EP 07: When Additive Gets Boring, It Wins

In Episode 7 of The Additive Advantage, we’re joined by Stefan Joens, President of Elnik Systems and DSH Technologies, companies at the center of metal injection molding and sinter-based additive manufacturing.

Stefan shares how decades of experience in traditional manufacturing helped his team approach additive manufacturing with a different mindset—one grounded in proven manufacturing principles rather than hype. From debinding and sintering to workforce development and production economics, the conversation explores what it really takes to scale metal additive manufacturing.

We discuss why additive should be viewed as just another forming technology in the broader manufacturing toolkit, how education across the entire production chain is critical for success, and why the companies that succeed in advanced manufacturing will be the ones that prioritize people, culture, and collaboration alongside technology.

Stefan also shares leadership lessons from relocating his company, building a values-driven team, and why successful entrepreneurs must focus less on having the answers and more on building teams capable of solving problems together.

Ultimately, the future of additive manufacturing won’t be defined by machines alone. It will depend on manufacturing discipline, strong leadership, and a clear understanding of where additive truly creates value.

Key Takeaways

Additive is a tool—not a replacement for manufacturing.
Successful companies start by asking what is the best way to make this part, then choose the right technology.

Manufacturing fundamentals still apply.
Materials control, process validation, quality inspection, and workflow discipline remain critical when scaling additive.

Education across the production chain matters.
Understanding materials, debinding, sintering, and downstream processes is essential for repeatable production.

Technology adoption requires the right mindset.
Early hype around additive created unrealistic expectations. Long-term success comes from integrating it into existing manufacturing systems.

People and culture drive innovation.
Strong teams, clear core values, and collaborative problem solving are essential to building resilient manufacturing organizations.

Entrepreneurship requires resilience.
Founders and leaders must focus less on having all the answers and more on building teams capable of figuring things out.

About the Show
The Additive Advantage Podcast explores what it really takes to turn additive manufacturing into a scalable, performance-driven business capability. Hosted by Dani Mason and Shon Anderson, the show features real conversations with leaders accountable for outcomes — not hype.

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About the Hosts
Hosted by Dani Mason and Shon Anderson, industry leaders with deep experience in technology and additive manufacturing.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We we got a 3D printer in house some years ago, just a plastic printer. And I've told every engineer and anybody who wants to, but engineers are naturally the ones that know how to do the drawing set to it. I was like, print everything. I don't care if you're printing a fork, print something, right? Get an understanding of how the technology's working and where the flaws are so that as you learn it and improve it, ideas are going to come to your head for how to do something better. And now all of a sudden I understand where this arrow should be pulled out.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Right?

SPEAKER_01 0:25

It's just another arrow in the quiver. And it's understanding when to pull this one out, right? It's like the I forget the guy's name from the Marvel comic, the dude that shoots the arrows, but he's got arrows for every different type of thing, right? He's got the red tip, the green tip, the white tip, and he uses the one he needs to when he needs to. And that's like you said, it's what 3D printing needs to be realized for. It's don't print it because you're capable of printing it. Print it because this is the only way I can print this part or make this part. And that's the understanding that in the early days, there was a misguided vision of we're going to take over the world. No industry's taking over the world. You know what I mean? So it's it's the right tool for the right job.

SPEAKER_03 1:01

Today on the Additive Advantage, we're joined by Stefan Yarns, president of LNIC Systems. ElNIC is one of the world's leading providers of divining and centering furnaces for metal injection molding and center-based additive manufacturing. In this conversation, we dive into the intersection of traditional manufacturing and additive, what it really takes to scale metal AM, and why the future of the industry may depend more on people and culture than technology alone. Well, it's great to have you on. I appreciate you taking some time. I think a wonderful place to start is you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your company.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Yeah, I'd be grateful. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I look forward to not just a really fun discussion, but also helping some of the people that uh, you know, this industry serves and what you guys do as a as a whole. So I'm super appreciative. So my name is Stefan Jurns. I'm the owner and operator of ElNIC Systems and DSH Technologies. ElNIC is a furnace-making company for mostly the center-based additive and metal injection molding industry. Uh, we play in other furnace technology too, but that's the bulk of what we do. And then we have a sister company, DSH, which does a lot of service and support for the industry to not just provide ability to run parts through furnaces that ElNIC makes, but we also do a lot of education, a lot of process support and troubleshooting through that program too.

SPEAKER_03 2:18

That's wonderful. And you have a pretty interesting background where there's this family business, but you also have experience outside of manufacturing in customer education and finance. Can you talk a little bit about how that experience has shaped your approach to leading this company?

SPEAKER_01 2:33

It's uh it's a great question, actually. Uh it's funny how many times I pull from the time I had when I worked in finance for five years. As a kid, 14 to 18, I worked through the company here. I did some work, you know, in college, a little bit of draft work, drafting work and so forth. I always looked at my dad and I said, Man, you work way too many hours. I was young, right? 17, 18, 60 hours a week. I was like, that's crazy. I decided to join the finance world and I became a financial planner. And what I loved about that industry was having in-depth conversations with customers about what it is they're trying to accomplish personally, right? Money is the thing that everybody needs at the end of the day to move things forward from goals and just food and all that kinds of other stuff, but really strategically plan out what we are trying to do with our lives and how can we make our money work for us and then protect us for insurances and everything else. And that led me to really quickly learn how to have conversations with people about things that are difficult, right? Money is what everybody needs, but not everybody likes to talk about it, especially after you come home from a long day at work, right? Additionally, the the way the company I worked for in Enterprise, they were very full service. So they looked at everything. It wasn't just brokerage stocks and and bonds. It was estate planning, life insurances, health insurances, the whole gamut. I really ended up getting into the weeds with people and having to have conversations around, well, what do you want to do when you die? What do you want to have for work and going forward? So it was a lot of future casting, a lot of vision casting with with the customers we had. And I decided to leave that industry because it just wasn't, it wasn't me. And internally, I'm a builder, I'm a maker, I'm an engineer, but in study, I'm a finance and economics guy. So I decided to, you know, after five almost five years there, decide to come back to the family business and found a path to eventually take this business over a period of 12 years. And it's been a lot of fun. And all the stuff that I did in those hard conversations and trying to lead people gave me the ability to sit with the team here. And every time I had meetings or planning or guidance, gave me the ability to draw on a good foundation that I built of how to have the right conversation and bring it together as a team. But really, and this is the the important part is at the end of the day, as a financial planner, you're just running the play that the customer wants you to do by giving them resources and tools and tips of how to get there. This is what I do as a leader here. It's not my job to make the decision unless there's a stalemate. My goal is to get the team to have the right conversations and answer the questions that need to be answered and come up with a solution as a team to move things forward. So it really helped me build that foundation of team building, team engagement, and then eventually into the whole culture side of the business and so forth that we've grown to.

SPEAKER_03 5:07

I love that, you know, we talk to a lot of folks here that are in highly technical fields, whether it's traditional additive manufacturing, but people is everything. And so this idea that you have these principles around people and vision casting and how do I have the difficult conversations because it's actually much kinder than not having them. What other principles would you say guide your leadership at the helm of this company?

SPEAKER_01 5:28

It's exactly what you just said. It's people, right? One of the things I really and it's more than just the people on your team, it's the people that you support, your customer base. It's the industry, like it depends on how far you want it to reach, right? Your industry. What are you doing to impact the industry? Are you helping to move it forward technically, educationally, and all the things associated with it? So for me, I realize the value of I can I can certainly take on a furnace order and do the wiring, do the mechanical work, do the fabrication, but I'll only maybe get one or two furnaces out a year, right? That's a lot of laborsome work and so forth. So in order for companies to be successful and have far reach, need a good team. So for me, I look at the team and I look at their needs and I look at every single individual when they walk through this door, they're humans first. And then they put on their uniforms or their shirts or their jerseys or polos. And then together we're a team that goes and solves what the industry and the world needs from us. So I look at people as individual humans that all have, you know, families, animals, health issues, in-law issues, or whatever the things are that they could possibly have throughout their life when they come in here. I want to give them a place where they feel like they can separate themselves. You know, we all have things we have to deal with every day, but when we're here, we put on that uniform. We're now a team that has to go perform. We got to go win this game. Now, not every game is won, right? But the idea is how do we continuously find ways to win that game and strive for perfection, which is for me is excellence. Nothing in this world is ever perfect, but I think striving for that is excellence. And that's one of our core values. So core values is is really, I'd say around 2016, 17, as I was leading the business from an operations and general management perspective, um, I really started to pour into and learn about what core values are and how important they are to the company. It actually led to some people leaving the company because they just weren't on board with it. And it's through natural attrition that you gain the people that are on the team and they're there because they want to be there. And those are some of the guiding rules. So core values are something that we bring into every decision we make, every thing we talk about, every vision casting we're talking about, whether it's, you know, recognizing teammates or even disciplining teammates, it's no longer a, hey, you didn't do this. It's what core value did we not hit by not performing what we needed to do? And then try to get the team to think about it themselves, right? So it's like, hey, I didn't meet quality first because I just made this and it doesn't look right, but that's our number one core value. So now it's no longer a me and you issue. It's a me and you, and what does the company expect of us thing? It really helps to have that conversation where the teammate feels like you're with them trying to do what we as a team need to do.

SPEAKER_03 7:52

Absolutely. You know, we talk a lot here at B9 about you need to lead from your people's needs, not manage from your own. And that happens at every level of the organization. And one of the things that really struck me when you and I were chatting earlier prior to this podcast is you have this incredible story that I think exemplifies what it means when you have a team rallying around those core values. And it happened around a strategic move you made, geographically and otherwise. Could you share that with our audience?

SPEAKER_01 8:18

Yeah, that was um even just now, I still sometimes get a little tightened up about it. But uh it was we basically relocated our business from New Jersey, which it's been in for 55 years. We relocated the entire manufacturing down to the Charlotte, North Carolina area, 600 miles away. And uh, we did that because we needed space. And it was not an easy decision to, okay, do we just get a bigger building where we are? What's the best location? It started to lead into, well, people are gonna have to move. Do they want to move? Maybe they want to move to a place that's better for them individually. And hey, hopefully we can find a great place for the company too. So, in the decision to relocate, yes, naturally we need to find a place that's good for the company, but the way I looked at the relocation was what's the best place for the people? And then proposed the idea. And I I didn't sleep for like a day and a half at least. You know, I went in, gave this big presentation with the team. We didn't have enough space for a big training room. We moved equipment out of the way. I rented chairs, took the projector from the conference room, put it in the back, like set all this stuff up, and I said, here's our future opportunity. I'm not gonna do this alone. We need to do this and we need to make a decision as a team. I thought everybody thinks everybody was gonna throw things at me at the end of that meeting because it was like, oh, you want to move? I was like, I want us to move if we want to move. So we ended up, you know, through a couple of weeks of good conversation and working with the team. Um, we ended up getting 21 out of 40 people to move with us. Half of them had families. That means new school systems, that means new homes, new location, new culture, new everything. You know, Charlotte's been a uh uh melting pot of all the other states around it lately. So it's not that different from where we are. But uh, you know, the team that's come down here, we've done a really good job of you know staying together as a team. So it was really fun in the early few months. Not really many people knew anybody down here, but we knew each other. So we would spend time outside of work. We would have these incredible bonding moments as a team that's led to what we're doing now. And the teammates that we've onboarded since we've relocated, they walk in and they're like, this place just feels different. This is not your regular manufacturing dirty factory, a bunch of people that don't want to work and just punch holes. It's like we're actually making a difference across the world with the equipment we make. And everybody that's been able to relocate with us helps to share the story of what we've done and what we actually have now. So it's just building on this cultural vibe that we have throughout the company. But uh I've given myself time to process it from time to time, but I don't think I've done it in in its full entirety. It's it's pretty amazing to think that 21 people would, you know, follow this idea I had. But in truth, I think the reason they followed is because I came from it from a perspective of what do they need and what will make their individual lives better. And then all the rest is gonna fall in line with it.

SPEAKER_03 10:53

Yeah, it's it's an incredible story. I mean, it gave me goosebumps when we were talking about it earlier, and you were even saying, you know, the original American flag that we hung in our New Jersey facility, we put in our new one in Charlotte so that you walk by and you see, here's where we came from and here's how much we have to grow. And I I love that and it's inspirational. And I think, you know, this first change you made, I'll call it geographical plus in nature. But you've made another organizational evolution when you've started incorporating additive into what you look like. How have you managed that type of cultural and organizational shift?

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Yeah, that's a great, that's a great question. And I'm I'm gonna put a pin in that for a second because about the flag. Actually, the one that's behind me right now is the one that was in our shop.

SPEAKER_03 11:36

Love it.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

The one that's in our shop now is about 10 times the size. And our old building was a 15-foot interior ceiling height, and the shop floor flag is 15 feet tall by 25 feet wide. And it's there, one, because it's the greatest flag, I think, on the planet. Naturally, I'm a little biased to it, but you know, that's another thing for the team when we're out there, and especially the new guys that join that don't know our history as much. The team that's with us gets to say, hey, by the way, our old building was only that tall.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

You know, there's a lot of things to it. And I think a big part of artwork throughout a facility and, you know, wall quotes, color choices, everything you do within an organization from the visual perspective needs to have an intention behind it with a story, right? Don't just put up a Van Gogh picture unless that Van Gogh picture means something to your business, right? So that's kind of how we're doing what we're doing. We've got a lot of really cool artwork stuff that's going on right now throughout the business. So we're excited. But back to the pin, let's untake that. We've been in the the metal injection molding world since 1994. We've developed a piece of cup, uh, piece of equipment. My dad started that kind of helping to transform the metal injection molding industry from a furnace that thermally removes binder and does centering in the same piece of equipment. And it took what was a three-day process with three different pieces of equipment and shortened it down to about a day and a half. So huge win in that industry was a piece of equipment that that industry was dying to get, right? So we we built a piece of equipment from the ground up, needed specifically for this industry of binder removal and centering, that as additive was making its way into the world, binder jets, filament printing, all these different types of technologies, we already had a solution that was the same thing. They're just using a different forming technology, right? So in the 16, 17 timeframe, through our sister business, DSH, which was one of the greatest things I think my father ever started back in '99, was we gave people, and you can come into DSH, bring us some parts, and there's this same furnace you would buy is sitting right there to be able to run parts. So a lot of the early forming companies, the printer guys, would come to us to run parts through the furnaces we have because we're the most versatile one that's out there. It does every gas, every atmosphere, tons of process control. So instead of having to go capex a new piece of equipment, you can go run trial runs to prove it out. And that philosophy has worked great in MIM to help companies get started up that all the additive companies kind of used that as their original stepping stone before they either bought their own equipment or eventually built business models for what they're trying to do. So it was kind of an easy shoe-in. We didn't really have to change much on the equipment. We've learned a few things over the over the last few years to make adjustments. But because we had such a viable proven solution that's available all over the world in almost every single continent, it was an easy decision for people to come and see us and do that. So moving into the additive world, some of the shifts we had to do was, you know, you're still working with generally the same metal powder because they took a lot of the metal injection molding powders, but now you have different binders, right? So you're not working with polyethylene, you're working with acrylics and latex and all these other variables that they don't process the same, but they still process out. So, and this is where out of DSH as a company, we probably do the most help with people is let's, if you got a problem and it's a chemistry problem, let's dig into the science why it's not working. What is the binder temperature supposed to be? Let's go use a tool for that. What's your metal powder supposed to center at? Let's use a tool to figure out the answers to that. So we've given this knowledge share of what we've done through MIM for all these years, and I believe really helped the additive make, you know, making a technology, whether it's like, like I said, binder jet filament printing, screen printing, all these guys, it's given them the ability to really get off the ground running because they were solutions providers and support people like us that knew what we were doing and we just said, hey, what can we do to help you guys? Right. Because as an equipment maker, we have to look at things a little differently, right? I can't call a furnace user and just be like, hey, I got a great furnace, it's the best in the world. Would you like to buy it? Because if it's not in your CapEx or you're not growing, it's not going to be something I can sell. You know, you might have a furnace that only yields 60 or 70%, but it's just something you deal with. So our objective as a user or maker of these equipment is to go to the people making forming technologies and increase their awareness, increase their knowledge, increase their ability to go find a way to sell their forming technology because that gives us a chance to sell furnace technology. So, same concept that we talked about earlier with my team. What do I got to do to make sure my team's good? The company will follow. What do I got to go do to make sure that the forming technologies are good, the company will follow? And it's there's a lot of synergies between people operations and business operations that we have that interestingly overlap quite well.

SPEAKER_03 16:13

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that's so good. And I want to dwell here for a little bit. I mean, you know, you mentioned it in terms of the same lead from their needs, don't manage from your own. That's would this needs to be an opex, not a capex expenditure. The other thing that I think is so critical that we see, I'd love your perspective on, is sometimes people will go into additive and manufacturing principles are out the door. When really, to your point, it's just another forming technology, or I could say it's just another way to make things. So all of the lean principles that I apply to the back end, I should probably think about here QA, QC, what's the right tech stack, change management, all of these things. How have you, when working with those forming companies or or even with your eventual end customers, how do you think about applying, I'll call it your expertise in traditional manufacturing into this space to help it become as advanced, repeatable, reliable as traditional manufacturing is?

SPEAKER_01 17:09

Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, anybody who in the audience here who's you know explored or tried or works for a company that's like brought in binder jet in the early days, not a lot of them around anymore, right? Why are they not around? Because there was a lot of lacking education across every single process step, right? Additionally, there was there, and there still is, there's a small portion of technical sound engineer mindset people that know how to think 3D printing. And this is where there was a lot of challenges in the early days. And some of the companies, you know, did a great job marketing, but they would go after metal ejection molding. You know, you're not gonna go after an industry that's been around for 35 to 40 years and take tons of their business away unless you have something that's actually gonna do that. But when you look at some of these equipment, you know, price tags, you're at a million, two million just to invest in the forming technology, and then you still need a furnace versus a couple hundred thousand dollars for a molding machine, you know, fifty to a hundred thousand dollars for a mold and feedstock that's predictable, it's tough to beat it. And why compete with an industry that's been around for 30 years? They've probably figured out how to do it the lowest cost, right? Now, metal injection molding is not good in less than 10,000 parts, unless the value of the product versus the cost, the margin difference makes up the difference for that, right? So what we've tried to do, and I think this is where some of the wins have been in the industry collectively as a whole, is when you look at it from a perspective of what did metal injection molding do when it came into the industry? Everybody came to the table with a machining drawing that had a tolerance that was like, you know, a tenth of a tenth, because in some machining centers you can do that, but in metal injection molding, there's not a chance. So a lot of the good metal injection molding facilities that have succeeded are the ones that have taken an understanding of their technology and educated their customer on how it's works for them and educating them about, hey, you have 17 dimensions on this part or 17 features. How many of them are critical? How many of them are clearance holes? If it's a clearance hole, do you really need to hold a tenth? Can you hold more? Can you hold less? So it's educating around the use of the technology. And what MIM did a really good job of is understanding the value of uniform parts, right? So traditionally in machining, you want minimal subtraction to get to the end part, right? Because the more time I spend cutting the material away, not only am I throwing stuff, I'm costing more for the part. Where in metal injection molding, the more uniform the item is, the more uniform the part will shrink and have the ability to retain its shape. So that's where a lot of the think of the help came into the AM world in the early days, but AM was looking at different style parts: big parts, small parts, small section, thin section. So centering softwares and development softwares came out, but they lot they require a lot of iteration to get to an end goal. So where we come in is, hey, let's look at this part. You can make this in metal injection molding, you don't need to do it in 3D printing. You can take a piece of sheet metal and stamp this out, and you don't need to go make this in 3D printing. So a lot of the challenges in the early days was trying to help people realize you don't need to 3D print this. But if you want to, let's look at what we can do with 3D printing that you can't do in any other technology, because now the cost of the part is justified by something that you can't attain somewhere else. And it was a lot of that conversation in the early days that you know took some time and not everybody had the ability to grasp it the way it was, I think, grasped, you know, like better like it is today.

SPEAKER_03 20:22

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I I couldn't agree more. And that kind of gets to one of the other things I I would love your perspective on, which is around this true cost of ownership. You know, a lot I've been in both worlds. I've been in additive first organizations, I've been in manufacturing organizations, and sometimes you go to the manufacturing organization and they're like, well, what's the cost per part? I'm like, well, what's the cost of a line being down? You know, can you get this product out? What's your lead time? How much inventory are you carrying on the shelf? How much cash is tied up? All of these questions. I I could do the same with an additive first industry. And you're touching on something I think is so critical. First, should what should we make this with? And then how do I think about the economic or business case around this holistically? How do you start to describe that, whether it's to partners, I'll call it, like these other metal additive companies or customers when they're trying to make the right business decision?

SPEAKER_01 21:12

Yeah. So there was a lot of misconceptions in the early days too, around what can be processed through equipment, bases of parts on a tray, right? So in the mem industry, I mean, for example, dental brackets. We have one customer who puts 450,000 dental brackets in one run. That's a lot of parts, but they're tiny, so you can stack them multiple times, right? If you're dealing with bigger parts, medical components, firearms, stuff along those lines, you still want to get as many parts in the equipment as you possibly can because every step along the process chain generally has a fixed cost. You run the furnace for 24 hours at X temperature. Let's say it cost$1,000 to run, right? Keep the numbers easy. If I put 10 parts in there versus 100 parts in there, the price difference per part is massive. So there was a lot of education in the early days to people about realizing you only need about an eighth. Them an inch of space between each part. Because in the early processing, it's like I need like an inch. The gas has to move through it. Okay, maybe in a certain specific furnace because it pushes gas, you need to have that kind of spacing because you'll create turbulence. In furnaces that pull gas, you can take a different approach. So a lot of our education early on was yes, naturally we'd love to sell element furnaces, but specifically out of DSH, we're agnostic. Let's solve the problems that you're dealing with. And if you want this price per part and this is the equipment you're using, and I can't get that many pieces of equipment in either through printing or centering or whatever, it might not be attainable. You have to make a decision what you want to do from a capital equipment perspective across the industry. So, or across your operation. So we look at it from start to finish as a support. We look at what are we making? So what's the design of the part versus how are we shipping the part out the door, right? And all the little steps along the way to manage total cost. So the most important thing that I'm still surprised, even in the mim world, how many companies don't do this? When you buy feedstock, you should do a quality control step. What's the chemistry of that material? When you when you mold it, did you change it, right? Is it of a different weight? Do I have a separation of wax and plastic? In you know, first stage D-binding, did I lose all my weight? Did I add oxygen? So if you do all those quality control steps, that's the same stuff we've helped bring into the AM world to help people realize the process steps along the way because the more you do that, to your point earlier, you're reducing your total scrap, right? And now with 3D printing, the idea is more like on-hand printing, not as much inventory. The flexibility of your equipment, both in printing and in centering, to be able to do multiple different parts of different sizes is very critical. Not every piece of equipment can do that. So a lot of it was the education going in and around what do we have? What are we starting with? And what do we need to do to get to the end goal? You paint me the vision, I'll help you build your equipment list for what you need to do.

SPEAKER_03 23:48

Yeah. And I think you you see the emphasis on that mounting even higher because there's this big manufacturing trend between reshoring, near-shoring, supply chain resilience. How are you seeing that macro trend affect some of your customers as they're also trying to implement, whether it be new technology but traditional manufacturing principles? How are you seeing those two trends converge?

SPEAKER_01 24:11

Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't know that anybody has a real clear vision on that yet. Um I think the laser printing side of 3D printing metal has had a stronger onset of reshoring technologies and reshoring fabrication because it's a longer-standing technology that's got a better history. You know, they've made enough mistakes where they kind of know what they're supposed to be doing. The Cinnerbase side is new and it's doing well. And there are some companies that have moved, you know, decision making and part manufacturing back into the United States away from other countries. I would say the biggest reason anybody's relocating something right now is purely driven off of the costs that are going on in the world and some of the political decisions, right? Is a country going to export something? What's the cost? What's the import cost? So some of those decisions are happening. I've seen things move back into North America, but North America doesn't mean the USA. Canada and Mexico are still picking up and still having increases in fabrication to stay within the North American region. So a lot of people look to this reshoring, but they don't really realize it's all not staying within our 50 states, which is an issue too if you're a patriot and you love to see things made and said made in America, but it's an interesting approach. I think it's giving the ability to 3D print stuff is giving people the ability to look at things a little different, right? I mean, the whole Apple announcement with their, you know, their next version of the titanium watch. Now that's probably still being made over in China. They did a lot of development work in Canada. Everybody would love for them to come over to California. They would love for them to bring that to the United States and have it as a made-in USA item, but the truth is the truth, right? Costs versus sale price, and people want to make a certain amount of money because they're part of large organizations that have shareholders that drive whether or not you can do it here or there is always going to weigh in on these bigger corporations. So I've seen some companies make United States-based manufacturing plants that have things in other countries to support what they traditionally would sell over here. I've seen a lot of that grow up in the last five years, which is cool. Not a tremendous amount, but it's been it's been fun to see. And because we've got good relationships with the company overseas, we're naturally the company that they look at when they come over here too. And I've actually supported some of these companies, you know, in our local region. Hey, what do you they're like, what do you think about this state? And is it a better state than this state? So I've given some guidance, you know, in that area too. So it's been fun.

SPEAKER_03 26:21

Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you have on the one hand, I'll call it an economic driver, which to your point, it may not be reshoring, it may be near shoring because it still makes more sense to have my factory in Mexico than the US. There's this other trend we're starting to see that I would actually categorize more as security. So the NDAA regulation came out. A lot of companies are facing increased scrutiny from their own IT teams about where is the equipment provenance? How are you thinking about firmware software updates? Where is that coming from? How have you maybe seen, or to what extent, have you seen not just the economic drivers around reshoring near-shoring, but I'll call it security drivers around having things be US made or at least a large portion of it be US made?

SPEAKER_01 27:06

Directly for me, I haven't seen that much of an impact, at least in the decisions that I see companies making. But I have, you know, just through communications and networking at trade shows and so forth, I've learned of, you know, some things that are going on. The there's a lot of work being done in the Department of Defense in the 3D printing world, right? Looking at copper, looking at tungsten carbide, looking at titanium. A lot of the materials that some people are using for that are not coming from the United States. The equipment that they were trying a lot of this experimentation work out doesn't come from the United States. So that is becoming a driving force for looking to bring in a manufacturing of a feedstock material here versus buying it overseas. So I'm seeing a little bit of that already start to take place in our industry. There's a lot of work, like I said, in the Department of Defense that's starting to tick off. And I think that the metal 3D printing industry is super interesting for those guys because it gives them the flexibility of shifting and moving and pivoting, right? Where they don't have to go out and get these big contracts. Now, that might mean there's some companies that are going to get smaller contracts, you know, through the Department of Defense, but if they have a good relationship with them, they can be the company that they go to because they're able to pivot quick because of the technology of what 3D printing can do.

SPEAKER_03 28:15

Yeah, I I couldn't agree more. I think there's a democratization of, I'll call it manufacturing and workforce opportunity that additive brings simply because the setup looks a lot different than if I had to bring in a metal injection molding and try to learn that. So I'll I'll be curious as this evolves, how people respond to that, whether that's internal security measures, I'll call it defense adjacent, you know, aerospace companies, medical device, where they're starting to think about that on a global scale. We've talked about. Oh yeah, please, Stefan.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

It's uh it's interesting, right? So, like if you look at metal injection mold or even plastic injection molding and the older form of powder metal work, press and center, the forming technology requires tools and molds. Mold makers are not a breed of people coming out of college anymore, right? It's a dying generation of people that I think as you know, the middle generation here between the young and the older group, we have a responsibility to help try to build the bridge for the education transfer and the knowledge transfer and giving the, let's say, the the retiring generation the ability to say, I don't want to just hold on to my job and therefore I'm not going to teach you anything. It's like, yeah, you can work till X date, but let's start this knowledge transfer because if it were me, I would want to leave a legacy of this thing is still going because it's still a viable technology. The other side to it is because of that, people are looking at 3D printing as ways to make parts because I don't know how to make a mold anymore. I don't know how to do this. And if I go to a company that's good at it, I might have to pay 4X the cost of me doing it in-house. So that's I I don't know that we have a true answer yet to where we are, but we are definitely in this kind of like, you know, understanding ourselves phase of what can we do, what should we do, what makes sense. And it's it's an interesting time. You know, 3D printing was super hyped and it's kind of falling itself off that uh that trough of delusionment. And we're almost there, but I don't think we're fully there yet.

SPEAKER_03 30:01

Yeah, I I was just in a conversation a couple of weeks ago, and they're like, the sign that I know additive manufacturing has made it is it will be boring, is it won't be the thing you show on the tour. It'll be another part of manufacturing. And I think that speaks a little bit to your point too, even with workforce, you know, going in, right? You want your technician or engineer to be thinking, what is the best way to make these parts? Not how do I make it with 3D printing or how do I go learn molding? It's no start with the right question and then have enough of an educational transference that you can then apply the right tech stack accordingly. But I I couldn't agree more. I think you should you shoehorn either way, and you actually won't be the most effective person inside a company or starting a company.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

It's the truth. Yeah. I mean, we we got a 3D printer in-house some years ago, just a plastic printer. And I told every engineer, and anybody who wants to, but engineers are naturally the ones that know how to do the drawing set to it. I was like, print everything. I don't care if you're printing a fork, print something, right? Get an understanding of how the technology is working and where the flaws are so that as you learn it and improve it, ideas are going to come to your head for how to do something better. And now all of a sudden I understand the where this arrow should be pulled out. Right? It's just another arrow in the quiver. And it's understanding when to pull this one out, right? It's like the I forget the guy's name from the Marvel comic, the dude that shoots the arrows, but he's got arrows for every different type of thing, right? He's got the red tip, the green tip, the white tip, and he uses the one he needs to when he needs to. And that's like you said, it's what 3D printing needs to be realized for. It's don't print it because you're capable of printing it. Print it because this is the only way I can print this part or make this part. And that's the understanding that in the early days, there was a misguided vision of we're gonna take over the world. No industry's taking over the world. You know what I mean? So it's it's the right tool for the right job.

SPEAKER_03 31:43

Yeah, absolutely. I want to kind of, you know, as we wrap up our conversation, we've talked a lot about the technology, but you have so many incredible people lessons that I wanna end there. Between your experience, I'll call it as a founder, leading a technical organization. What advice would you offer to folks in that space building a next gen additive technology, or it could be a traditional technology today that needs to integrate with established manufacturing knowledge? What advice would you give them? It could be business, people, tech, we'll take anything.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

It's a loaded question. Let me make sure I understand the question correctly. So, like if we're talking about somebody new that wants to build a business to be able to integrate into an existing fab, or they want to support a new industry.

SPEAKER_03 32:31

Yeah. So a lot of times when someone's looking to start something in the additive space, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. And eventually that product maybe scales and goes into traditional, or to your point, your company is part of a value chain that has a lot of other technologies around it. What advice would you give that person who's probably technical, but they're trying to found a company, lead people, understand customers, integrate into other technologies. How should they be thinking about that?

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Yeah, the entrepreneur's mindset. The first thing I would tell you is the life you're choosing to live is not the life that most people choose to live. And if you expect to have a nine to five, if you expect to have regular life, you know, if you expect to be home at nine o'clock and not sometimes have to do work, stop. Don't start. If you don't come into the mindset knowing that your life is going to be all over the place, you're not ready. If you think about anything you do, kind of like we open this conversation, right? And I tailored to both my team and then also within our industry, the way we've approached it. The most important thing you have when you build a company, you start out with yourself, right? Everybody starts a company by themselves. Fortunately, I'm actually a second generation owner. I've seen my dad do a lot of this stuff. Obviously, I wasn't born when he started it, but I've seen him go through a lot of trials and a lot of tribulations and a lot of challenges. What I would say, and you can apply this to work, you can apply this to life, you can apply this to a young kid playing sports or trying out for a band or whatever it is. The most important thing to be successful as an entrepreneur is to believe in yourself. And when I mean believe in yourself, it doesn't mean you know you have all the answers. It doesn't mean you can walk in any room and solve everybody's problem. What it means is you've been through enough things in your life where you've had to trust yourself to figure it out that you can dig into that discipline muscle of saying, I'm gonna figure this out no matter what it is. Believe you're gonna get there, regardless of what comes your way. Because the truth of entrepreneurship is you're running through a rosebush thorn thing farm where you're just getting pricked and pulled and this, that, and the other all over the place, right? You're jumping into the deep end, whatever analogy you want to bring into it, believe in yourself. And the way people should really learn how to believe in themselves is ask yourself to do something and then hold that promise to you. A lot of people, and I was like this growing up, actually. I was great at helping everybody. I loved to help other people. It was like my thing. If somebody needed to move this weekend and I wanted to do a project and be like, oh, what can I do to help you? It was the thing I loved. And then in my mid-30s or late early 30s, I started to realize, Stefan, you're a person too. Nobody's doing these kinds of things for you the way you're doing it for somebody else. Treat yourself like a person. And the whole adage of, you know, the oxygen mask in an airplane, put yours on first before you do somebody else's. I started flipping my script and I started doing that. And it's allowed me as a person to be able to tackle any task that comes my way because I believe that I'm gonna figure it out. Now, what are the other adages to that? Go to networking events, meet the people in your industry, learn the technologies that you can. Remember, we started this about my journey. I was studied finance and economics. I run circles around a lot of people in the metallurgical and furnace world. And I just learned it by being here and being around it and being a desiring learner of life. It never stops. The only time that really stops is when you don't have the ability to live on the planet anymore.

SPEAKER_02 35:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

So there's there's a lot of adages in that area that I think people need to really get into. Believe in yourself, have the courage, realize you're gonna fall down. And then the listen, we build equipment, things happen. Sometimes they don't always go the way they need to. There could be an issue, electrical, mechanical, whatever the problem is. And what I'm what I've really coached my team in doing, and this is something I've seen in the last year and a half, be even greater than it's ever been, you're not defined by the issue that happens to you. You're defined by how you respond to it. And we deal with vendors all the time. And there's times I'm asking myself, I'm like, wow, these guys, I guess they just they just don't care. Right. But when we have issues come to us, we jump on it. We go work on it, we go solve it because that's what people are going to remember. You don't want to remember the issue, right? And the only way to get rid of that is to respond the best you possibly can and become the version of who they want you to be and that you know you can be.

SPEAKER_03 36:26

Yeah, that that's so good, Stefan. And I know I asked you about founders, but I think there's so many lessons in there that people can apply, even if they're in an existing organization, really at any level. You know, I love this idea of trust yourself. I always think about, you know, does a bird feel secure on a tree branch because it trusts that tree branch won't break or because it knows it can fly? And that I think is pretty important. I work with a lot of engineers. I work with a lot of people in technical fields, and sometimes they can attach their value to having the answers instead of I can figure anything out. And just having that confidence frees you up from maybe doubting your own value because of the changing context that you're in. I love this idea too that you're talking about. I'm gonna call it ROI on time spent, like this insatiable curiosity. We talk a lot about that metric here where can I spend time with a person or a process and have a fast ROI from the amount of time spent and apply it? And you guys seem to have that in spades. And then I love you finishing on this. You will not get to choose the cards you're dealt. You will only get to choose how you play them. And that is where you will find the value and growth. And I think that those things are timeless, timeless principles that everyone should be writing down, laminating and putting above wherever they work because they're critical. So I really appreciate you ending on those words of wisdom today.

SPEAKER_01 37:45

Yeah, thank you. That's the card analogy, something I use all the time. You know, think about people's health. Somebody who loses a limb or has arthritis or whatever it is. It's like, are you gonna let that end you? Or are you gonna get up every day and keep working? I have some arthritis issues I deal with every day, but I work my butt off, both physically and personally and in work, to show that it's not I'm not gonna let that define me. There's a lot, there's a lot that really goes into that. And there's yeah, we could have a whole conversation on leadership and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_03 38:12

And just talk, just talk about the people side.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

There was actually one extra thing that that helped me in the work side of things here from a from a growth perspective. So as a leader, as I moved myself through all these different roles in the company, which I took on by saying yes without knowing exactly how the roles were supposed to work, but I knew people, right? That was the thing I learned early on. So I knew through the working together with those people I'd learned something. A little tip or trick that I used, especially when I was a shop, you know, production manager for how things were being built, I've never welded before. Like I did some machining and I did some of the other works and jobs throughout the company. But when we had an issue, what I realized early on was I don't have all the answers. But the great people that I have around me have been through this multiple times. They probably do. So I would bring a group of people together when we had an issue, and it would be, you know, shop guy, engineer, you know, a couple different mindsets to it to solve it. But my tip is always make sure it's an odd number of people and then you. And the reason is because if you really don't know the answer and they have a majority vote, you can decide to either go with, or if you've learned enough to go the other way, you can certainly do that. But let them speak first. Because they might, you might go into it knowing you have an answer, and you got a much better way to do it, lower cost way, better effect, better result, and they might change your mindset to it. So as a leader of a situation, let the team speak, bring in an odd number of people, and uh some magic can happen from that.

SPEAKER_03 39:34

Yeah, absolutely, especially when you have those diverse perspectives. I think that's a good, a good word of caution to folks too. Make sure that there are people that fundamentally think different than you and you'll arrive at a better conclusion. It's been awesome today. I really appreciate you joining us, and I'm looking forward to getting this out there and hearing what people think.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

Absolutely. It's been a true honor, true pleasure. I hope this landed for some of your audience the way it needs to. There's so much more we can talk about and share, and I appreciate the the work you guys put into this podcast. I think it really means a lot for our industry and really starting to help people think through a different set of or look through a different set of lenses at stuff from time to time.

SPEAKER_03 40:07

Absolutely. All right, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 40:11

Interesting interview. Yes. One of the things Stefan mentioned was additive manufacturing being just another forming technology. Why is that mindset so important to companies trying to scale in additive?

SPEAKER_03 40:23

I love that he came from this background of all these traditional manufacturing practices. Because when that company started getting interest from additive manufacturers in the space, he did not see them as some novel technology ground that needed to be trodden again. Instead, he said, What am I doing today already that metal injection molding has perfected? How do I think about yield and cost targets and workforce and workflow implications and take all of that mentality and best practices and apply it over here? And the fact that he even called them forming technologies instead of additive manufacturers, I feel like was so revealing because he communicated, hey, we have built this whole process already. Let's figure out how you fit into that versus the other way around.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

Well, how many times have we said that when additive becomes boring, we'll know it has integrated into just a another tool in the manufacturing toolbox? And I think that's what Stefan was hinting at there. He also emphasized education quite a bit across all of the manufacturing chain, materials, deep binding, centering, et cetera. Why do you think that that systems level understanding has been missing in parts of our industry?

SPEAKER_03 41:34

Well, I think it was very much a technology first industry for a long time. People talking about printer specs and the latest and greatest and the equipment themselves, instead of taking a step back, and it warmed my heart when Stefan goes, you know, the first question we start with is what is the best way to make a part? I air could have air high-fived him over that interview. And I think his whole approach in saying, what is the best way? And then we'll go figure out the technology stack, the people, the implications. But this application first mindset, it's not new or novel in the space that he has grown his business in. So it shouldn't be new or novel when you switch from traditional into additive manufacturing. And that's really the premise he starts from.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

I thought that was uh, you know, we talk a lot about the polymer side of things, but so refreshing to hear someone coming from the metal side of things that get to that same point. I was also really struck by his leadership philosophy, you know, letting the team speak first, solving problems collaboratively. I know these are themes that that you and I work on a lot as well with our team, but how does that kind of culture influence technology innovation?

SPEAKER_03 42:36

Yes. You know, he obviously is a technical person running a technical company with a technical team. And you can easily get trapped into this mindset of needing to have all the answers. And very early on, he coached his people, I want to know you as humans, I want to know your gift and talents, and your superpower is not having all the answers, it's figuring anything out. And he said, This came from my entrepreneurial ship background, but that lesson applies to any domain, even if you're in a well-established existing company. And so he would take all these leadership principles, the leader speaks last so that you can hear what the team has to say. How do I structure discourse in a way that gets to a better resolution by having people from different parts of the company, having an odd number of folks in the room? All of these things you would think would be relegated to maybe a HR field. He goes, No, that's a fundamental driver of growth. One of my favorite stories he shared when we were on this call is they moved from New Jersey to North Carolina and they brought half of their team relocated with them. That to me speaks volumes about the type of commitment and buy-in you have in a mission, not in a metal injection molding system, not in a furnace, not in 3D printing. That's it, that's a culture built around a purpose. And I think he allows that to infuse both his internal team and his interactions with customers. And his success shows the results of that mindset.

SPEAKER_00 43:53

You know, he also stressed only using additive when it's the right tool. Where do you see the bigger Opportunities in terms of AM actually creating value today with that mindset.

SPEAKER_03 44:05

Absolutely. One of the things he said is a lot of people thought, well, add a dev will wholesale replace molding. Why? Why would it? Why should it? This thing has been around for centuries. That is not the right mindset to take. And for him to not only start with what's the best way to make this part, but then where can it add the most value? I think things like digital inventory, think spare parts, low inventory, complex geometries, where you're looking at this and you're not just saying it would be possible to make it with 3D printing, but where does it add the most economic value, not just performance enhancement with part consolidation, et cetera? That's where AM is going to add value, this tool in your toolbox. And he is doing a lot of coaching, if you will, to end customers and other 3D printing manufacturers, on starting with that mindset first of giving a business return on this investment in addition to technological capability that wasn't there before. Well, this was an incredible conversation with Stefan Jurens from ElNIC. And what really stood out to me was how he connects these deep manufacturing principles with leadership, whether that's educating customers about the right way to make parts or building teams that can solve complex problems together. It's a great reminder that the future of additive manufacturing will be built not just on new technologies, but on strong manufacturing fundamentals and strong people. And if you're trying to figure out how I can leverage additive manufacturing to be a strategic enabler of my business, we'd encourage you to reach out. Go to b9c.com slash additive advantage, and we'd love to talk with you more.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

Follow us on Apple and Spotify or watch full episodes of the Additive Advantage podcast on YouTube. If this episode was helpful to you, please leave us a five star review on Apple or rate us five stars on Spotify. It helps the show grow and reach more audience. Also follow us on LinkedIn for new episodes and updates. Thank you for joining us.