Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jordy Wallace. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Jordy, thanks for joining us today. We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today

I’ve been in business full time (without a outside job) since 2016. I did ok. I made enough money to pay all my bills but only just barely. In October of 2020 I was burning out. I was exhausted and not enjoying my work at all. My passion had become and underpaid overstressed job. I had given my self a year MAX to turn it around or fold and go get a job.

My neighbor told me about a business coach he had started working with so I thought, “Hey. I don’t really know how to run a business. It can’t hurt, I’ll give a business coach a try.”

Turns out this is what I would have done differently.

Our coach has taught us how to build and fully understand financials. How to set pricing based on data instead of hopes and dreams. Basically how to run a business instead of a stressful, underpaid job.

I know how to do my profession really well. I’ve worked hard to be a better machinist since Grade 10. But business is a totally different thing. And it’s really hard (and interesting).

Running a Machining business is incredibly capital intensive. Each machine can easily cost as much as a house. We started out with inexpensive used equipment. and that got us going but I don’t think I would go that way again if I had to start over.

I would buy modern, super efficient equipment so I could focus on business and marketing intensively and not have to worry about maintenance on old and slow, not ideal equipment, to make my products.

I would intensify my business coaching because it’s his job to always be better at business than me and that expertise will super charge the business progress. (It did! It took about three months to turn the business around. Now I only work 50 hour weeks instead of 100’s. I take weekends off. And 2021 was a record year for the business.)

Also, and this is something I really struggle with, I’d not try to do everything myself. My wife Lisa has always handled the book keeping and keeping all the bills paid as well as helping in the shop when needed. That’s not what I mean though.

I would have a social media manager so I’m not constantly trying to do all the marketing and all the work too. social media is incredibly time consuming for me and gets worse as I get onto new platforms, I’m working on getting that setup now but I would do that right from the beginning in a new business.

Basically, as much as finances allowed I would hire people to do the jobs that I’m not good at instead of burning out doing everything myself.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I’m a 7th generation machinist. My family were blacksmiths before we were machinists. I’m pretty proud of that.

I built a go-cart at the family shop when I was ten years old. We had a lot of fun on that thing. But my first time actually machining was in grade 10 auto shop. I didn’t have a car and was pretty dis-interested in working on them so my teacher, Mr. Irish (who worked on the development team that built the Concorde jet) suggested that I build a steam engine to keep me busy.

From the moment I took my first cut on that lathe I’ve never gone a single day without thinking about machining. It’s in my blood, and I hope it never leaves.

The next year an after school machining class (called Cool School) started in the high school taught by a machinist and an engineer from the local pulp mill started up. It was run twice a week for 4 hours and every other Saturday for a full 8 hours. I never missed a minute of it. This gets more relevant later in the story.

Jump to college where I took a 9 month machining entry level course and then served my 4 year apprenticeship in a shop that did mainly maintenance for a neighboring factory. We also did some work for the Boeing 787 and parts for submarines, which was pretty cool.

I got married in 2005. Lisa’s Dad is also a machinist and she’s is a welder and grew up in shops every bit as much as I did. We both grew up in the same small town and eventually got sick of living in the city and moved back to our home town.

When we moved back Cool School was still going strong so I started volunteering as a teacher so I could give back and still get some machining in. There is no opportunity for machining jobs here outside of the pulp mill so I worked construction and then as welder building aluminum yachts.

That’s where I accidentally got my first machining job as a business around 2010. My father-in-law had run a machining business out of his shop for many years but was retiring. His full shop was my opportunity to get into machining as a business with no capital expenses. I designed and machined a hinge for the main floor hatches that was completely hidden from view. It’s still used on every single boat that goes out the door.

Jump to 2015, with my Father-in-laws help we now had a CNC Milling machine and a CNC lathe. I was still volunteering at cool school and wanted to have the kids in to our shop for a tour. We wanted to have something to show being made that each kid could take home with them. So we though hey, lets make a spinning top. that should be quick and easy.

They were a hit.

I thought hey we put a bunch of effort into this lets put them in our Etsy store and see what happens. within days I was contacted by a guy who also made tops. He told me about this community on Facebook that was the home of spinning top collector/enthusiasts.

Things started to take off from there, and that’s where my EDC (Every Day Carry) business started. Early 2016 saw Jim Skelton review a top from another maker that caused the spinning top world too go nut’s. My designs got more complex and detailed. Demand was high and as difficult as tops are to make they were quite profitable. between them and my customers that I make parts for it kept the business going well.

Then fidget spinners hit. (remember those?) they hit massively. You literally couldn’t make them fast enough. I made high end machined spinners and still do occasionally. That’s where my business gained a lot of recognition. But like all fads, spinners died off in popularity. There’s still a large group of enthusiasts out there but not to nearly the same levels as before.

In 2019 I started making flashlights. I love flashlights and always have. For years I’d wanted to build flashlight’s. Figuring out what to use for the electronics in them was always totally overwhelming to me. Everything looks the same and they all do the same thing to an uneducated eye. So I’d give up and come back in a few months and repeat the cycle.

That’s where Pedro Pepito the Frenchman comes in. He’d been a spinning top customer of mine for a few years and turns out he’s been collecting flashlights for more than 20 years. He offered to help. He told me what to buy and where to get it all. Once he gave me that push past my indecision I haven’t looked back. I love making flashlights!! I’m also a collector/enthusiast.

I have 3 models currently with several more at various stages of development.

It’s really important to me to do as much of the manufacturing of my products as possible/practical in my own shop here on the west coast of Canada. Buying parts from other shops, especially overseas shops, just seems wrong. If all I’m doing is putting parts together or worse, selling fully built product then I’m no longer a machinist. I’d just be a marketer and salesman.

For me, being in business has never been about the money. I would much rather work for free. Obviously that’s not possible (I’ve been told I’m crazy for that). I owe it to my customers new and long time to run a profitable business so that I’m still around for their lifetime warranties to be valid. I also owe myself and my customers top quality so that they never need to use their warranties😅.

Customer service is something I pride myself on. I love answering questions about my products. I can be contacted pretty well anytime via one of the social media platform with a message. As long as I’m awake you’ll generally get a response within minutes. I stand behind my products 100%.

The odd time that there is an issue, customers won’t ever be ignored or worse, receive rude reply’s. Even though we don’t enjoy dealing with problems they always get dealt with professionally.

Not everyone in this high end industry has those same values. For a lot of them their interest in a customer ends when money changes hands. I believe that is one thing that sets me apart from some of the competition. I’m will ing to chat and discuss mutual interests with customers. I’ll even send them to my competition if after the discussion it seems like they’ll get something more to their tastes from them.

It’s tricky to set yourself apart in the custom flashlight and knife (I’m starting to make knives now) world. We all use the same flashlight parts. There’s only so many ways to make a folding knife and only so many shapes for fixed blades. It comes down to your distinctive design style and marketing. Having the right presence on social media is critical to success.

My thought’s on design style. My personal style tends to be very organic. lots of 3 dimensional curves and smooth shapes. The reason for that is my love of machining. Those shapes are difficult to make which is what I love about them.

However, being in business where you must sell your personal design style, it needs to be tempered with research. The design style needs to also reflect other peoples preference. My wife has an uncanny ability be the average persons taste. If she doesn’t like a design, when I power through and make it because I love it, it tends to not sell very well😂. Melding my style with trending styles is really fun.

Hopefully this has been reasonably coherent

Can you talk to us about your experience with buying businesses?

In the hayday of the fidget spinner craze, the company Last Room Standing (LRS) was one of the originals. In those days you couldn’t build enough spinners and people would pay whatever you charged and ask for more.

Amid all that chaos LRS was running open unlimited pre-sales. Selling hundreds of spinners (the Axis Micro) at $150-200 each.

Alex, the owner was rolling in money.

I was doing all his machining at the time which is why I’m so close to the details.

June of 2017 Alex went to Blade Show and apparently did really really well in the lotteries and came home with a small fortune in knives.

Around the same time he decided he was a big company and decided to move the company from California to Texas.

However he continued to make mistakes. He got himself a storefront and commercial space for assembling and shipping.

Then he, some-how, lost his deposits for those spaces and all the money that had been paid for outstanding pre-sales.

His solution? Design a new spinner (Divide) and run another pre-sale.

It wasn’t a very good design but it still sold well. He put a deposit down with me and I went to work machining them.

This is a sad part of the story, around this time his GRandmother died. He didn’t take it well.

I started to get worrried when he had to sell off a bunch of the knives he had bought to afford a plane ticket to California to attend the funeral.

At this point he started to go dark.

at this point he owed me the remainder of the bill for the Divide manufacturing but all the money from that pre-sale was gone it would seem.

his solution? Another pre-sale!

People were starting to get concerned at this point as he was starting a new sale without having fulfilled the last one. And he was getting hard to reach becasue he didn’t want to deal with all the questions about where peoples spinners were.

so his new pre-sale didn’t sell well enough to pay for the Divides.

Can you see where things are going now???

Another pre-sale! Septemberish 2017

That didn’t go well AT ALL! People were starting to realize what he was doing. Now the Paypal chargebacks starting coming in. there were so many that Paypal froze thousands of dollars in the account to make sure there were enough funds there to cover those chargebacks. (I’m actually not sure at what point in the timeline the freeze happened, it may have been earlier than this)

All the spinner groups on social media were lit up with the drama and advice on how to do chargebacks.

Alewx was pretty much completely dark at this point. He would pop up now and then to tell people how he was working a bunch of jobs like Uber Eats etc. to pay for the machining. At one point he had a bunch of parts but was so short on money he couldn’t pay the postage to mail them to the customers.

At this point people were getting REALLY angry. Most companies fail after the first unfulfilled pre-sale. This guy now had three or four all at once.

Coming up to December 2017 lots of the patient customers had gone past thte deadline for getting a chargeback from Paypal.

Then someone said they should go get their money back in person. And then someone found his address and phone number and posted them on Facebook!! This was around Christmas.

Over the last few months of disaster, I had offered a couple times to take over the business but I think seeing his address up on Facebook and people threatening to go get their money back in person scared him. S owe came to an agreement and I bought his company in exchange for fulfilling all his outstanding pre-sale orders.

There were hundreds of orders that needed to go out but I got them out and solidified my reputation for customer service in the EDC world and proceeded to have a record year in 2018.

How’d you meet your business partner?

My cofounder/business partner is my wife Lisa. We grew up most in the same town. We knew each other a little but weren’t really friends. Our Dad’s had grown up in the same area and had know each other their whole lives. Lisa has been working in her dad’s shop since she was 7 years old. So we have very similar backgrounds.

In 2000 we both went to the same trade school, her for welding and me for machining. We both knew the other was there but never saw each other. Despite both of our sets of parent’s urging😂.

Jump to 2004 we were both working at our professions and our brothers got to be good friends. So she starting coming along when they would come hang out with me.

It didn’t take long to realize that she was utterly perfect in every way😁. We got married in May 2005.

Jump a few years and I started the business and dragged her along kicking and screaming. With her initial reluctant help we got going. A couple years ago when we started with our business coach it all switched as we started to get the training you need to actually run a business. She’s enthusiastic now and the business never could have run without her.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.focusworksedc.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/focusworksedc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/focusworks
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JordyWallacefocusworks
• Other: tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@focusworksedc?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc