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The Allied Advisors Podcast

The Allied Advisors Podcast

De : Justin Goethe
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The Allied Advisors Podcast is designed for mid-market manufacturers looking to scale and sharpen their competitive edge. Each episode features in-depth conversations with lean manufacturing experts and top-performing manufacturing executives who share proven strategies, hard-earned lessons, and real-world success stories. Our goal is simple: every listener walks away with practical insights they can apply immediately to drive growth, improve efficiency, and lead their teams more effectively.

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  • Connecting the Systems Behind the Sales Process with Andy Janaitis

    Connecting the Systems Behind the Sales Process with Andy Janaitis
    Oct 28 2026
    EPISODE SUMMARYAsk a small manufacturer what his win rate on quotes is and most will guess at a number. Ask how they know, and the room goes quiet. The company already bought the ERP, the CRM and the subscriptions, but nobody ever connected them, so the same question gets three different answers.In this episode, Justin Goethe sits down with Andy Janaitis, founder of Janaitis Business Systems and PPC Pitbulls, to talk about bringing an industrial engineering mindset to the commercial side of the business. Andy explains why SOPs rarely stick until the underlying systems make it impossible to break the process, why most AI pilots fail because nobody feeds them real context, and why Claude is best thought of as a strong junior developer that still needs a systems architect checking its work. They also dig into who actually owns systems integration in a $2M to $20M shop, how to think about the org chart in terms of jobs and skills, and why a founder-dependent sales process shows up as a discount at the time of sale.ABOUT THE GUESTAndy Janaitis is the founder of Janaitis Business Systems in Baltimore, Maryland, and has run the paid media agency PPC Pitbulls since 2020. He is an industrial engineer by training, with an undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s from UMBC, and he came up on the data and software side at Booz Allen, Elder Research and MindGrub.Andy works with $2M to $20M manufacturers to fill the systems and numbers role they cannot yet afford to hire full time. His approach is to fix where data gets captured, connect the systems so nobody retypes a record, and then go after the biggest bottleneck those numbers reveal. He works with what a company already runs and guarantees the build at 90 days, or he keeps working for free until it ships.KEY TAKEAWAYSThree answers to one question is a systems problem. In founder-driven shops, sales data lives in the founder’s head or with one key salesperson. Until the CRM is configured properly and connected to everything else, close rate and win rate will mean something different to everyone who reports them.Build the system so the process cannot be broken. Andy’s own team wrote SOP after SOP in Google Docs and none of them stuck. What worked was building the standard into the tools, such as requiring certain fields and emails before a deal can move forward in the pipeline. Justin shared a parallel from an RFID project where compliance only came once material could not be pulled without scanning the tag.Take KPIs down to leading indicators. Revenue and margin are the end result. A real-time scorecard (Andy’s team runs EOS) or a KPI tree that starts at net profitability and breaks down into revenue, material, labor and overhead lets you find the leading indicators that actually move those numbers.Founders run on gut feel because the reports take too long to build. Most owners understand how their numbers roll up. They just cannot pull something like scrap rate without a months-long study, so connecting systems and automating the reporting is what moves a business from rule of thumb to data.AI pilots fail when they lack context. Long, carefully built prompts work, but nobody will write them every day. Andy’s team connects AI directly to their email so it drafts each message, the person rewrites it, and the tool compares the draft to what was sent to learn the writer’s voice. Repeated over time, that loop gets an inbox done in minutes instead of hours.Keep a human in the loop, and make sure that human knows the work. Andy’s internal operating system cuts his team’s workload roughly in half, yet he still catches something flat wrong every day. His rule for the team is to do a task manually once before automating it, and his view is that anyone building complex apps without coding experience is setting up to fail.Systems architecture is the role nobody owns. Integration work tends to fall to the founder, an operations director, an admin or the IT person who installed the software and has no idea how it is supposed to be used. Each tool works on its own, but the real value comes when time tracking, quoting, invoicing, financials and planning talk to each other.Plan the org chart around jobs and skills. Small manufacturers tend to grow headcount one supervisor at a time. Andy suggests listing every job that has to get done first, since one person may wear five or six hats, and Justin adds an honest look at the skills on the team so you know where to supplement with outside help.A founder-dependent sales process lowers your valuation. As a buyer, the question is whether someone else could step in and run the business tomorrow. If every sale closes on the founder’s relationships and nothing ever hits a system, there is little business left without that person, and that shows up in the price.QUOTABLE MOMENTS“It wasn’t an SOP problem. It was that the systems that underlie all these problems weren’t connected.” – ...
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    32 min
  • Small Problems, Big Levers: Lean, AI, and Growing Pains with Jamie Flinchbaugh

    Small Problems, Big Levers: Lean, AI, and Growing Pains with Jamie Flinchbaugh
    Oct 14 2026
    Episode SummaryMost big problems in a manufacturing business started out as small ones that nobody solved. In this episode, Justin sits down with Jamie Flinchbaugh, founder of JFlinch and author of People Solve Problems. They talk about why leaders keep reaching for big levers like AI, reorgs, and acquisitions, when the real momentum usually comes from breaking problems down and understanding cause and effect.Jamie explains how to connect daily huddles to monthly KPI reviews so leaders can trust that their teams have the ball. He also explains why process metrics invite curiosity while output metrics drive accountability. The two dig into a practical approach to AI for mid-market manufacturers, what breaks first when a company doubles in size, and how to bring skeptical veterans along on standardization. They close on how operations leaders can translate lean gains into the language boards and PE owners care about.About the GuestJamie Flinchbaugh is the founder of JFlinch, where he works as an advisor, coach, and board member to leaders building organizations that hold up. He started on the plant floor at Chrysler and went through MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing program. He spent 15 years co-founding and building the Lean Learning Center into one of the top lean transformation firms in the country. More recently he served as Corporate Vice President of Qorvo’s Lean Journey.Jamie has worked with more than 300 companies, including Harley-Davidson, Intel, Mars, Amazon, and Whirlpool. He has helped build close to 20 companies as a co-founder, board member, or investor, and he serves on the boards of Robinson Fans, York Container, S&S Cycle, and Orion Fleet Intelligence. He wrote People Solve Problems: The Power of Every Person, Every Day, Every Problem, co-wrote the lean bestseller The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean, and hosts the People Solve Problems podcast.Key TakeawaysBig levers are often an act of desperation. Buying a company, replacing the CEO, or launching an AI program can feel like progress. Jamie sees more momentum in breaking a big problem into medium-sized pieces you can confidently move, then working out cause and effect on each one.Structure matters more than systems. Every metric should answer three questions: how are we performing, why are we performing there, and what are we doing about it. When a red metric shows up in a monthly review with the “why” and the countermeasure already attached, leaders can trust the team instead of jumping in from the top.Every injury started as a trip hazard. You can’t predict which small problem will become the big one, so solve them while they’re small. Smaller problems also give your people more repetitions, which builds problem-solving capability faster.Process metrics drive curiosity, output metrics drive accountability. Measuring diet and exercise tells you far more about what to change than waiting to measure heart attacks. The same logic applies on the shop floor.Start AI with a nagging problem. Skip the AI strategy. Pick a messy problem that has sat in the back of your mind, run a small experiment, and learn what the tools can do. Treat it like pruning a growing tree, because nobody knows where the tools will be in 18 months.Know which kind of AI fits the job. Machine code and other work that needs consistency calls for deterministic tools. Generative AI is better suited to finding patterns in handwritten quality reports or normalizing customer specs. Jamie ranks efficiency gains last, behind making the team smarter and doing work you never had time for before.AI always sounds confident. Challenge its output the way you would an intern’s work. And ask whether you would have spent three days helping an employee succeed the way you spent three days on the tool.Growth breaks at the connections. Every person you add creates new handoffs, and every handoff is a chance for delay or error. Activities and flows tend to hold up as a company grows. The connections between people and departments change the most and are the hardest to get right.You already had a standard. A great chef doesn’t measure, and they are still remarkably consistent. Small teams have standards embedded in a few experienced people. Scaling means giving that consistency tools that work across the whole enterprise.Standardize to solve a problem. Ask why this standard, why now, and how far to take it. Standardizing scheduling across three acquired plants matters if they share a supply chain. Standardizing their food service probably doesn’t. Writing a process down is what lets you troubleshoot it when it fails.Know your board before you pitch to it. Some PE firms are full of operators who understand cause and effect, while others are purely financial. Family-owned businesses usually care most about sustaining the company for the next generation. Interest rates are unlikely to return to zero, so operations leaders need to learn capital efficiency, return on assets, and ...
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    50 min
  • Ops vs. the Model: Turnarounds, Lean Culture, and Automation on a PE Timeline with Otis Spencer Jr.

    Ops vs. the Model: Turnarounds, Lean Culture, and Automation on a PE Timeline with Otis Spencer Jr.
    Sep 30 2026
    Episode SummaryWhat happens to a portfolio company when the operating partner's voice carries less weight than the investment thesis? Otis Spencer Jr. has seen that question from both sides of the table, first as an operating partner at GenNx360 Capital Partners and then as the CEO of a PE-backed industrial business. Justin and Otis dig into how unrealistic diligence assumptions end up on the operations team's desk, why the ops and investment sides of a firm need to speak with one voice, and what it takes to build a lean culture on a three-to-five-year hold.Otis also walks through a turnaround he calls "a dog fight," where the company came out of a restructuring with a clean balance sheet but couldn't get the credit it needed to stock long-lead parts and shorten delivery times. He explains how he worked through lenders and critical suppliers to get the business moving again. The conversation closes with his case for automation as a quality and safety tool, and the lessons from 13 years as an Army logistics officer that he kept and the ones he had to unlearn.About the GuestOtis Spencer Jr. is a turnaround CEO, operating partner, and industrial executive with more than 30 years of experience leading PE-backed transformations and complex global operations. Most recently he served as President and CEO of Schramm Inc., where he navigated severe liquidity and supply chain crises, grew revenue from $29 million to $54 million, and guided the business to a successful sale. He quadrupled EBITDA for an aviation MRO platform from $16 million to $60 million, and at TAMKO Building Products he doubled division EBITDA to $80 million while growing revenue to $250 million.Otis spent 13 years as a US Army logistics officer and earned a Bronze Star for commanding a 1,500-person task force during Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he stood up the first wartime containerized fuel pipeline and terminal distribution system in Iraq and Kuwait. He holds a BS in industrial engineering from the University of Alabama and an MBA from Saint Martin's University.Key TakeawaysPut operations in the diligence room. When ops isn't part of valuation and diligence, the model fills up with assumptions like a new plant reaching peak output in year one or heavy price increases every year. The firm overpays, and the operating team inherits targets it was never going to hit.Operations estimates run optimistic. Teams routinely underestimate project effort by about half, which is why experienced operators need to pressure-test the plan before it becomes the thesis.The firm needs to speak with one voice. If management can go around the operating partner to the deal lead whenever they dislike an answer, the credibility of the CEO and ops team erodes fast. Lockstep alignment between the ops and investment sides keeps that from happening.Lean culture starts with CEO buy-in. On a short hold, buying a new machine is always the more exciting story. Lean takes hold when the CEO treats it as a way of life, and an early Kaizen win builds the confidence to keep going.You can't improve what you haven't measured. Many mid-market plants track little beyond revenue, cost, and on-time delivery. Bringing in help up front to install a few critical KPIs, and sharing what they uncover without playing gotcha, turns early embarrassment into engagement.A clean balance sheet doesn't guarantee working capital. After a restructuring, lenders may not line up and the fund may be low on dry powder. Otis worked the firm's lender relationships, then specialty lenders, and finally key suppliers like Caterpillar, who helped with terms in exchange for future volume.Automation is a quality and safety play. Reducing process variation means less material, less downtime, and less startup scrap, and it keeps hands away from lines running 700 feet per minute. Framing it that way, and sharing the gains with the operators who remain, earns the buy-in a headcount story never will.Keep the military training and let go of the rank. Formal training in planning, decision-making, and staying calm under pressure has paid off at every stop. What Otis had to unlearn was the expectation that people act because you're the boss. In industry, results come from knowing people individually, and sometimes from making the hard call to get the right people on the bus.Quotable Moments"All those returns that you finger painted into the model, you probably won't reach." (Otis)"You want to have solidarity from the firm." (Otis)"It's a way of life. It's not just a project." (Otis)"You can't make an improvement without having baseline data." (Otis)"Lean manufacturing is a religion. You gotta believe in it first, and then you gotta try your best to practice it for a long time before you really start seeing the results." (Justin)"Us manufacturing guys were kind of the first AI folks." (Otis)"Everybody hits the door with their own set of problems." (Otis)"We can all talk theory till we're blue in the face, but the ...
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    44 min
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