Technology Is Your Friend: Bob Orth on Embracing Innovation in American Manufacturing

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Bob Orth, the president of Go Industries. This company, founded in 1978, provides top quality truck accessories and enhancements for law enforcement vehicles, all manufactured in the USA using cutting-edge technology. They offer everything from sturdy grille guards to innovative winch systems, ensuring customers get the best in durability and customization. Now, under Bob’s leadership, Go Industries continues to earn recognition for its expert manufacturing processes, featuring fiber optic lasers, press brakes, and robotic welding machines. Bob has guided the organization since 1984, building on its long-standing reputation to keep it at the forefront of the truck accessory market. Among their achievements is the launch of a modular winch grille guard system, which brings durability and adaptability to trucks across the country. Bob’s background includes overseeing new product development and operations, making him a key figure in the company’s success story. He prides himself on fostering innovation through advanced production methods. Now, before we get into all this good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, AdBac Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company, and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the president of Go Industries, Bob Orth. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. Absolutely.

Thank you for having me. So, Bob, you’ve been at the helm of Go for over 40 years, which is simply incredible in today’s day and age. Is this a family business? How did this first start? It is.

Bob Orth : And being at the helm, it wasn’t always me because my father started the company when I was in college. I was a freshman in college, and my father was a salesman. He was a good salesman. He was the type of person who was kind of a life of the party. He could tell good stories. And he had had seven or eight different jobs when I was in high school and different sales jobs. One of the jobs he had was to sell an item that would take a pickup truck and turn it into a dump truck. And I remember coming home and asking, dad, why would anybody want that? And he goes, well, pig farmers want it. So they can dump all their pigs out of the back of the truck.

They got it. That’s kind of interesting. Anyway, eventually one day he was in the office and there was a man there trying to sell the owners of the company metal, a piece of metal that would go on top of the tailgate. And the owners looked at it and said, we’re not interested. And so the man left. My dad had met the man when he passed one out. About six months later, my dad parted ways with that company. But he remembered this guy with all these tailgate protectors. So he called him up and the guy said, I’ve got several hundred of them.

I don’t know what to do with I can’t sell them. And so my dad said, well, will you take an offer on him? He goes, sure. So he gave him a price. He bought them all.

And my dad was always in automotive. He knew all the dealers in the Dallas, Fort Worth area, Houston, Oklahoma city. And he went around, he sold all those things in two weeks.

Anthony Codispoti : How could he sell one? The other guy could.

Bob Orth : He knew where to go with him. He knew the market for automotive products. But then once he got done with that, he didn’t know very much or anything about manufacturing. So he needed to find somebody to build the product for him. And long story short, he eventually found some people up in Tulsa to build these tailgate protectors for him. And eventually they did it part time at first.

And eventually my dad said, okay, I’m giving you a PO for 1000 tailgate guards a month for the next three months. Will you quit your jobs? They said, yeah, we’ll quit our jobs and we’ll do this. And they started a company up there in Oklahoma. And they were very successful at it. Because eventually they went into other things besides stuff for the industries.

But in the meantime, my dad added out of the products. By the time we get to about 1984, I’m halfway through a PhD program. My goal at that time was to become a professor of statistics. I was going to Texas A &M, which is a very good school for statistics.

And I thought I had a good future there. But in 1984, those of you that remember that, that was a year, those years where PCs were just starting to become on their own, where there were people who were starting to use them for things, not just experiment with one of the things with small business. So I told my dad, I said, dad, you know, you got six employees, one of them was my aunt. And I said, you need a computer. He said, I don’t need a computer.

He goes, I got, I got my cards here. Somebody owes me money. I have a paper clip on it.

So I’ve got it all under control. And I said, dad, I’m going to set you up with a computer, and I’m going to go back to graduate school and get my PhD. And that was 1984. And I still don’t have my PhD.

Anthony Codispoti : You’re still working on that computer for him?

Bob Orth : Well, it just led to a lot of other things. At that time, I became very serious about my wife. My wife was from Taiwan. And Taiwan built lots of parts out of for automotive. So there was a connection there. We started to import some things.

The people in Tulsa made stuff for us. My dad’s model was, I’m going to give this, you take this piece of metal, and you bend it and weld it and whatnot. And then you send it over this guy, and he’s going to powder coat it, and then it’s going to come back in our place. And we’re going to put it in a box and put some nuts and bolts in it. We’re going to sell it as our product. That was the model. And that worked for about 20 years.

But anyway, getting back to the computer real quickly, just because I know a lot of young people might find this hard to believe. But my father, like I said, at that time had six employees. And he tried, for some reason, he paid them every 10 days.

I do not know why, but that’s what he did. He would add up all the hours on what we call an adding machine. I believe they call them a printing calculator now. But he’d add them up, and then he’d have to calculate the FICA and the federal tax and look at this stuff. And for six or so, it probably took him 20 or 30 minutes just to produce six paychecks. At that time, there was a program called Lotus 123, very similar to what kids do now is Excel. When my dad saw that, it was just like, you know, you set up a spreadsheet, everybody’s got the rate, you just all you put in the hours, everything came out, you write the checks and you’re done. And that was cutting edge technology in 1984. And it made a big difference for small business. Eventually, I wrote some software. And then eventually packages started coming out and we would buy packages.

And then about four years later, my brother came to work with us 1988, Chris, he and I have worked together now for almost 35 years, maybe more than 35 years. Anyway, he he I studied applied math and statistics, he studied pure math. So, you know, we might have these really interesting conversations about pi and I’d say it’s 3.1415 he said no, it’s not a 3.14159.

And we got another brother who’s an airline pilot, he says no, it’s not it’s three to seventh. Anyway, my brother eventually took over all the computer stuff. And he did a really good job because eventually, when we get to the turn of the century, we get into manufacturing. And that’s a completely different animal than just buying and selling.

Anthony Codispoti : So he prompted that transition into manufacturing.

Bob Orth : You had a pretty good business already. Great question, because my dad did not want to get into manufacturing. It’s a whole nother business. It’s a whole nother can of worms is what he would say. And what prompted it was, we in the mid 80s, we were making a grill guard that was very similar to another grill guard made by a company of Minnesota. They had the name and we were kind of like the aftermarket brand. Well, we’re both aftermarket. They had the name.

Let’s put it that way. And they had made an agreement with my dad before I came to work that we would have all of Texas, that would be our territory. Well, they reneged on that agreement. So my dad said, okay, we’re going to find somebody to make it for us. And it was not an easy thing. Eventually, we found somebody to make it. They agreed to sell to us and two other people, two other companies. Those two other companies after a year dropped out.

They didn’t really built this grill guard for us. They were in a small town called Clifton, Texas, which is a beautiful little town just 45 minutes west of Hillsborough, near Lake Whitney, about 3000 people. And those people they built, they’re two gentlemen and they had, I think they had five or six workers. They built the grill guards for us.

But towards the end of the 90s, they got a little greedy. They were supposed to only make the grill guards for us, but they started selling them kind of outside. Few grill guards here, few grill guards there. And we get calls and say, hey, we can buy your grill guard cheaper somewhere else.

Where did you get that? Well, so we decided what we were going to do is we’re going to start a shop here in Richardson, we’re in the Dallas area. We started the shop with one man from Germany.

He knew a lot about welding and whatnot. And we calculated how much money would take to duplicate what they had in Clifton. And we came up with a number at that time at $300,000.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s for the whole setup, like the equipment and all the tools that you needed.

Bob Orth : Extension on the building, tools, machines, everything. It was one problem though. We didn’t know who the heck we were going to get to run it. And some of that knowledge at that time, it just wasn’t like you’d go down the street and find somebody to run these machines. Well, we were getting pretty close to making a decision, breaking ground, because we wanted to replace them. When all of a sudden, August 2000, they get a call and they said, these two guys are about 65. They said, we want to retire. And we want you guys to buy us. So I came in and talked to my dad and my dad said, we better buy him because somebody else does.

We’re going to be out of grill guards. So we got into the car, we drove down to Clifton. It’s about our 45 minute drive. Talked to the two gentlemen. We made a handshake agreement. We asked them, how much money do they want? I said, $300,000, which is what we figured we’d have to vote just to get started. So it was a no brainer. And we paid them over five years. They agreed to that.

Anthony Codispoti : They’re client based. You get their expertise, their tools that you get the sort of the built in know how

Bob Orth : the biggest, the biggest advantage was one of the son-in-laws of the owners worked there. He kind of managed the shop. And I said to him, I said, what is your plan? He goes, oh, I plan to stay here for 20 years.

And as long as I can, I said, that was that was it. I knew that was a good man. I knew he would do a good job. And he did. He worked for us for, let’s see, till till COVID.

So he worked another 20 years. So but that’s how we got into manufacturing. It kind of hit us all at once. And once we did, the place in Clifton grew a bunch. And we started the shop up here with the gentleman from Germany. We started to shop up here.

And that’s grown well as well too. So you’ve got two manufacturing facilities now? The way it works now is the manufacturing facility in Clifton has our fiber optic laser to cut metal, you know, take it, it’s like a, you know, you take a sheet of metal and you want to cut it up any which way you want any amount of pieces you want to cut out of there, you can program it to do that. And they also have two benders. They have a press print.

Anthony Codispoti : I want to hear about the laser a little bit more. What is the backdrop to the laser so that when the laser isn’t cutting through the metal or once it’s cut through that it doesn’t then cut through something else?

Bob Orth : Well, there’s a grid underneath to hold the metal. It’s usually out of copper or some kind of metal. And then I think also, depending on how thick the metal is, you can program it the laser so it doesn’t go too far or doesn’t go, you know, how far it needs to go. Interesting thing about the laser, when we bought Clifton, they’re really, lasers weren’t really a big thing. You could get lasers that were run off of gases and whatnot. They’re very complicated machines, very expensive machines.

So we didn’t want to buy that. So what the laser was mostly used for in the beginning was to build the grill guard upright. The grill guard upright is the vertical part that goes across the bumper, maybe to the frame, and then it’ll hold the actual grill on the front of the truck.

Okay, the grill guards, so to speak. Well, every bumper, every truck bumper had a different configuration. So before you had a laser, what you had to do was you had to make a die and you had to put in this giant punch press. Boom, it was like a cookie cutter, just cut it, cut that metal right out, take that out, and then you might have to form, bend it, or weld on it, whatnot.

Anthony Codispoti : And you got to make a different template for each grill that you’re producing.

Bob Orth : Every single truck. And at that time, I remember it was like $4,000. Well, you better be sure you’re going to sell enough grill guards to cover that $4,000 just for the upright, just for the upright. Today’s technology, which now they have fiber optic laser, as a matter of fact, running our third fiber optic laser, you simply program it and tell it how you want to cut it. And if you’ve got like 50 of this part and 10 of this part, and can you fit them on this sheet, it’ll figure out the most efficient way to put all

Anthony Codispoti : this on the table. It’ll do the math for you. That’s great.

Bob Orth : So that’s one thing that I think is real important to anybody in small businesses. Technology is your friend, and you got to embrace it, and you got to use it because it may be your only edge against competition.

Anthony Codispoti : So tell me more about the tech that you guys have. I cut you off as you were starting to describe some of the other tools.

Bob Orth : Oh, well, because the grill guards that we make were made out of round steel tubing, we have tube benders. And a lot of those two benders, well, we’ve got two of them, but a lot of two benders are where we found were in Southern California because they were used in the defense industry. And okay, so the tube mender takes a piece of tube and it bends it, and then you can put something inside the tube called a mandrel. So then when it bends, it won’t crinkle.

That may be important if you want that look. Some people don’t care depending on what you’re bending. But the funny thing was when we bought Clifton, they had a very simple tube bender and they’d bend one bend at a time.

Now our grill guard, some of them had 14 bends. So you take this piece of metal and you’d bend it, and then maybe you’d do that 50 times. And then you’d make the becks bend and they put it in, and they’d do that 50 times. And then when they got all done and they stacked it up, you could tell the difference between all those different grill guards because there’s just a little difference. And one of those bends would make a difference on how the grill guard would look. It wasn’t enough that when you put it on the truck, it wouldn’t fit.

It would fit, but they just were not identical. Eventually we got CNC tube benders, which you could program and stick one 12-foot stick of tubing in there, and it goes through and it bends 12 different bends at every single time you get the same part. That’s the technology I’ve seen in my lifetime, which is pretty amazing actually. So we also have punch presses and press brakes, press brakes basically take, they’re just a thing that goes up and down and you put the metal in there and it bends it. So all they do is they go up and down, but you can have different kinds of tools to make it bend differently or so.

Anthony Codispoti : So give us an idea with all these different tools. Obviously in the examples we’ve been talking a lot about the grill guards, what else is it that you guys are known for?

Bob Orth : Well, once we got all those tools and machines, we realized we don’t have to just make truck accessories. So we started to make other things. We made projects for the cable and wireless and cable and wire industry where they have these giant reels and they hold lots and lots of wire. It’s hard to believe this, but even in any major city like Dallas, Houston, you know, I’m sure New York, whatever, LA, they have warehouses that are just full of all kinds of cable and not just one.

They might have a dozen warehouses throughout the city. They have different kinds of cable, whether it’s coax cable or telephone wire or who knows what. And they’ve got spools and spools and spools of this cable and somebody wants to build a building or something and says, well, I need 100 feet of this, 1,000 feet of this, and they’ll just spit it out and sell it to them. Well, they need several things. They need the spools, which we build for some people, and they need rack system to hold the spools because otherwise you just get a bunch of spools sitting all over the warehouse and that’s not very efficient. And then there’s some other machines, that simple machines we make that can help store the wire or cut the wire or whatever they need.

Anthony Codispoti : You guys do enhancements for law enforcement vehicles too, right?

Bob Orth : We do. Law enforcement, most of it is stuff that we built for pickup trucks and we kind of adapted for the police cars and whatnot. So we built a number of things for police vehicles, gun racks, the grill guards, of course, push bumpers and… What’s a push bumper? Well, it’s pretty much a grill guard, but the ring doesn’t go around the headlights. It’s just like two uprights and two tubes in the middle.

Anthony Codispoti : And the point of a grill guard exactly is what? Like, is it just to protect that grill from bumping into things?

Bob Orth : It’s to protect the front of the car. Yes, it’s to protect the front of the car. There’s people in farming communities that like to have grill guards because maybe they’re on a ranch where there’s lots of animals. They don’t want to hurt the animals, but they don’t want the animals to run into the car or the truck.

We’ve gotten letters from people in different parts of the country that they got hit by a mousse or a deer or something. And if the grill guard wasn’t there, it would have done thousands and thousands of dollars worth of damage. That’s really the main use of the grill guards, sometimes to push other vehicles. You could use them for that as well.

Anthony Codispoti : Like a law enforcement vehicle would do.

Bob Orth : Like a law enforcement vehicle. You guys came up with something, the winch grill guard system for trucks. Can you explain what that is and where the inspiration came from? Well, as we got known for grill guards, a number of winch companies realized that they could sell more winches if they had a grill guard to go with it. So they would call us and say, can you make a grill guard for our winch? And so we made grill guards for winch companies.

And we still do. And then we realized that some of the trucks now, particularly the medium duty trucks, the way the hood opens, the front grill is actually attached to the hood. So it opens thus. If this was your grill on the front of your truck, it’s normally the hood would open like this, right? But now the grill is attached to that. So the whole thing opens up.

So why does that make any difference? Well, the grill guards we have, if you had that the regular stationary grill guards, we just bolt it to the frame or to the bumper, that would be in the way of opening up the hood. So you couldn’t open the hood. So we designed a grill guard that would open up front wise, little cotter pins open up, and then you could get the whole hood and grill up. And you get in there.

Anthony Codispoti : So in this system, the grill is coming up with the hood. That’s right. That’s right. But I’m guessing that the grill is pretty heavy. It’s not causing damage to the edge of the hood as you’re pulling it up.

Bob Orth : No, no, because a lot of those are plastic. A lot of those grills, if you look at them, they can get them chrome plated. They look like metal, but a lot of them are plastic. A lot of them are pretty light.

Anthony Codispoti : Oh, I just had assumed that this was some kind of heavy duty metal that is going to withstand the impact.

Bob Orth : Well, okay, we’re talking about two different things now. I’m talking about the grill that comes with the truck. So if you have a…

Anthony Codispoti : And so when you open the hood, is are both grills going up with the hood? No. Just the OEM grill is attached.

Bob Orth : That’s only on medium duty trucks. So if you have a grill guard, our grill guard, which is made out of metal, if it’s attached to the bumper or to the frame, it’s stationary.

It’s not moving. So if you try to open this thing up, it’ll wind up hitting the grill guard. So we designed a system so that the grill guard would open itself. I mean, you can move it. It’s on a pivot point. Yeah. So you can get… That’s pretty clever.

Anthony Codispoti : I should have brought pictures. Yeah.

Bob Orth : Well, let me see if I find some on my phone quicker. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, go ahead and look. And I’ll kind of tee up the next question here. Right? Sure. Because you were saying kind of earlier on, you met a woman who would become your wife. She’s from Taiwan. You started to source some things from there. Are you guys still sourcing components from overseas?

Bob Orth : We do, but to a much less… Less or more…

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah. I mean, there’s certain components you can only find in certain places.

Bob Orth : Right. Right. You can… Yeah, you might be… Yeah, that’s true. That is actually true because there’s been some components we tried. We used to buy from the United States, but they all just went overseas. I would say about 1% or less of our business is stuff from Taiwan.

At one point, it was 37, 38% back in the ages of 90s. And what’s kind of interesting is I remember people would call me up and they’d say, oh, who’s your contact over there? I want to get something from Taiwan. I said, well, you can ask me and I’ll try and get it. I said, no, I want to go direct. I said, no, if you want your contact, you got to go find somebody because it wasn’t that easy to go… China wasn’t open up and Taiwan is this little island over there and a lot of people get confused with Thailand, which it’s not. But today with the internet, that changed everything and that changed a lot of things, which kind of gets back to our discussion about why we got into manufacturing because the system that my dad started with where you build it, send it to this guy to Chrome Play did or Proud to code it and we’ll put it in our box. It didn’t work anymore. The margins had been cut quite a bit from the internet.

People would just go around. Some of our competitors now that were manufacturers of truck accessories buy everything from China and put it in a box. It still looks like it’s here. They might have some part that’s UMiss made or something or maybe assembled in the US or something. But the internet, it’s great for a lot of things, but for manufacturers, it presented a new challenge.

Anthony Codispoti : So some of your competitors have gone the other direction where they’ve stopped manufacturing a lot of their stuff. They’re sourcing from China, but for you, it’s been really important to be almost completely 99%.

Bob Orth : We went exactly the opposite way. One of the reasons I think is those companies that went full China, so to speak, they focused more on retail. They focused more on the name. They focused very much on where this name, I won’t say any names, but this name or that name and they buy lots of magazine advertisement now. It’s probably a lot of internet advertisement.

So everybody knows their name. We on the other hand, we just wanted the wholesale business. We’re not really big into retail. We do have a website. We do sell off that website, but mostly what we want to do is sell to our distributors. And that model worked for a long time.

Once again, the internet has managed to break some of that too. The way it worked in truck accessories is the manufacturer would sell to a distributor. A distributor might sell to jobbers or stores of his own. There would be other people that you could might buy directly from a manufacturer, but the distributor network was pretty strong. And when we first got on the web with the website, we didn’t want to sell anything on the website because we didn’t want to interfere with what our distributors were doing.

Unfortunately, what happened to our distributors, much larger companies than we are, they got their own brand name and they got it made overseas. And now you’re competing with your customer, which is not a good situation. So that’s just some of the things that have happened in the industry. I’m sure it’s happened in a lot of other industries.

Anthony Codispoti : I’ve seen it happen in a number of industries. And I refer to it as the flattening of the supply chain or the distribution chain, where it starts to become muddled. Who’s the brand? Who’s the manufacturer? Who’s the intermediary?

Bob Orth : Absolutely. Absolutely. And you don’t know sometimes. You don’t know. So let’s see here. I got… You got a picture for us? I think I got a picture here. Hang on a second. You know, they changed how you do the pictures. So not yet. I’m going to keep looking and keep talking.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s all right. That’s all right. When you find it, you let me know. So what do you think the future looks like in terms of like, is it, you know, still like largely through distributor networks? Is it going more direct to consumer?

Bob Orth : Well, it is going more direct to consumer, I think. The distributors have kind of gone starting to go through a process where the big ones are eating up the little ones. It’s harder to do what my dad did 40 years ago, because when he started, the truck was basically a box. It was a box with an engine on it.

And the big three didn’t really care how it looked. There are lots of accessories that we no longer sell that we sold quite a few of that that tailgate protector in particular in the late 80s. One year we sold over 100,000 of those pieces of metal. It just went on a tailgate.

We don’t sell those anymore because a lot of times the pickup trucks come with rubber or plastic parts on top. It’s great. It’s better than the metal.

I have to admit, but it wiped out the market. There are people, and we sold some of these, were called rocker panel moldings. The rocker panels on the bottom of the truck would get dinged up from rocks or whatnot.

And so they made stainless sheets that would fit there and go on with two-way tape. That industry is pretty much gone because, well, paints have gotten better. The metals have gotten better.

Things have gotten better. Of course, way back when you might spend $10,000 or $15,000 for a pickup truck, today you spend $100,000 for a pickup truck. So you get a much better quality truck, but it’s costing a lot more money. But if you’re spending that much money, you’re not going to want to put just anything on the truck. The products have got to be better. They’ve got to be engineered for the vehicle. And that’s part of the challenge with what we’re dealing with right now.

Anthony Codispoti : What are some fun, new, interesting products that have either been released recently or maybe that are coming soon?

Bob Orth : We’ve come out with a line of boxes that get mounted to utility vehicles. We started making flatbeds. If you’ve seen a flatbed truck, that doesn’t come from the OEM. What happens is someone has to build that bed and somebody else has to install it onto the back of the truck. This is the product that I was trying to tell you about.

You can see how the grill guard has been pushed forward independently of how they open up the hood. I don’t know if that’s clear enough. Yep. But that’s a new product that wouldn’t have existed 10 years ago. Those kind of things.

Anthony Codispoti : You and your family members, you’ve got a strong background in math and statistics. I wonder if how you guys kind of leverage that to find kind of data-driven insights to guide the company’s strategic decisions.

Bob Orth : Well, I think a lot of that was a couple of things. A lot of that had to do back in the 80s and 90s with the computers because my brother and I were able to make changes into the programs. As long as we could have the code, we could go in and change it. And we would. And we’d fix it.

We’d customize it. And so a lot of that has gone away. Another thing that was interesting is because I came to work here for the computer and my dad was a salesperson, we didn’t have some of the some of the disagreements that I’ve seen other people have in their family businesses. A lot of times the children want to do what the dad does, or the mom, which is honestly, that’s what we all do at some level.

But my dad and I didn’t. I really wanted to focus on the computer. I wanted to focus on importing things from Taiwan. And then he just loved trying to sell things. He loved trying to sell things.

So we never really competed that. Now, where I’m going with all this is he also was a risk taker, a much bigger risk taker than I am. And he almost broke broke himself before I got here. He had an idea for stagecoach rails. They were made out of mahogany and they were bolted on the back of the bed of the truck. So he was trying to go for the Western look, you know, like a stagecoach. And he knew he was going to sell just a zillions of these because this was just the greatest idea since sliced bread, as he would say. And so he bought $20,000 worth of mahogany and he had a guy hired a guy to cut him up. And everything. And of course he called all the people’s head. He had sold tailgate protection. He said, Hey, you want to take 10? I know you’ll sell them.

If you don’t let me know. Well, everybody took 10, five, whatever. But after a month, two months, three months, six months, pretty soon they all came back. And it almost broke him. He wound up selling it all off. So where I’m going with this is we would have these discussions and he’d have a new idea. And I’d say, Dad, that’s a great idea.

Let’s see if it works. It’s okay. We need to build a thousand of them to get a good price. And I said, why don’t we build 20 up?

Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You won’t get as good a price. We’ll probably lose money. I said, we might lose money, but at least we’ll find out what people think about. Now that that to some people, that’s going to sound very obvious to the sales type of person.

The one who takes risk, that makes no sense at all. But these are the kind of discussions my dad and I would have. And in the end, I think it benefited the company because we both had a little bit of input on what we needed to do. And a lot of times he was right.

In 2003, he wanted to make this grill guard, which we called the Rancher Grill Guard. And we were going back and forth about, do we take the time to do this or do this or whatever. And I said, we’re never going to sell that many. And he looked at me and he goes, I’ll bet you within six months we sell 300 of them a month. And I said, dad, there’s no way we’re going to sell 300 a month of those grill guards. There’s no way. Well, I have to give my words. He was right. After six months, we were selling 500 a month. And some people just have that eye or that, but he’s not right every single time.

Anthony Codispoti : And that’s the benefit of the approach that you described, which I’ll call the minimum viable product. Yes, you may, you’re not going to get the economies of scale. And so you may not make money on each of those first 20 units that you sell, but at least you can prove if the concept, if the demand is there for the concept. And then you can jump in with both feet.

Bob Orth : That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So anyway, the next thing was once we got into manufacturing, we tried to build other things. We built something for swimming pools. It’s this system where you climb through ropes and everything and jump in the pool. I’ve got a picture I could pull off the wall real quick if you want to see what I’m talking about.

Anthony Codispoti : I think I can envision it. Yeah, like a rope system that’s sort of strung across the pool. People can, yeah, like a little ropes course and they can just use that and then sort of drop themselves into the pool.

Bob Orth : Right. It’s not our product. We build it for someone else. But we do have an engineer on staff that can say, okay, if you change this, we can make it better this way or it’ll be more.

Anthony Codispoti : But I’m sorry, you have the picture right there on the wall.

Bob Orth : I didn’t. You want to grab it? Yeah, sure. Let’s show everybody. And it’s starring my grandson here in the front. Oh, that’s even better.

Anthony Codispoti : Oh, I’m glad you grabbed that because that’s different than I was envisioning. That’s cool. Yeah.

Bob Orth : So that goes across the Olympic size pool. We built all that. You can see the rings and they have things to climb on and all this other stuff.

Anthony Codispoti : And you can see it’s a hit. I mean, kids are lined up waiting for it.

Bob Orth : Well, we don’t do the installing. We built eight of them that have gone around the world, different ones, places in the world. Hopefully we’ll be sending one to Los Angeles pretty soon. We’ll see.

Anthony Codispoti : And where does that anchor into? Is it just anchored like into the interior of the pool or at the edges?

Bob Orth : No, outside past the edges of the pool. That’s all another thing.

Anthony Codispoti : Because in this picture, obviously, we can’t see the whole thing, but I can’t see where the close end gets anchored in. Yeah. That’s even further on the other side of the pool.

Bob Orth : Yeah, it’s all the way across on the other side. And then they make some that just hang from the roof. So if it’s in indoor pool, you could put the system in there. We made some of those for some pools in this area as well. But that’s kind of one of those fun little projects that you don’t get to see every day.

Anthony Codispoti : And so you guys can do pretty much anything that involves this cutting and this bending of metal and tubular steel. Yeah, we sure can. What’s something that you’ve wanted to try? Haven’t had a chance to yet.

Bob Orth : Well, one thing I’ve always wanted to get into is aviation. But in order to do that, it requires a lot of certificates and a lot of time. And we’ve just never put our energy into it. I always thought it’d be cool to make parts for planes and things like that. That’s kind of a frontier we’ve never gone to, but maybe someday we will.

Anthony Codispoti : We talked for a moment about how you guys do enhancements to law enforcement vehicles. I’m curious if you’ve ever heard a story come back about a way that your product has had a tangible impact on their operations?

Bob Orth : No, we haven’t because the way that works is you don’t really talk to the departments. What happens is there’s a customizer. There’s a guy who will have 100 trucks maybe for the city of Dallas or whatever big city. And he has a contract with the city of Dallas. And the city of Dallas says we want this on it, this on it, this on it, this on it, this on it.

We want these radios, this grill guard, this whatever. And so then he goes and sources all those products. So it’s a very tight-nitched industry and you’ve got to know the right people. But we don’t ever get to meet the people who actually use the vehicles.

Because they go to a person who decks out the vehicle and then they sell it to the city and then the city gives it to the policemen. So I’m sorry.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s a few layers removed for you guys. Yeah. You know, I’m curious, kind of hearing you talk about you being early in the curve with computers back in the 80s and telling your dad, hey, we need to get in on this and showing him what you could do in Lotus 1, 2, 3, and it blew his mind. Where are you with AI? Is this something you have dabbled in? Are you utilizing it at all? How do you think about it?

Bob Orth : We really haven’t. I’ll tell you this story. When I was 18 years old, I got into some program that I got to go to UTD and talk to professors, which was supposed to be a big deal. And I remember talking to this one professor and I wanted to know what he thought about computers. And he was probably my age or maybe a little younger.

And he just said, no, I’m too old for that. I don’t need to learn it. And I could not for the life of me understand why anybody would say that.

But now I’m 65 and I know the best place to be right now, the last 10 years, has probably been the website and whatnot. But I just don’t really want to take the time to learn it. I’ll hire somebody else to do it. So I guess AI is even another section beyond the web. So I don’t know if I’ll ever get to that point. But we’ll see. Somebody might come along with something that’ll make it easier for a person like me to use it. Or it’s not off the table.

Anthony Codispoti : Is there any interest from younger generation of the family?

Bob Orth : There are not. I’m afraid Go Industries is similar to a lot of small businesses where the business started as a way for my parents to make a living. And it accomplished that. My dad, like I said, had many jobs and sometimes there were some tough times.

I even had to loan my parents money one time for the house payment. But once Go Industries started, everything went well. Things got better. And then my brother Chris and I who had no plans at all to work with our dad or mom or anything.

We had no plans to do that at all. It just worked out. And I’m glad it did. I mean, it’s been a nice ride. But then our children and my brother, I have another brother and sister and their children have all become successful in other things. And they want to go on and do other things. My son is a web developer with Snapchat.

Or I say chat, snap. I got to mix it up. One of those two.

So truck accessories is just not the thing for him. My brother has three daughters. All of them are very, very successful in what they do.

They went into engineering programs and did some really amazing things. And I have two daughters. One of them’s in Spain. She’s married and writes music and she’s happy there.

The other’s in Houston and she’s married and she’s happy there. So it’s kind of like in the United States, we always want our children to do better. Everybody wants their children to do better. And sometimes they do better enough that what you got ain’t interesting anymore.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s kind of sad. But there’s some families that they stay kind of multi-generational. And at some point, a lot of them, just the kids, they go in a different direction. They go in different directions.

Bob Orth : So and we never try to force anybody. If they’re interested, that would be very nice. But there’s so much in the world today.

Anthony Codispoti : Bob, for people listening who are like, oh, what Bob’s describing, his capabilities sound really interesting. Who’s kind of a good target customer for you? It’s somebody who needs what? It’s somebody in this industry or this geography?

Bob Orth : Well, it’s anybody who needs metal parts, metal manufactured parts. Made out. Yeah. So it could be something that they just dreamed up and they’d like to see it created. It might cost a little bit of money to get it creative.

Because sometimes you’ve got to make one of something to start. It could be something where they’re building something out of metal parts. And they’ve got two or three parts that they make. But really, they could have been combined it into one.

And they just like to see that happen. And that could make a big change in the amount of money they’re making on the product. Or it could make the product better. It could be somebody who has an idea for, well, like the swimming pool thing. That was somebody’s idea. And he got money behind him. And now he’s been ordering these things and putting up over swimming pools and things like that.

Anthony Codispoti : So somebody can come to you with, hey, I need a prototype of this. As well as come to you and say, hey, I want hundreds of these made.

Bob Orth : Right. Our sweet spot is like 100 to 1,000. That’s what we’d like to build. We have done prototypes for people. The only thing is you have to have engineering design drawing. We have an engineer. If you don’t know how to do that, we’ll charge you and make one for you. And you can have us build it or somebody else build it. But you can’t come with a napkin and a piece of paper and here, take it from here and let me know when you got it.

Anthony Codispoti : Doesn’t work that way. That’s right. Okay. So I want to shift gears for a moment. And I’d be curious, Bob, to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome in your life.

Whether it’s something personal or professional. Yeah. Okay.

I have one thing. If you’re a small businessman, the word lawsuit strikes serious fear in you. And I’m going to tell you a story about a lawsuit that we went through.

And we survived, but there was questions at the time, whether we would. In the late 80s, there was a company that made sun visors. Sun visor, not from the inside of the truck, but on the outside of the truck. And we made a sun visor as well. And we decided to make one very similar to this other company’s sun visor. Now, this sun visor, this sun visor were made out of fiberglass. They mounted to the top of the vehicle.

And they were to keep the sun off you when you’re driving the truck. And the company that made them had a patent on them. But it was a design patent. There’s two kinds of patents. It was a utility patent, a design patent. And with a design patent, the question is, what did he actually patent? You know, what is the design? So we came up with a design we thought was different.

And they didn’t think it was different. So they proceeded to sue us. And the battle lasted a while.

There’s a lot of things that went on. Eventually, we got an injunction against us from one judge. We appealed it. We went to a federal appeal court where they had three judges and they overturned the injunction. And like all things, like almost all things in legal, it had to go to mediation. And eventually, eventually we settled out of court. But in the meantime, we were paying lawyers more money than we were paying ourselves. And a lot of it had to do with my father didn’t want to give up. The other side didn’t want to give up. But they were much larger and richer company than we were. So that was quite a challenge. So we did eventually survive and make it through. But you know, there’s a lesson learned. And if you’re a small businessman, you want to avoid lawsuits as best you can.

Anthony Codispoti : So if you had that to do over again, would you have and it was your decision, I understand your father was involved and he wanted to go one direction with it. Would you have handled any part of it differently?

Bob Orth : Yeah, I would have. In the beginning, when they first threatened to sue us, we had made an agreement with them. It’s kind of interesting, actually. We made an agreement with them that we would pay them a royalty for each of the ones that we sold. And it wasn’t that much money. And compared to what they were selling, we were like small, small. And so my brother and I was fine with it until that. But my dad wasn’t.

He did not want to give up the ghost. So they defined the design as two intersecting lines that come to a point on the sun visor, the leading edge of the sun visor. And my dad said, well, we’re going to get out of this. We’re going to make it a curve.

So now our sun visor is a different design and we don’t have to pay the royalty anymore. And I really didn’t agree with that. But my dad was determined to do that. And that’s what he did. It resulted in another lawsuit that I pretty much told you the gist about. And in the end, even though he had a patent on that, he had to give it up in part of the settlement. He designed another sun visor that was even a little bit more different.

And that’s what we sold for a while. What’s very interesting about this whole story is you don’t see any sun visors on trucks at all, hardly anymore. Part of the reason is because the trucks in the 80s and the 70s and even the 90s, a lot of them, the windshield was almost vertical. So when you put a sun visor there, it blocks the sun. Well, what’s happened is a lot of times now the windshields are here. And now your sun visor really isn’t doing much at all.

It’s not blocking very much sun at all. The other company was bought out. It was a family company too. They went public and they were very successful. And then they’re bought out and now they’re owned by probably some private equity firm. But they don’t sell sun visors anymore.

Anthony Codispoti : Why did windshields go from this to this? Styling. If you look at a functional thing like more aerodynamic or it could be.

Bob Orth : I don’t know. I think I think a lot of things in automotive is styling. We we I was like tell the story. We like we we sold bed rails that went on the back of the truck. Right.

You know what I’m talking about. A piece of metal that’s kind of like, you know, just kind of like that and bolted to the top of the bed so you could tie things to it. The first bed rail we made was one and a quarter inch steel. It was strong. You bolted the truck. You could tie pretty much whatever you want to it. Then my dad got the idea.

All right. I don’t know if he got her somebody else will make two by one inch and they were fatter, you know, and they look better. Didn’t really do much better. You could still tie things. You could tie more stuff to it.

I guess if you want to do is thicker metal. But OK, so what? That lasted about six months because the next thing came out was round. And round just took the bed bed rail market by storm.

After a year, you couldn’t find any more two by ones or one and a quarter. Everything was round. And all of it was just aesthetics. That’s all it was.

It they they all did the same thing. But people just like the looks of the round. So I don’t know for sure what the OEMs were thinking when they changed the windshield. But I assume it was more aesthetics. It just it just looks better than having a big flat sun visor off your hood like this. It looks very squarish.

Anthony Codispoti : And it basically did away with the market for sun visors on the unsetted trucks. And so when you’re going through this difficult period, the lawsuit, the uncertainty, the, you know, filing the appeals, not knowing what’s going to happen, spending more money on the attorneys than you can pay yourselves.

Bob Orth : Opening up attorney bills. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : Just like probably wanting to throw up in your mouth every time you do it. Like what gets you through what got you through that difficult, uncertain time? Like what or who could you lean on?

Bob Orth : Well, I will say one thing for my dad. And he was very adamant about this. And it turned out he was right. He said that company did not invent that sun visor. He said that that was and the reason they settled was we found Sears magazines a few years before he filed for the patent that they were selling it to Sears, which you have to file for a patent within one year.

And that’s not what happened. He decided to file it after a couple of years. So the patent could have been invalidated.

Most likely. I wanted my dad wanted to go after him and the lawyer told him, no, you’re not doing it. We’re settling that and this is it. I’m not going to let you go through that because it’s already been too much. But that’s kind of the way the law works. It’s you never really get to see a judge. Nobody ever solves everything. How much money you have has a big difference is how far you go. It’s but especially with patents.

Anthony Codispoti : So what’s Bob, what’s your approach when it comes to building your team? You know, everybody, every industry, it’s hard to find good folks. It’s hard to hold on to them. What have you done in terms of recruiting and retention that’s worked well for you?

Bob Orth : So what I tell everybody that I hire is I said, I am not going to make you rich, but I am going to make a good place for you to work, a place where you’ll be respected, a place where you’ll be listened to, a place that I hope you will make a home away from home. That’s the kind of employee that I’m looking for. Now, of course, there are there are exceptions for different positions, but for most employees, I want I want somebody who wants to be here, who likes what they’re doing, that likes the people that are around around them. And that to me is more important than than really anything, because how people relate and work together is is very important.

Anthony Codispoti : How about daily practices like habits or rituals that are helpful to you, Bob, and sort of starting your day, keeping you on track, keeping you centered?

Bob Orth : Well, you know, my wife and I go to a Bible denomination church and non-denominational church. We we we tend to read the Bible every day if we can, you know, she’s better at that than I am. And we and we try to we try to, you know, our mantra is to follow Jesus. So that that’s kind of where our heart and soul is.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s your North Star. Yeah. Yeah. Is that something you were raised with or that’s something you found later?

Bob Orth : A little bit. My dad was was Catholic. He was a disciplined Catholic. He went to Mass every every Sunday, every day of every holy day of obligation. He had last rites before he died. He was very important to him. And it was very hard for him not to see all his children become cast like remain Catholic. But that’s that’s a topic for another day, I guess.

Anthony Codispoti : Fair enough. Bob, if we’re talking a year from now and you’re celebrating something, what would you want that thing to be?

Bob Orth : Oh, a successful year where everybody worked together and we put a little money away and you know, while we had a nice maybe nice dinner, nice party together, the whole company, that would be that would be my dream.

Anthony Codispoti : All right. How about the best decision you ever made for your business?

Bob Orth : The best decision I ever made from a business. Wow. So I told you my dad was a salesperson and that was his thing. I mean, he believed that sales was the way to get ahead. Sales was what he wanted to do.

And there came a time when I had to tell him dad, we’re going to hire this guy to be the sales manager. And he didn’t like that very much at first. But he eventually accepted it. And it was good for him because it allowed him to do other things that he wasn’t tied down anymore.

So I think that was a really good decision. I’m proud of the fact that after seeing my dad and mom struggle before I went to college, I’m proud of the fact that I was here for most of their adulthood. And I was able to help them be part of a company that accomplished its mission. In that, it provided a very good standard of living for both of them. And they were very happy. They didn’t have to, they weren’t stressed out.

I mean, of course you have things in small business, things happen, things go wrong. My dad had a heart attack in 1989. I joined in 1984.

My brother joined 1988. As I said, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we didn’t come. I mean, he would have had this business that was running, but nobody to run it. What would have happened? So he had a triple bypass and it took him a while to recover.

Anthony Codispoti : But he came back into the business eventually after that? Oh yeah. I mean, he might only come for

Bob Orth : an hour or two after the surgery or whatnot. But he had to be here. He lived to be 88. He died a little more than two years ago until the last couple of months when he couldn’t leave the house. He was here every day. You know, even if it was just for an hour, he’d go down and talk to my brother in his office and tell him a few jokes. And he’d come down to my office and tell me the same jokes I could hear.

Anthony Codispoti : But you knew well enough to go ahead and laugh at the punchline. Exactly. Exactly.

Bob Orth : Exactly. Give your dad some purpose. It’s really good to know my parents as an adult. I know that’s kind of a privilege. Not everybody gets that. And I value that. And I’m very grateful. I’m very grateful.

Anthony Codispoti : Bob, what is something you wish more people knew or understood about your business?

Bob Orth : I think just some of the things we talked about like the technology, like the way things have changed so much, I think it’s valuable on a lot of different levels. Another thing we didn’t talk about was cash. I mean, people used to pay for things in cash, you know, or checks are practically going away now too.

Everything’s ACH. And we’ve seen that in our lifetime. It’s just amazing that 30, 40 years ago, people thought having a lot of money was what you had in your wallet. And most people today don’t even have any money in your wallet. They got credit cards or debit cards or something like that. Or they just have this. This is just their…

So that to me is… I think my grandson comes up every once in a while and I’ve got a whole water bottle full of coins. And I dump it out and I say, we’re going to roll coins today. And I’ll bet you there’s lots of kids out there that never rolled quarters or pennies or nickels. They probably don’t even know what they are. But it gives us something to do.

Anthony Codispoti : So I think the kind of… A little nostalgic for you. For people to know. Maybe it’s not specific to go industries, but I think there’s a lot of stuff that’s just… We’ve gone so fast so quickly in the last 20, 30 years, I think there’s a lot of stuff that just gets forgotten.

Yeah. I just have one more question for you, Bob. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First of all, everyone listening today, I’m going to invite you to hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app there. So you can continue to get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Bob Worth. One of the several family members and the leader of the NEPCO industries. I also want to let people know, Bob, the best way to get in touch with you or to follow your story or your company. What would that be?

Bob Orth : Well, we have a website, www.goindustries .com. It’s got all our products on it. If you want to get ahold of me, my email is ro2, like Robert Orth, ro, and then number two, because I’m a junior. So ro2 at goindustries.com. So that’s my…

Anthony Codispoti : We’ll include that in the show notes. So last question for you, Bob. As we look to the future, what exciting changes do you see coming to the business in the next few years?

Bob Orth : Exciting changes. Well, there’s just so many different kinds of things to build. I think for me, it’s just getting up in the morning note. There’s something out there we can build. There’s so many things that could be built, and we just need to find a customer that wants us to build it. That to me is exciting. So I don’t think that directly answers your question, but that’s the best thing.

Anthony Codispoti : You’re just excited for more ideas to come to you, more things to build. You just never know. How can we use the really cool tech and the tools that we’ve got to make something else with it? That’s right. That’s right. Well, Bob, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Bob Orth : Well, thank you for listening. I appreciate it. I think we can all learn something from everybody. So I hope some little piece of nugget information got to somebody through this podcast.

Anthony Codispoti : I know that it has. So thank you for that. And folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.