Lean Legends | Brad Cairns | My Door Factory
Brad Cairns is the senior principal at Quantum Lean and is dedicated to improving the woodworking industry in North America using lean methods. He also owns My Door Factory and Stolbek Machines.
In this episode he shares:
Why he changed his company name from “Best Damn Doors”
His first exposure to “lean manufacturing”
How waste is like gravity
Going from making 5 doors per day to 52 within a few weeks of implementing lean
And how he developed a multi-million pound product by solving his own problems
Check it out!
Links:
Brad’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumLean
Stolbek Machines: https://stolbek.subscribemenow.com/
My Door Factory: https://mydoorfactory.ca/
Book a Lean Made Simple Tour: https://www.leanmadesimple.com/book-a-tour
Welcome to Lean Made Simple: a podcast for people who want to change their business and their lives one step at a time. I’m Ryan Tierney from Seating Matters, a manufacturing company from Limavady, Northern Ireland that employs 60+ people. Almost ten years ago, I came across this thing called “lean” and it transformed my life… now I want to share this message with as many people as possible.
This podcast unpacks our learnings, lessons and principles developed over the last decade in a fun, conversational way that will hopefully empower you on your own business journey — whether you’ve been doing lean for years or are just starting out!
Check it out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other podcast platform by searching “lean made simple.”
Thanks and all the best.
— Ryan Tierney
Magic Moment 1: An improvement that started a business
Magic Moment 2: Why Best Damn Doors Changed Their Name
Magic Moment 3: How a woodworker went from making 5 doors to 52 per day!
Full Transcription of Episode
Braid Cairns (00:00):
Waste is like gravity. The day you stop pushing back is the day it takes over. So, there is no, today I'm on cruise control. Eh. There is no cruise control.
Matt (00:10):
Guys, welcome back to the Lean Made Simple podcast. We're joined today by Lean Maniac, Brad Cairns.
Braid Cairns (00:18):
That's a big accolade, but okay,
Matt (00:20):
All the way from Canada?
Braid Cairns (00:21):
Ontario, Canada. Yes, sir.
Matt (00:23):
And a place called London, just to throw everybody off.
Braid Cairns (00:25):
Right? I'm from London, no accent. It's a long story.
Matt (00:29):
Best Damn Doors?
Braid Cairns (00:31):
Ah, not anymore. We changed the name to My Door Factory.
Matt (00:35):
My Door Factory?
Braid Cairns (00:36):
Yeah.
Matt (00:37):
And you've got a Quantum?
Braid Cairns (00:40):
We have My Door Factory, we have Quantum Lean, which is a website with web tools, kanban cards, SOP generators, kamishibai boards, training, all our training's up there. And then we also have a machinery building company called Stol-Bek Machinery. And it's all because of lean, every last piece of it.
Matt (01:02):
Wow.
Braid Cairns (01:02):
Yeah.
Matt (01:03):
Crazy.
(01:03):
Yeah.
Braid Cairns (01:04):
This is part of the mini series we're doing here, live at the Lean Summit. I don't know if you can hear the guitars and the banjos and the mandolins in the background. Everyone drinking wine and beer, connecting, having a great time. But we're just here to find out more about people's lean journeys.
(01:16):
Before we jump into the official set of questions, what made you get rid of the damn?
(01:21):
Customers. We have a wide range of customers and everybody has different cultural beliefs. And we found out some of them were just not impressed with the language. Our company vision is to improve life and character through the manufacturing of doors. We looked at that and we thought, if we had a defect in the door, what would we do? We would not stop until the defect was fixed. Right?
Matt (01:47):
Yeah.
Braid Cairns (01:48):
And then we just looked at it and said, "We have a defect in our name."
Matt (01:52):
Wow.
Braid Cairns (01:53):
If it's offending one person, that's too many. And let's face it, it's a borderline swear word. If our vision is to improve life and character, could we not use that as an opportunity for a character building? And what it did actually was, it went across the plant, and no swearing, period...
Matt (02:13):
Oh wow.
Braid Cairns (02:14):
... in the whole factory now.
Matt (02:15):
Dude.
Braid Cairns (02:16):
It was really cool. Like where everything comes from, your customers, right?
Matt (02:21):
Yeah.
Braid Cairns (02:21):
It all came from a customer we were working with on the lean side. We were at dinner with his family, and I couldn't believe the level of character that these people were at. And I'm like, that's amazing. If I can improve and my team can improve, they set the example for us. And it was a no-brainer. We were just like, yeah, it's done. Let's change it.
Matt (02:47):
Guys, thank you so much for checking out the podc.... That's a mic-drop moment right there. Honestly...
Braid Cairns (02:53):
[inaudible 00:02:54] that.
Matt (02:53):
... could flipping just chop that up, put it on YouTube, and done. Wow. The humility there is really interesting to me, because we get attached to stuff, you've had the name for a while.
Braid Cairns (03:02):
Totally.
Matt (03:03):
You become known for a certain thing, and that's a big, big pivot for you to do.
Braid Cairns (03:07):
Yeah, it was. In the beginning, as a company, we needed it. We needed a shock factor. We needed that. When we're at the trade shows, the big sign, and everyone's like, "I guess I know what you guys do." But we feel like we're past that now. We're pretty established. Just life and character.
Matt (03:24):
Awesome. First official question. This is the way these podcasts work...
Braid Cairns (03:28):
Let's do it. I'm ready.
Matt (03:29):
... it's like we're 40 minutes in and now it's time to do the first question. How'd you come across lean? What was your life like before and what's it like after?
Braid Cairns (03:35):
How long do I have for this story? 10 seconds?
Matt (03:38):
Yeah, we'll let you have 45...
Braid Cairns (03:40):
Okay.
Matt (03:41):
... if that works for you.
Braid Cairns (03:42):
I bought some equipment at an auction and it was about an eight-hour drive. I was doing cabinet making at the time, the hard way. I stopped at a bookstore and... This is how long ago... I got a CD called, The Toyota Way. And I was like, whatever, some business book and I just threw it in. I was glued. Driving, and I just played it over and over and over. I've been playing it over and over now for 20 years. I haven't stopped listening to that book.
Matt (04:13):
Wow.
Braid Cairns (04:15):
I just couldn't believe there was another way to do things. Everybody's just like, that's just how it is or that's how we do it. And when I heard that... I actually got back from that trip, I pulled my whole team together, I put it up on the board and I was like, "Guys, this is what we're doing. It's not optional. This is the direction the company's going.
(04:34):
If you don't like it, no problem. I don't want to interfere with your life, but we're not going to stop until we figure this out. I don't care if it costs $100,000 in 10 years." And we spent way more than that, and we still don't have it figured out.
Matt (04:51):
You held good on your word there.
Braid Cairns (04:52):
Yeah. We're grinding every day, but that was it. That was the introduction. And then fast forward 10 or 15 years, we hired a lean consultant to help us, because I couldn't get the message across to my people. That was the hard part. Once I saw how he did it, I was like, okay, thank you.
Matt (05:13):
Whoa.
Braid Cairns (05:14):
And it was the exact same story as Paul, with his... We couldn't afford the consultant. It was 10 grand a week. And I'm like, I don't have any money now. Whatever. Let's just do it. He came in and it was just like boom, boom, boom. That guy ends up retiring maybe eight years after we worked together, and he phones me and he's like, "Hey, Brad, I'm retiring." Sweet. Enjoy the golf course. Right?
Matt (05:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you tell me for?
Braid Cairns (05:42):
Yeah. Thanks. And he goes, "I want you to take over the consulting company."
Matt (05:46):
Phew.
Braid Cairns (05:46):
And I'm like, "Nope." And he goes, "Yep." I said, "Nope." "Yep." "Nope." "Yep." "Nope." "Yep." "Nope." "Yep." "Nope." The next week I was in Texas, helping a cabinet company.
Matt (05:57):
Awesome. We've been doing that for 10 years now. It's crazy.
Braid Cairns (06:03):
Crazy.
Matt (06:03):
Crazy turn of events, but it's been a wild ride.
(06:08):
It sounds like it.
Braid Cairns (06:08):
Yeah.
Matt (06:09):
At the start, was there anything that gave you a sign that you were on the right track? Any early wins?
Braid Cairns (06:15):
Oh, my God. It was staggering. When you're not lean and you just think you're doing good... The first walkthrough with this consultant was priceless. He's an older guy. Jim Lewis is his name. There's a plug for you, Jim. I love you.
(06:30):
We're walking through the shop and I'm bragging. I'm like, "We got all our parts stacked here, and tops and bottoms and gables, and everything's all neat, and skids." And he looks, and he looks at it and he goes, "Wait, you guys making wine here?" I'm like, oh, God. Oh, God, he's back... He's losing it. "No, we're making cabinets." And he goes, "Why are you aging all your parts?"
Matt (06:53):
Ooh.
Braid Cairns (06:54):
Right?
Matt (06:54):
He set you up for the [inaudible 00:06:56].
Braid Cairns (06:56):
I was like...
Matt (06:57):
It was a two-parter.
Braid Cairns (06:58):
... Ooh, got me. I was like, okay, hired. We just started working with him. The story goes he was going to be there for a week and all we needed was five... No, we were doing five finished cabinets a day, and all we needed was 10. I was happy. That was going to get us the sales we needed. After the first week, we were doing 10 a day.
Matt (07:21):
Oh, my goodness.
Braid Cairns (07:22):
I sat him down on Friday. I'm like, "This has been great. I know we agreed on 15. Right, Jim? We said 15 a day, right?" He laughed. He goes, "I'll stay for another week." He stays for another week. By the end of that week we're doing 15.
Matt (07:35):
Geez, Louise. And then I said, "Stay for another week until we're doing 20." Then we were doing 20. Then he said, "You got it. I'm out of here." And we kept going. We went from five finished boxes a day to 52, with the same crew.
(07:50):
The same crew?
Braid Cairns (07:51):
Yeah. And you just watched all the work in process...
Matt (07:53):
[inaudible 00:07:54].
Braid Cairns (07:53):
... get smaller and smaller. At the end of the five-cabinet-a-day production, there's parts everywhere. At the end of the 50-cabinet-a-day production, there wasn't a piece in the shop. Everyone thought we had nothing to do.
Matt (08:08):
Crazy.
Braid Cairns (08:09):
It was staggering.
Matt (08:09):
Nice.
Braid Cairns (08:11):
When you're not doing any of this stuff... 'cause so much of it is counterintuitive, so it doesn't make sense. Oh, I'm going to make things in smaller batches. I don't know, that doesn't make sense. Until you introduce reality into the equation, and then it does. Because humans are imperfect, so smaller batches catch mistakes faster.
Matt (08:30):
Very cool. The flip side of that, what were the early setbacks or the obstacles or the...
Braid Cairns (08:37):
There're still daily. There is no early setback. A good friend of mine, Jeff Koss, he says, "Waste is like gravity." He goes, "The day you stop pushing back is the day it takes over." There is no, today I'm on cruise control because we're lean now. Eh. There's no cruise control.
Matt (09:04):
Rosco just looked at you as if you were Eminem, dropping a sick bar right there. He literally put his hands on his head like this. "What?"
Braid Cairns (09:16):
There's no rest, there's no giving up. You let your foot off the gas for two seconds and it's over.
Matt (09:22):
Awesome. This is an impossible question, especially for a guy like you. Favorite improvement of all time? Anything that you still look back on with such deep satisfaction, you're like, whoa, that's the good stuff.
Braid Cairns (09:35):
I think I would have to say the progression of our businesses. Because we were doing woodworking and I set out to solve a problem for myself, which was sanding. I had 12 people sanding, and I'm like, this is the worst job in the world, come on. We thought, let's solve this problem for ourself, and so we sat out to build a robot to do it. The amount of R&D and... Forget about it. We financed our building again, I went all in on this thing.
Matt (10:14):
Wow.
Braid Cairns (10:15):
And when we were done, we're like, it works. There's no other machine like it in the industry because it's designed with lean in mind. Everyone's like, "Oh, why didn't you make a feed-through machine?" Because rule number one of manufacturing is, subordinate to the bottleneck. If your bottleneck's hand sanding, I don't need to sand a door, if that takes two minutes, I don't need to sand a door in 15 seconds, I have two minutes. We built a single-piece flow sanding robot, and when we saw it working, we're like, we should show someone this.
(10:49):
And we did. And now we have a machinery company called Stol-Bek Machines...
Matt (10:56):
Dude.
Braid Cairns (10:56):
... and we can't make the robots fast enough right now.
Matt (10:57):
That's unbelievable.
Braid Cairns (10:59):
It's just a progression of lean thinking and helping ourself, but then now we just solve the problem for an entire industry. The entire woodworking industry has this problem. And all of it based in just lean thinking, little baby steps along the way. Whether it was our micro improvements that helped us to come up with the ideas, you don't wake up and have the aha moments. It's like a flashlight in a dark room, you don't know, you can't see the other side until you take a step and you could see a little further and a little further.
(11:35):
The culmination of 15 years of lean thinking, this was our baby that came out. There's a 15-year process to get this. We're really proud of that.
Matt (11:47):
Awesome. We are newborn babies when it comes to lean. We are so, so early on. All of us are, man. I'm just really fascinated by the exponential, the compound nature of the improvements. It's almost frightening.
Braid Cairns (12:02):
It is.
Matt (12:03):
You're looking at this sand robot you've built, you're like, what have we created?
Braid Cairns (12:06):
If you look at the metrics of our companies, and probably collectively within this group, when we talk to people and we're like, "Yeah, I shut down my factory for an hour a day." Their jaw is... They're like, "What? That's impossible. That's one eighth of your day. How do you do it?" And I'm like, "How do you not?" Let's look at your metrics. Flat, flat, flat. Let's look at ours. Flat, sucked for about a month, and then you start picking up speed.
Matt (12:39):
Yeah, man.
Braid Cairns (12:39):
An hour a day, in a manufacturing facility where you make mistakes all day long, do you know how fast you lose an hour? Like that. You get rid of a few of those mistakes, you're hours back. Now you're developing your people.
Matt (12:51):
Love that.
Braid Cairns (12:53):
No. Forget about it. There's no.
Matt (12:56):
Super cool. For the skeptic or for the [inaudible 00:12:58] listeners maybe fallen off the bandwagon, they've had their butt, shall I say, kicked in the lean journey, what advice would you give to them, either startup or start going again?
Braid Cairns (13:10):
A startup would be literally, just do it. Quit reading. Just get up in the morning and just do it. Like babies, crawl, walk, run. Don't say, oh, Brad and Ryan say shut down for an hour. You'll go bankrupt in a week. Build things one at a time. Also bankrupt, less than a week. You can't do these things. Just start learning. Start implementing slowly, and get yourself convinced before you start.
(13:44):
One iota of doubt is like blood in the water for your people. And they'll wait it out, man. They will be patient. They'll be like, oh, it's another thing he saw on the weekend. It's going to go away if we just hang in there. There's no turning back. Convince yourself first. Get educated so you're a step ahead of your people. But just do it.
(14:10):
It's the exact same if it falls off the rails. What are you going to do? What's the option? Not do it. Those are your options. Do it or not do it. Five years ago, you got a different answer. I'm past the be nice and nah, nah, nah. There is no other way. There just isn't. You can bumble around like everybody else, or... How many Seating Matters videos do you have to watch before you're like, holy crap? Wow.
(14:41):
Go to the bookstore. There's, I don't know, 9,000 Toyoda books. Do all of the authors have it wrong, and just you are right? Probably not. But if you have a better way, we want hear it, maybe you're the next book.
Matt (14:58):
Teach us.
Braid Cairns (14:59):
But for now, like Michael... Do this with Michael, by the way. Get him.
Matt (15:05):
Yellotools?
Braid Cairns (15:06):
Yeah.
Matt (15:07):
Oh, yeah.
Braid Cairns (15:07):
Oh, yeah. He's...
Matt (15:07):
I mean, I'll grab him next. I'm excited.
Braid Cairns (15:09):
He's on another level, man. He says, "If you want to bake my cookies, come to Yellotools. We'll give you the recipe." And you go home and you bake Yellotools's cookies. But you'll find over time, a pinch more salt, a pinch more sugar, a pinch more... Make it your recipe over time, but in the beginning, just do...
(15:31):
I tell my people all the time, who else should we copy? Let's copy Toyota until they come here and ask us. Every time someone tells me they have a better inventory system than just kanban cards, I'm like, "Cool. If I call Toyota, are they going to be fascinated with your answer or do you think they're probably still going to use their kanban cards?" I got one answer for you.
(16:00):
Just do it. Just don't talk about it. Don't give up on it. Don't give up would be... It's like anything. Pick up a guitar.You think Jimi Hendrix just came out of the womb? No, took 20 years. And don't get discouraged, because we look at Michael and we look at Paul and Jeff Koss, Ryan, these guys have been doing it forever. Don't look at that and get frustrated your factory doesn't look like that in two weeks. Paul's been at it for 25 years, or 20 years or something. Spread that out and it becomes totally doable.
(16:40):
You're like, if we take four months to educate our staff before they can even go make an improvement, it seems like forever, when we could put a video up tomorrow and say, make improvements. But when you look at the overall timeline, slow down to speed up.
Matt (16:55):
Awesome. We did an interview recently and the guy said, "Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast."
Braid Cairns (17:01):
You always have to go slow to go fast.
Matt (17:03):
Always. I love that.
Braid Cairns (17:04):
I'll quote the Toyota Way, which is 90% of my vocabulary... Thank you, Jeff Liker... where he says, "In the early days they said Toyota won't be successful until every person in the organization is a tortoise. No hares."
Matt (17:22):
Brad, where can people find you?
Braid Cairns (17:25):
Do I want them to find me?
Matt (17:27):
That's your decision, really.
Braid Cairns (17:28):
Yeah, you could totally check us out. I mean, if you google Quantum Lean, quantum lean.ca, you find us there. If you jump on YouTube, we got a YouTube channel. You can find me on TikTok. I think I'm Lean Maniac on TikTok. That's probably about it. Use the ìntraweb, you'll catch up with me.
Matt (17:47):
You'll figure it out.
Braid Cairns (17:47):
Yeah.
Matt (17:48):
Dude, appreciate it.
Braid Cairns (17:48):
No problem.
Matt (17:49):
Killed it.
Braid Cairns (17:49):
Thank you.
Matt (17:50):
Really cool. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. And hey, lots more of these coming, so stick around. Really appreciate it. Thank you.