T2:E25 Maker Spaces con Joel Leonard

Joel Leonard is The Maintenance Evangelist, on a journey to make maintenance interesting to the younger generations.   

Summary

In this week's episode of Masterminds in Maintenance, we are excited to have Joel Leonard, The Maintenance Evangelist, on the show! Joel's lifelong mission is to build the next generation of skilled technicians, and he is passionate about reducing the skilled labor gap our industry is facing. Joel also shares with us about Maker Spaces and how he uses this platform to fulfill his mission and passion!

[Embedded content: https://anchor.fm/upkeep/embed/episodes/S2E25-Maker-Spaces-with-Joel-Leonard-eot88t]

Episode Show Notes

• Why should you cultivate talent in your company?

• Why is the next generation crucial for the community?

• What is the Maker Movement, and why is it important?

Podcast Platforms

• Anchor FM

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• YouTube

Transcript 

0:00:04.4 Ryan: Welcome to Masterminds in Maintenance, a podcast for those with new ideas in maintenance. I'm your host, Ryan. I'm the CEO and founder of UpKeep. Each week I'll be meeting with guest, who's had an idea for how to shake things up in the maintenance and reliability industry. Sometimes the idea failed, sometimes it made their business more successful, and other times their idea revolutionized an entire industry. Today, I'm really excited. We've got Joel Leonard here on the show. I'm really excited to learn from all of your experiences from you today.

0:00:31.4 Joel Leonard: Well, thank you, Ryan, and it's an honor to be here. My career took kind of a side track. If you grow up in North Carolina, and if you're over 6 foot tall, you wanna be a basketball player, but I ended up graduating from Elon University and had a marketing degree and needed to pay my way through school. And through doing that, I worked in the furniture industry, but I got exposed to some really amazing skills because they put me on the fast track to management and they made me do every job in the factory. The guy that really fascinated me the most was a guy that was always busy trying to get him to go from one place to the next to fix a machine or fix them a motor, or fix the electrical or fix something on the roof or fix something in the basement. He was just all over the place. He earned my respect because of the amount of importance that really the organization put on him. And then I got a job offer to work at a software company. And I actually helped set up over a thousand computerized maintenance management systems.

0:01:39.3 JL: So that experience helped me vastly in understanding the roles and responsibilities, the importance of maintenance. I got involved with the Association for Facilities Engineering. I was the youngest executive committee member that they ever had, but I've been quite honored to try to make an impact and try to get more people to provide more appreciation and support of the maintenance industry, which is often confused and often misaligned or maligned and not given the resources and support that it needs.

0:02:13.9 Ryan: You've dedicated a big part of your life's mission to build what you call the next generation of skilled technicians, so I guess the question here is, what made you choose this path and how did this become your life's work? 

0:02:26.6 JL: When I attended the Society for Maintenance and Reliability Conference in Nashville in October of 2002, there was over 600 attendees. And they had a poll, and they asked them, "How many of you are gonna retire in the next 10 years? Raise your hand." Well, it was quite scary when you know that these are some of the best of the best from Coca-Cola, the Post Office, Corps, Michelin, all these major corporations had representatives there. And when 90% of them raised their hand, it really caused a stir because we were like, "Wow." That just made it so tangible that we've got a crisis on our hands, and nobody's doing anything about it. And then we walk outside and there were 5000 young kids, 15 to 20-somethings, that were standing in line in 30-degree weather, singing on the streets of Nashville, trying to get into the convention center to compete for a spot in America Idol. And meanwhile, the best of the best of the career paths that really matter, now we call them essential careers were going unaware, unpursued, and nobody's even considering those options.

0:03:45.4 JL: So later that evening, I came up with an idea and I told the group I was with that telling engineers that we need more engineers ain't gonna generate enough engineers. We gotta tell the masses. And I said, "Writing a book, not enough people will read it. And maybe we could write a magazine. That will help a little bit, but maybe we need to think about writing a song because heck, if these kids will stand in 30-degree weather, singing songs, maybe some of them will hear it." And sure enough, I did. I had a guy named Harley record it. We've had 15 genres and it's called the Maintenance Crisis Song, and thousands of people have heard it. It got me to travel. I've been to over 30 countries, and I spoke before Congress, gotten the White House, and even it was played during a conference at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

[music]

0:04:49.7 Ryan: Joel, so I know that you're deeply involved with the Makers Maker, and I think it would be great for you to share with our listeners what that is and how that platform has really helped reduce the skills gap labor in our industry that we're starting to see.

0:05:06.0 JL: And I started hearing about some of these things called Makerspaces and hearing about the Maker movement. And evidently there was some effort underway around the world, even in Germany and other places, and in Silicon Valley, they actually started setting up Maker Fairs and was having huge crowds, and there was a magazine that emerged called Make Magazine. And there was all this effort to try to get people to rebuild their skill sets and start having opportunities to go somewhere without having to spend a lot of money. So for like 50 bucks, you can get 24/7 access to thousands of dollars worth of equipment and get all kinds of help and support. So I got involved in actually building one in my community, and in the first year, we had 16 new companies formed, Ryan, nine patents were filed and over 50 people got jobs. We had 150 members had access to about eight tractor-trailer loads of equipment that I got donated to us.

0:06:14.4 JL: And we were well on our way to doing some great things. I got invited to the White House, and they actually created a group called the Nation of Makers. And they estimate there's over 3000 Makerspaces out there. So they heard about what I did, and they've asked me to go around the country and coach Makerspaces. So that's why they call me the Makers Maker. I helped make this support for the Makerspaces, which are typically run by introverts and they aren't really connected too well with their community. And so I go in and teach them how to get all the support from their community and get more funding and get more support.

0:06:54.7 Ryan: You are definitely not the introvert. I love it, and I love the passion to help and support our community, and how should educators and also potential employers look at training the next generation of technicians, given this rapid pace of change in the industry? 

0:07:16.6 JL: And this Maker movement is definitely a vital component to it, and again, what's great is they're in the schools. They're in the libraries. They're in the museums even. And even they're in the detention centers, and even they're putting them in retirement homes. So these are really amazing resources that can be available if leveraged properly to support the Maker Movement. And what we've gotta do is get the manufacturers and the maintenance and reliability folks out of their plant and into these operations and start looking at the talent, and don't even tell them that they're hiring. Let's start surveying some of their skills and maybe give them some challenges.

0:07:58.7 Ryan: Yeah, it's a really good point, Joel, 'cause what we hear from the industry is that there's definitely this skills gap, especially from the employer's perspective, but then the next question always becomes, "Okay, where do I go find them?" And what I'm hearing from you is like, they're already there. They're already there.

0:08:16.5 JL: Yeah. It's not that hard to set up another Makerspace. In fact, right now, Ryan, I'm in the process of working with some manufacturers, and this spring, my goal is to start rolling out at least five and get up to 20 and even up to 50 by next year, mobile Makerspaces that go around the country and entice and expose people to these types of skill sets. And it would be great if some of the manufacturers would partner with me and come out and help.

0:08:51.2 Ryan: Maybe a question from me, Joel, is, a common response back that we get from employers is essentially like, "Hey, we wanna hire someone that's had the three, five, 10 years of experience before, and going to a trade school isn't the same thing as having in-the-field experience, decade-plus of experience." So I guess the question from me to you, Joel, is, "What would you say to that prospective employer of why they should hire someone who's just coming out of, it's called a trade school or a Makerspace that wants to get into the industry when they've got a job req that says five years of experience at a minimum?"

0:09:39.3 JL: Yeah, that's the hard thing about it. And you know, a lot of those job reqs, they put the ideal person, and they're not out there. We have a very shallow bench, and three to five years, yeah, that might be a little bit of a challenge. But you can get people that have been playing with electronics for five to 10 years and have been playing in these Makerspaces. They might not necessarily have corporate experience, but I can tell you they can solder, they can 3D print, they can laser engrave, they can work on CNCs, they can design and build things, and also they can troubleshoot. They've been working on 3D printers, and those things break down all the time. And so we've been creating some gateways to manufacturing. And again, if you wanna be a mercenary and hire somebody for a little bit more money and hire them, their loyalty is to the money, it's not to the organization. But if you become a farmer and not a pirate. A pirate goes, steals other talent. A company that really wants to be a farmer and grow their own, there'll be the ones that have the processes and that will cultivate the pipeline. You're not gonna... You can't just put... Expect one or two people to come in and last with you. You gotta put in a process that will cultivate and build that talent, and that's what organizations that are successful are doing.

0:11:07.2 Ryan: I love that mentality, Joel, and I'm excited to see what people in the Makerspaces do, going forward. What's something that you wish more people knew about within the maintenance and reliability industry? 

0:11:20.7 JL: Well, again, the ability of thinking beyond the immediacy and start focusing on the long-term. The maintenance crisis term, I invented that, and the song 18 years ago, and some people act like it's a new thing. We've known that the baby boomers... You see my chin here. I'm gonna be walking out the door here in the next several years, and there's nobody that's coming up at the volume levels that we need to handle the replacements, much less the growth in our sector. They're gonna be pushing us away, and they're not gonna wanna do what we want them to do. But there's are some that blow me away with their technical capability at a young age. I've been working with some all over the world, and it's just amazing how they work with me. In fact, this was made by a kid that flunked out of college. I got him a job, and he's now a machinist. And I got him in at a technical program, and he's helping me launch my new initiative here called Barry 2020. We're gonna close out the year by creating time capsules and provide lessons learned to the future, and this was made on a 3D printer. It took 20 hours to make that.

0:12:42.7 Ryan: Awesome. Again, thank you so much, Joel, for everything that you've done for the community. If our listeners wanna follow you on your journey, get up to speed with the Makerspace, where can they connect with you and where can they... Wow, what is that, Joel? 

[laughter]

0:13:02.0 JL: Have to show you. So I've been trying to wake up kids that they gotta start working with tools, so I invented a tool that gets their attention. It's a 50-pound hammer called the Thorminator, half Thor, half Terminator. And it's got the, over 1000 LEDs on it. And I've taken this to 25 Maker Fairs, bet over 16,000 people pick it up and challenge them to start learning how to use tools. So if people want to get in touch with me, they can look me up on LinkedIn, the Makers Maker, Joel Leonard. I'm on Facebook too. If they wanna send me an email, it's [email protected].

0:13:47.7 Ryan: Thank you so much again, Joel, for joining us and thank you to over listeners for tuning in to today's Masterminds in Maintenance. Thank you, Joel. [chuckle]

0:13:53.6 JL: Thank you.

0:13:55.5 Ryan: My name is Ryan. I'm the CEO and founder of UpKeep. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email directly at [email protected]. And lastly, you can find all of us, both of us here in the maintenance community on Slack. It's the largest online community of maintenance professionals in the world. We've got daily conversations. We share resources and host weekly webinars, so much more. I hope to connect with all of you guys soon. Thank you again, Joel. I hope to see you next time.

0:14:22.0 JL: Thank you. Take care.

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