What Manufacturers Get Wrong About Supply Chain Risk With Phillip Gulley – RFP 66 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere (00:05): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Phillip Gulley. Phillip is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Cofactr, an end-to-end hardware supply chain risk management platform providing solutions for parts management, procurement, and storage for critical manufacturing. On the podcast, we discuss challenges in the logistics industry, onshoring and trade, and how Trump’s tariff war may shape commercial real estate markets. Phil, thank you for hopping on the podcast today.
Phillip Gulley (00:53): Pleasure to be here, Gordon. Pleasure to be here.
Wandering Into Supply Chain by Accident
Gordon Lamphere (00:56): One of the big topics we’ve been discussing on the podcast is trade. How did you get into the world of trade and logistics, and understanding how goods move around the world?
Phillip Gulley (01:13): Deeply accidentally. My background had absolutely nothing to do with what I’m doing today. I came from arts and technology and the overlap between them. You get a little too deep into it and start saying, “If I just made my own hardware, I could probably get much more reliable outcomes on the software side.” So my co-founder, Matthew, and I started working in hardware. You make a server, people ask if you can do IoT work, and fast-forward a couple of years, we’d worked with a lot of very large companies, been through an acquisition, and decided to take a pass at manufacturing. We didn’t know what that was going to be. You start ordering things and figuring out supply chain, realize you have to manage tariffs and temporary import bonds, and all of a sudden you’re just in it. As we’ve scaled and grown, we’ve become an organization that works with critical industries and manages a lot of the documentation needed for duty drawback. So this is where we’ve ended up living. It’s what we need to think about actively to solve problems for our customers. We wandered into this world very accidentally.
Why Electronics Are So Supply Chain Sensitive
Gordon Lamphere (02:30): Why are electronics in particular so sensitive to supply chain issues?
Phillip Gulley (02:36): There are some realities about how manufacturing is distributed globally. In critical industries, like aerospace, satellites, and infrastructure, you can’t use the same materials you put in a cell phone. That’s because of interference, and because of the amount of radiation and vibration something is exposed to. Many conditions can negatively affect a very technologically advanced component, and once you put it in space, it has a much harder time. So what you’re looking at is mature-node electronics, which refers to the density of the electronics’ underlying architecture. Over the last thirty years, most of the materials critical to building satellites, rockets, and infrastructure have been manufactured in China.
That’s of particular importance given what’s happening in global policy right now. Can you reliably build critical systems with a transparent, reliable supply chain? Those are huge concerns. Look at the drone ecosystem, or cellular modems and IoT. You’re seeing a lot of US manufacturers pop up that are really just licensing the hardware designs and firmware to take a Chinese product and stand it up in a Western market. Any change to your supply chain is a process change, and process change is a nightmare. When you’re dealing with commercial off-the-shelf materials, you’re dealing with distribution channels that obscure your relationship to the manufacturer.
It’s a really complex space, with many points of interaction on the way to an assembled system. Electronics specifically, as opposed to a custom piece of hardware you manufacture for a purpose, are a really fractured ecosystem, especially in critical industries where
Phillip Gulley (05:02): you need security around the components going into those systems. It’s top of mind for a lot of organizations, and it’s really scary, because if you can’t use the part you designed in and then certified and qualified with the US government, you can’t manufacture your product. And the financial consequences for a business hit with penalties for failing to deliver on a government contract are huge. So it’s a particularly sticky subject in manufacturing.
How Companies Are Responding: Design for Supply Chain
Gordon Lamphere (05:36): How does an organization handle all these shifts and manage its supply chain right now? I work with a lot of organizations. Many are less sophisticated, but some in the pharmaceutical space are very sophisticated, and not all of their precursors come from China, but most come from Asia in general. Overwhelmingly, the last ninety days have been kind of crazy.
Phillip Gulley: Yeah.
Gordon Lamphere: How does an organization handle this kind of rapid change, and are you finding productive ways to navigate these very turbulent waters?
Phillip Gulley (06:21): I’ve heard a lot of different approaches, depending on a company’s stage and scale. High-value, low-volume manufacturers are just shrugging it off. If you’re building a rocket, paying twice as much for the hardware ultimately isn’t what makes or breaks your ability to get to space. If you’re a med tech manufacturer with a lot of SKUs pumping many products into the market, I’ve heard, “We’ll absorb as much as we can, and if the market won’t bear it, we’ll stop making it.” That’s spooky when it comes to medical technology that might be life-critical. For the manufacturer, it’s just a product line they’re shutting down for a while, but what does it mean for the consumer, a US citizen who might rely on that hardware?
There are really significant challenges with tiered supply chains, which get a lot more opaque. If you’re building a very complicated system, like an airplane, there are millions of parts nested in assemblies and subassemblies, and you might never have needed visibility into that supply chain before, because it was really nice to get those processes off your books and into somebody else’s back office. That was lovely. Now I think we’re seeing a shift at the most responsible organizations. Instead of shrugging it off, or saying someone else will have to pay or they’ll stop making the product, they’re changing what they consider risk. I’m seeing obsolescence leaders become a lot more proactive about supply chain, thinking about the risk they’re absorbing in their tiered supply and wanting much more transparency.
Just as you’d say about an individual part, “I need to know whether it was made in Taiwan or China before I put it into a system,” we’re now seeing, “If I buy a box from you, I need to know what inside it comes from China, what has a long lead time, and what lacks quality documentation up to my standards.”
Phillip Gulley (08:46): This is a shift from “When will this part no longer be available?” to “Is it available, and should I be using it?” The definition of risk is expanding. Supply chain is now an obsolescence story, because if a part is still being manufactured but you can’t get it anymore, it’s effectively obsolete for your build. That’s an interesting philosophical shift.
It’s also highlighted within organizations with design engineering functions. Design for manufacturing didn’t used to be top of mind. Then a whole world of software and solutions emerged saying that the engineering function should think about manufacturing to some extent, with checks along the way as you work with your manufacturer. But design for supply chain is where we live, and it’s the philosophy we’re pushing forward. I think obsolescence leaders are starting to see that the engineering function isn’t just designing, or designing for manufacturing, but also designing for supply chain. So we’re seeing a lot more interplay between departments, and I think it will lead to more interplay between organizations. Even in a lower-volume industry, where you may not have the transparency Apple or Google has with their manufacturers, it will become more demanded and more expected, so you can assess your risk. Then, however the tides of policy or international trade go, you’ll at least understand your position and be able to pull those levers responsibly.
Assessing Risk in Tiered Supply Chains
Gordon Lamphere (10:30): How does one assess that risk and pull those levers responsibly? There are a lot of factors involved. I’m working with a biopharmaceutical company that makes precursors to a number of drugs used in the United States. When they looked at the supply chain for some of their chemicals, they quickly realized the problem wasn’t that one of their suppliers was in China. It was that one of their suppliers got its supplies from China, and they’re stuck right now, totally reevaluating their supply chain as a result. How can a company navigate that? It seems incredibly complex for even the sharpest mind to wrap their head around.
Phillip Gulley (11:21): It is. I hate to use a phrase like this, but it’s kind of shaking down the suppliers and saying, “I know we’ve had a bit of don’t-ask, don’t-tell about how we get these materials or assemblies, but that’s changing.” And it’s changing rapidly. One interesting question we’re exploring is how you avoid making this purely vendor communication. Is it a procurement function? An obsolescence or supply chain function? Who’s supposed to track this down?
We’ve been discussing how a buyer can understand risk while the supplier maintains its IP. If we can access a supplier’s designs and bills of material and index them against the broader industry database of supply data, can we highlight the points of risk the way you would internally? This part has a long lead time. This part may come from a source that isn’t approved for export control reasons, general political reasons, or safety. Can we surface that risk so a buyer understands, say, that six out of 1,004 parts carry risk, and what that risk is? Then can we work with the vendor to reduce the risk as much as possible, so the buyer can at least buy responsibly?
There are other issues, especially in complex systems. If you have a failure in the field, you lose forward and backward traceability without access to that data. So it’s an interesting model, and I know other startups and organizations are thinking about it too. How do you maintain a healthy relationship and protect intellectual property, while creating transparency around an error, issue, or point of risk in a tiered supply chain, so you can make better strategic decisions as an organization?
Phillip Gulley (13:42): Hand in hand with that, you need to make sure maintenance and repair can happen very quickly if there’s a failure. So it’s really about creating a digital thread that connects these tiers of supply in a way that doesn’t compromise anyone, and isn’t just endless phone calls and pressuring everyone for more data and another spreadsheet. There are some interesting experiments, models, and ideas going on right now. But from what I’ve seen, other than the largest, most scaled manufacturers, who have built this up internally over decades, it’s a bit of a Wild West right now.
Deterministic AI for Critical Supply Chains
Gordon Lamphere (14:19): Speaking of the Wild West, many people see technology as the solution, because the human mind can only follow so many threads. Even with everything down on paper, we can only monitor so many threads in real time. You have some solutions to this problem. What are you seeing as the most effective solutions in the market? Feel free to talk about your own and how you’re deploying it.
Phillip Gulley (14:57): We work in critical industries, so we’re on GovCloud and ITAR registered and compliant. We’re in a slightly different universe, in that our customer base is extremely data-sensitive. A lot of the documents we handle are export-controlled and have to be managed differently than they would be for a consumer good. What we’re doing is running lightweight AI clients on GovCloud to take in a lot of this data: managing emails, purchase orders, and invoices, tracking materials, and absorbing bills of material and design documents. Whenever we need to reach out to the broader internet ecosystem, whether through an LLM or an external API, we parse the data apart and obfuscate or hash out anything sensitive. Then we reabsorb the response in an anticipated JSON format, so there’s no possibility of code injection. There’s no risk and no exposure. That’s a very specific model: take what we know internally, compare it with what we know externally, and get the best outcomes from that.
But if you look at any company in the supply chain space right now, they’re pushing AI in a million different ways, depending on their risk profile and willingness to adopt new technology. In manufacturing and supply chain, you can’t have hallucination. That’s the big focus. It has to be deterministic. If you ask it the same question twice, you need the same answer both times, and it has to be accurate. That’s really what we’re focused on: leveraging new technology in a way that gives you 100 percent deterministic, successful outcomes, and automating as much of the redundant work as possible. You don’t need an inbox slammed with a thousand updates telling you your order is on time or that material arrived when expected. It’s about solving the direct,
Phillip Gulley (17:23): simple, mundane problems, and then flagging, “This is outside the norm. Something unexpected has happened.” I believe any good application is really about reliably solving the simple problems so the more complex, strategic issues rise to the surface without all the other noise. That’s how we think about it: don’t be big and fancy. Be practical, and let people focus on what matters.
What Supply Chain Shocks Mean for Industrial Real Estate
Gordon Lamphere (17:52): One practical thing that matters for probably 80 percent of our listeners is how the real estate world is reacting to these supply chain shocks. In the last 90 days, we’ve had more LOIs fall through without turning into purchase and sale agreements or leases than at probably any other time in my career. There’s a lot of instability, and people are looking for any indicator they can latch onto, whether they’re optimizing occupier decisions or investment decisions, particularly in industrial. What are you seeing, from your perspective on the ground, about how supply chains are or aren’t functioning?
Phillip Gulley (18:51): Again, our vantage point is specific. We work with a lot of economic development groups and with aerospace and defense, and that ecosystem is driven either by tight government contracts with an absolute requirement to deliver, or by a lot of venture capital. To be transparent, we’re not working with the incumbent A&D companies. We’re very much working with the up-and-comers, recent recipients of some of those larger grants, plus aerospace and robotics. In that space, the facilities being built are monumental, and the deals being signed are huge, in places like Texas and Ohio. Data centers and manufacturing are the space. It’s, “We’re buying a huge amount of land in Virginia, and we’re transforming a community.”
So I probably have a skewed view. There’s more linear growth, with paced risk aversion and people asking, “Am I making the right decision?” But a lot of our customers are pulling the trigger on big moves, and these are almost tidal forces. I’d be super interested to hear what you’re seeing and experiencing, because I’m sure it’s a different universe from the one I’m exposed to.
Gordon Lamphere (20:37): Generally, some of the higher-margin businesses really aren’t seeing much of a shock, particularly because we’re in a pause right now, and this podcast will go out before the pause ends. Second, the tariffs on countries other than China weren’t that big relative to the total cost of many products. As a result, most of the companies we work with that don’t source a large share of their product from China, even if it comes from other countries with relatively high tariffs, can manage it, and it’s just pushing prices up a little. For some very low-margin product from China, or from Mexico, there’s some turbulence. I think it’s caused people to delay decisions overall, but it hasn’t stopped the market. It isn’t like the first six months of COVID for office, when everything was in absolute free fall.
I’m curious whether you’ve run into supply chain issues on some of those large projects. For us, some of the issues were things we didn’t originally expect to be big. For example, paper and wood products from Canada have been a huge issue for many of our suppliers, particularly in packaging. What are you seeing from larger players building out facilities, or working in robotics or highly sensitive areas where there may not be many alternative supply chains?
Phillip Gulley (22:40): I’ll use a customer we were supporting as an example. There’s been a lot of unexpected behavior, because our national stance has fluctuated. Regardless of your political beliefs or background, the last few months have certainly seen a lot of variation in how we approach trade.
Gordon Lamphere (23:08): That’s pretty fair.
Phillip Gulley (23:09): Meanwhile, other nations have basically said, “We have our policy, and we’ll keep our policy.” And there have been some not-great outcomes. Chinese steel, I think, is getting more subsidized by the Chinese state right now. If you’re making robotics and need a large chassis, China is still incredibly competitive, even with fluctuating tariffs, because it can subsidize its own steel costs and keep knocking prices down. China has done such a great job building up manufacturing ecosystems that its quotes still come in really, really competitive.
What we’re seeing, at least in higher-value assemblies, is a desire to nearshore or onshore those processes, so policy changes don’t upend your unit economics. That’s especially true in robotics-as-a-service models, where your product is in the field and there’s a period to recoup its value before you reach profitability. If your unit costs rise by twenty-five percent, that could kill your bottom line and eliminate the feasibility of your business model.
So there’s a lot of hunger to shore up supply chains, bring them into the United States, reliably build infrastructure, and use domestic infrastructure. But China can keep undercutting costs. And there are some unnerving trends in consumer goods, where you’ve seen tariff exceptions for some consumer electronics. Previously, at least some of that manufacturing was done domestically, supporting manufacturing facilities and growing teams. If you look at the R&D departments of some of the larger tech giants, the trend seems to be that the more appealing option is to push everything,
Phillip Gulley (25:32): design, quality, test, and new product introduction through production, entirely to Asian markets, because the unpredictability of the unit economics makes even early design processes untenable domestically. So there are a lot of challenges. There’s a lot of interest in, and a desire for, a more resilient onshore manufacturing ecosystem to normalize some of those costs. But there’s so much manufacturing capacity in Taiwan, South Korea, China, and Japan that it’s really difficult, from a bottom-line business standpoint, to move away from those environments.
Nearshoring to Mexico, and Canada’s Legacy
Gordon Lamphere (26:19): In many of our conversations with occupiers, one of the saddest aspects of the Trump policy is that we’d started to see substantial nearshoring, not necessarily to the United States, but a lot to Mexico. We’re in the Chicago and Wisconsin area, covering Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois, and there’s a strong railroad network running up through the Midwest into Chicago. So Mexico was a very desirable place for some of the lower-skilled labor, with products mainly finished in the United States. With this transition, that process has increasingly gone on pause in Mexico, and therefore in the United States as well. How have you seen the tariffs affect nearshoring generally, across your portfolio of clients?
Phillip Gulley (27:25): Nearshoring also feels risky now, which is a bummer, especially with Mexico. Over the last decade, we’ve made a huge infrastructure investment in Mexico, and those facilities are often run by US citizens living there. Creating an adversarial relationship means putting at risk more than a decade of investment, time, and strategy in figuring out how to build and compete in that economy and what good investments look like.
You see almost the inverse in Canada. A lot of that infrastructure has been there for decades. It started with companies like GE building infrastructure in Canada and eventually turning it over to Canadian companies to run. So there’s a generational challenge: maybe your grandfather worked in Canada and your grandson works in Mexico, and you think, “This is a beautiful manufacturing ecosystem we’ve built over decades to create a more resilient North American economy.” Now both are risks and potentially adversarial relationships.
It’s tragic, because those decades have been spent, and you can’t just shift that. You can’t magically make manufacturing or sourcing appear out of nothing. We’ll now have to spend decades of effort within US borders just to reach parity with what we’ve historically invested. It’s a really challenging environment. There are tools like duty drawback that let you manage it, so at least you pay tariffs only once on the initial product, which can soften some of the international trade impact, but it’s still challenging.
How Duty Drawback Works
Gordon Lamphere (29:40): Can you dive into how duty drawback works for listeners who might not fully understand it?
Phillip Gulley (29:47): Sure. Say I buy something from Taiwan, it lands in the United States, I ship it to Mexico, they build a subassembly there, and they ship it back to the United States. There are a couple of points where tariffs would be paid as things move across borders. When something is consumed or destroyed in the manufacturing process, meaning it has become part of another assembly, you should be able to recover some of the tariffs paid, so you effectively pay the tariff once instead of repeatedly. To make that work, you need very meticulous documentation of the materials, where they’ve gone, and what’s been done with them. We built a digital platform for that, so we have the documentation, but it’s a super challenging thing to do.
So there’s some sensationalism when someone says a car will cost five times as much because of tariffs on materials moving between Mexico, the US, and Canada. Organizations have opportunities to get those dollars back, but the documentation is very challenging. You have to file the paperwork with the United States to recover the money, and you still have to pay the tariffs up front to get the materials released from customs. So it’s a big capital expense, and it makes you less liquid. But there are at least methods to manage it. Again, it’s a back-office process. Who manages the paperwork? Do you have the infrastructure in place, or do you use a broker? It’s all process change, and it’s super difficult.
Managing Risk in the “New Normal”
Gordon Lamphere (31:38): Speaking of process change, before we wrap up, I’d like to talk about this, and I hate using the term, but it’s so effective, “new normal.”
Phillip Gulley (31:51): Whatever, whatever.
Gordon Lamphere (31:53): Whatever. It’s such a silly phrase. But what’s the best way for a business to manage the risk inherent in this new age of trade? Are there geopolitical lessons we can learn about how to behave as someone bringing goods into the country, or are we just rolling the dice?
Phillip Gulley (32:27): This isn’t new. We say, “My God, what’s happening to the whole world’s supply chain? It’s nightmarish.” It’s been about nine minutes since COVID and our last horrible supply chain environment.
Gordon Lamphere (32:41): A new new normal.
Phillip Gulley (32:43): Right. When VCRs got super popular, they stripped a bunch of electronic components from the market, and all of a sudden we were in a supply chain nightmare because VCRs were hot.
Phillip Gulley (32:54): There have been so many iterations of this. The lesson we have to take is that it’s really appealing to pass responsibility for your supply chain to a tiered vendor, and to say, “I’ve got my vendor, and my job is to beat them up on price, and if quality drops, I’ll yell at them to get it back up.” Supply and procurement are processes that have to be continuously improved. That means continuous improvement, diversifying your supplier base, and understanding your risk. It’s the same way people handle critical inventory: you don’t put it all in one building, because if that building burns down, you’re completely out of luck. There’s no ramping back up.
We’ve seen relationships with major electronics manufacturing service providers, big companies, where an OEM hands off its box build: “You’ll build my product.” That’s great, until demand fluctuates, the OEM’s volume falls off a bit, and the EMS provider says, “You’re not a great customer anymore. We’re firing you.” Now the OEM’s entire supply chain, its entire process and ability to deliver product, is in the hands of one organization that decided it doesn’t want to play nice anymore. I think that scary possibility is where we’ve pushed ourselves as a nation over the last three decades: “We’re a services country. We’re the thinkers, not the doers. Pass it off to somebody else. If I only have to call one person and say, ‘A thousand, please,’ and they send me a thousand, that’s great.” That’s just not a healthy way to do business or manage risk.
So I think it’s about continuously evaluating your supply chain, multi-sourcing, regular check-ins, and distributing your supply chain, recognizing that you can’t source only from Europe, only from Mexico, only from China, or only from the US. You need optionality across the board. You can already see this
Phillip Gulley (35:21): in avionics. If you look at what goes into an airplane, a lot of manufacturers have diversified where they actually manufacture subassemblies, and I think every company has to start thinking more like that. You can’t just find your one or five vendors, rely on them, and say, “That’s it. Fewer points of failure is good.” You need to pivot your thinking: “I need more of a network, more optionality, and continuous communication, whether through technology or directly, about the risks of these vendors.”
Gordon Lamphere (36:02): A chemical company I’m working with in the transportation industry, both aviation and ground transportation, is doing exactly that. They had one site and are now going to three, simply because of the market. As a relatively critical chemical company, they don’t feel safe, because if a lab blows up somewhere, they’re done.
The Final Four: More Transparency and Traceability
We don’t want to blow up this interview, but we’d like to go into our final four. It’s always a fun wrap-up and a way to learn more about you and where you think trade, logistics, and procurement are going. The first question we always ask, so let’s put on our Nostradamus hat: where is the future of trade, logistics, and manufacturing going over the next ten years?
Phillip Gulley (37:14): I think it’s what we’ve been hinting at the whole time: more transparency, more collaboration, and more optionality. What will come to the forefront of a lot of people’s minds is, “If something goes wrong, how and why? What happened?” We’re not going to have less complex supply chains or less tiered manufacturing. Specialization exists for a really good reason. If you’re building a drone, you shouldn’t necessarily have a five-axis CNC machine cutting up a bunch of steel or aluminum. That doesn’t make sense. So I think it will be more connectivity, more data moving between organizations, more automation, and more linkage. That includes the provenance of materials, quality documentation, and test documentation.
We’re already looking at models for supplier discovery. If you’re a smaller company that has lost a vendor because of trade issues, there’s a follow-the-leader approach: “Who’s already working with companies I respect? I want to track them down.” Today, if you ask supply chain leaders, it’s, “I’ve got a great guy in Taiwan.” That information has to become more readily available. Everyone will always have personal relationships, but understanding why a vendor delivers quality, what its processes are, knowing it will be transparent, open, and honest with you, and understanding its risk profile all lead to a more interconnected manufacturing and supply chain industry. If something goes wrong, you’ll have forward and backward traceability, understand the financial implications, and understand the risk before you build, so you can execute in a much more elegant and successful way.
Advice for Young Professionals: Treat Everything as a Product
Gordon Lamphere (39:36): I think transparency is great, and hopefully it’s the future. Now that we’ve gone to the future, let’s take a step back in time. A lot of our listeners are in the first ten years of their careers. If you could give yourself one piece of advice at the start of your career, even a short one, what would it be?
Phillip Gulley (40:09): Everything you do is a product. Whatever you’re doing, think of it as a product and try to make it one. I did a lot of really interesting projects that I thought were great fun, and a few years later I realized that’s what engineers get paid to do, and that almost everything I’d done could probably have been a product with about eight percent more effort. So when you jump in and try something, it may be interesting, fun, engaging, and new, but is it repeatable? Can you repeat that motion or that offering? Can you scale it and provide it to more people? I wish someone had clued me in on that a little earlier.
Book Recommendations: Finite and Infinite Games, Rules of Play, and Radical Candor
Gordon Lamphere (40:57): Developing systems is definitely the key to scaling and growing. Another way we like to grow is by seeing what people in the arena are reading. If you’re a reader, is there a book you’d recommend to our audience?
Phillip Gulley (41:19): Totally. Two of them are funky, and one is incredibly obvious.
Gordon Lamphere (41:24): That’s totally fine. We can get funky here.
Phillip Gulley (41:27): Okay. There’s a great book called Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. It starts off very simply, with the idea that play is a choice and no one can be forced to play, and then it evolves in a very unexpected direction. It tears apart ideas about how you engage with games, how you play games in your life, and what that means for society. It’s a really interesting take on how we interact with each other, how we overcome challenges, and the personal and moral implications of that. It really doesn’t end the way it starts, and it’s totally worth the ride.
Rules of Play is another one. It’s technically a textbook, but it’s just interesting. It breaks down the concepts of engagement and how you work with someone. It’s game theory, but what isn’t game theory? It’s big stuff. We’re all playing with each other, and we’re all choosing to show up every day.
Gordon Lamphere (42:37): Yeah.
Phillip Gulley (42:47): So Rules of Play is another really interesting one that breaks down a lot of useful concepts. That leads into the much more expected pick, a book I think everyone should read: Radical Candor by Kim Scott. It’s really easy to have communication that seems successful but is slightly unhealthy, maybe too sympathetic or too soft. It’s hard to be really honest and direct, and especially hard to build a culture around you that’s honest and direct and can separate expected outcomes from emotions. Radical Candor is a great book to read with a team as you build a culture and shape how you interact with the world. Directness without cruelty is a really valuable and important thing.
Who Should Be Our Next Guest? Economic Development Groups
Gordon Lamphere (43:47): I’ll be direct and practice some radical candor here. Beyond all your knowledge, the whole reason for this podcast, and for having you on today, is that we value it as a way to get recommendations for other intelligent, thoughtful men and women in the arena. Who’s the next person we should have on the podcast?
Phillip Gulley (44:12): This is more of a general direction, but I swear, economic development groups are the ones. They’re on the ground floor. They’re talking to companies that are moving and building facilities, and they understand the ecosystems they operate in. We’re talking to Team NEO in Northeast Ohio. They’re super smart, grounded, relatable people, connected to the community, but they’re building infrastructure, they know what it takes on the ground to get it done, and they’re talking to some of the biggest companies in the country and the world about whether they want to build there. If you knocked on doors in Virginia, Ohio, or Texas, those are environments where a lot is going on. It’s exciting and highly cost-competitive compared with other manufacturing hubs, like the Northeast or Silicon Valley. So those are the doors I’d knock on to ask, “What’s going to be happening in two, five, or ten years?”
How to Reach Phillip Gulley
Gordon Lamphere (45:19): I think that’s great advice. There’s one final question: if somebody wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way to get in contact?
Phillip Gulley (45:27): Our website, cofactr.com, that’s C-O-F-A-C-T-R dot com, is a great way. You can also email me directly at [email protected], or find me on LinkedIn as Phillip Gulley, G-U-L-L-E-Y. Those are all wonderful ways for us to start chatting.
Gordon Lamphere (45:54): Phil, thank you so much. I really appreciate it, and we have to have you on in the future.
Phillip Gulley (45:58): This was a pleasure. Thank you so much, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere (46:00): Thanks again to Phillip. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to bring on quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with The Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
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