We were lucky to catch up with Adam Heffner recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Adam thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

Higher education is a scam that consists of selling a dream funded by long term debt. The problem is two fold. The first issue is the cost; there are too many people competing for too few spots at colleges and universities. The second problem is the information that a university holds is available on the internet at zero cost. There are a few occupations, like neuro surgeon and engineer, that fit well in the college mold. But the vast majority of career skills can be found on the internet or quickly picked up on the job from an experienced person willing to teach. Our world is changing at an exponential rate that is almost impossible to keep up with; the only long term strategy for success is through informal life long learning.

The first issue can be solved by increasing the supply of publicly funded universities. Basic economics dictate that increasing the supply of higher education will reduce the cost. I’d like to see the current administration focus on funding new construction of universities rather than writing off large swaths of student loan debt without addressing the underlying issues. Let’s make the first two years of college free through the established network of community colleges or a new publicly funded online university. Let people have a free trial of college to see if it’s a good fit before they jump into debt for something they may never finish, or even worse, finish and not utilize.

The second issue requires a culture shift more than anything. Our country needs to promote the idea of continuous improvement throughout the course of a career. The current narrative in the media implies that there is a finish line to education called graduation. Which sets people up for disappointment when they realize their chosen field is a constantly changing landscape of technology, tools and methodology. We need to build out a system of continued education throughout the arc of someone’s working life. This network needs to be structured closer to a career college or boot camp where people can quickly gain specific knowledge necessary for the next chapter of a career like welding, coding or cosmetology. Many soft skills like entrepreneurship, logistics and human resources could be taught in the same way. The bottom line is we need to learn how to learn first, then move out into the world and figure out what skills are needed before signing the loan docs.

Adam, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My business started out as a side hustle in the garage. I worked during the day as a union ironworker building bridges, dams and high rises. Then at night, I would chase small jobs that I could fabricate in my spare time. I sold a lot of my first work at flea markets and home shows. Eventually I listed a few things on the internet and had a sale while I was busy working my day job. I’ll never forget the first online sale. I was standing on top of a 12 ft ladder welding out a prison cell in Stockton, CA. I had this huge rush when I realized that the online store was working while I was working. It never took a day off or clocked out, that’s when my whole mindset started to shift from local shows to creating an online presence.

I wish I could say I quit my job right there and went to work for myself full time but it took a few years to make that jump. I continued working the day job while I built up my savings and collected the parts to build a CNC plasma table that could cut large sheets of material. Eventually, I took some time off of work to focus on building the plasma table. I thought I would take a month off of work, get the shop and website organized, and then head right back to work. But that day never came, I was able to pick up enough work to support my small family and one employee. Now we have 20 full time employees and are building out a 12,000 square foot facility to keep up with our growth. We even made it onto the Forbes fastest 500 list last year for our exceptional growth in revenue.

Today, our main focus is on building complex architectural installations. We tell our customers “If it’s metal and you can’t find it in a catalogue, it’s time to call us”. We are one of the few metal shops that manage the whole project cycle from design to close out. We design, fabricate, finish and install all of our work with no sub contractors. This translates to shorter lead times and higher quality finished products because we control every step of the process with no middle men.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I bootstrapped the business out of personal savings so I made some compromises in the early days just to prove the concept. The biggest risk was building the business around a home made CNC plasma table. For those unfamiliar with the fabrication industry, this is basically a simple robot that can cut large sheets (5′ x 10′) of metal similar to a desktop printer but much larger. There are several companies that make the machines but the price was out of my budget without getting into debt. So I decided to buy the parts and teach myself how to build the table using internet forums and YouTube as my guide. It took me 3 weeks to build the table and another 6 months to learn how to make it cut efficiently. I had zero training or experience in robotics and was totally stumbling around in the dark every time the machine broke down. There was several times where I had to drive from Tennessee to Texas, overnight, just to get the machine components fixed. My car didn’t have AC, at the time, so there was a lot of hours spent sweating in the car just to keep the machine running and orders moving through the shop. That machine got us through the first 2 years of business before I finally retired it and moved on to a commercial grade machine. We now have 4 pieces of CNC equipment that are similar to that first plasma table. I can troubleshoot and repair all of them because of my experience building that first table. That experience has become the foundation for our current fabrication shop and future expansion in this field.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

We manufacture all of our own products. It’s part of our core mission to be a place where things are actually made.

I learned the trade from my family while growing up in a large meat manufacturing business. We processed over 200,000 pounds per day with 130 full time employees. Most people think of Henry Ford when you mention an assembly line but it was actually the stockyards in Chicago that inspired the idea of breaking down a job into simple tasks and distributing the workforce along a conveyor system. So a meat manufacturing facility was a great place to learn how to manage large groups of people running multiple processes simultaneously. As a kid, my dad would make me write out step by step processes for household tasks whenever I got in trouble. So at one point I had a standardized process for cleaning my room and taking a shower. It felt like a huge waste of time when I was younger but now I see it as a skill that all managers should have.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://makertable.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maker.table/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/makertable1776
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-heffner-55465019/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Maker_Table
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmKtQNVeRTI53LsjgEeKghQ