Jared Stearns: Hands-On Experiences Can Help You Find Your Passions
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Intro:
Today our guest is Jared Stearns, Sales Manager for Encoder Products, a supplier to multiple industries, including elevators.
Jared started his technical training, as a helper to his father, repairing tractors and other farm equipment in Eastern Connecticut.
After some time in the military and a close brush with School Teaching, Jared became a technician working on Servo Motors, which paved the way for his current position..
Jared credits much of his success to getting hands-on experience and is a big proponent of doing what you love.
Summary:
Jared Stearns, Sales Manager for Encoder Products, discusses his career path from a high school biology teacher to a technician at Servo Tech, where he gained hands-on experience with servo motors. He transitioned to sales, leveraging his technical background to solve complex problems. Stearns highlights the importance of practical experience over theoretical knowledge, especially in the elevator industry. He explains the role of encoders in measuring speed and position, emphasizing their critical role in safety-critical applications. Stearns also discusses the future of encoder technology, including reflective technology for improved reliability.
Transcript:
Jared Stearns 0:00
But I will tell you, I know a lot of successful people, and there’s a lot of opportunity, particularly if you live in the Rust Belt, if you live in anywhere in New England, in New Jersey, New York areas that have a large legacy industrial base. You know the best engineers I meet in the field, they’re typically running the teams. Are typically engineering managers. By the way, you know, for the most part, you get a degree in engineering, you’re an engineer, right? But to be an engineering manager, you got to prove you know how to lead people and solve problems, and you don’t learn that at college. And a lot of engineering managers I’ve met came from backgrounds where they started doing something with their hands, having that real world application.
Matthew Allred 0:41
Hello and welcome to the Elevator Careers Podcast sponsored by the Allred group. I am your host, Matt Allred in this podcast, we talk to the people whose lives and careers are dedicated to the vertical transportation industry to inform and share lessons learned, building upon the foundation of those who have gone before to inspire the next generation of elevator careers. Today, our guest is Jared Stearns, Sales Manager for encoder products, a supplier to multiple industries, including elevators. Jared started his technical training as a helper to his father repairing tractors and other farm equipment in Eastern Connecticut after some time in the military and a close rush with school teaching, Jared became a technician working on servo motors, which paved the way for his current position. Jared credits much of his success to getting hands on experience, and is a big proponent of doing what you love.
Jared, welcome to the show.
Jared Stearns 1:38
Thanks for having me.
Matthew Allred 1:39
Thank you. I’m excited. It’s always a pleasure, and looking forward to talking with you again. And I’m always there’s always something I’m learning, and I hope our listeners can learn something as well. But tell me a little bit about your early career path and what. What would you say? Excited you most right out of high school.
Jared Stearns 2:00
Well, it wasn’t elevators. That’s who you’re getting at for no other reason than I just knew no better. You know, grew up on a with a dairy farming family in the the woods of Eastern Connecticut, and I just always loved the study of life. So in high school, I wanted to, I left high school, wanted to go to college to be a high school biology teacher and nice, and that’s where it all started. But I did four years of that, and got my teaching certificate and diploma, and I did that for about six months, and I love teachers. They’re amazing human beings. Because I was bartending and waiting tables to pay for college at the time. And I talked to one of my fellow teachers and said, hey, you know, after all the fees and taxes and things, what do you make as a teacher? Whoa, you know, I made more down on Thursday at the restaurant. So that was the end of my teaching career, right? You know? And quickly said, oh, boy, I got to do something different. What do I do with this degree in biology? You know, I’d always worked with my hands. My father taught me at a young age that hard work doesn’t make you rich, it just makes you tired. So he did not milk cows. He fixed the farmers tractors. So I spent most of my childhood driving around in a pickup truck with a toolbox on the back, handing my dad wrenches and socket drivers as he fixed, you know, this ih tractor here, John Deere tractor there. So I was always good with my hands, and always, you know, my favorite part of college was actually physics, learning the right hand rule, bird and homes law and all this. So I just applied that, and I got into a small company called servo tech, which, at the time was in Adam, Connecticut. Now they’ve grown a lot in there in Middletown, Connecticut. And the owner there taught me, taught me more than anybody else, about how to be in business and about working on electro mechanical equipment. So I spent 14 years there, left as a general manager, and, you know, got a really strong background in robotics, specifically with servo motors and their related encoders. And we brought on three vendors that we were selling and purchasing encoders from, and one of those was encoder products. So after I left servo tech. It was to go try my hand at sales and to become an outside sales person and run a region of the country for encoder products.
Matthew Allred 2:54
So you were, you were essentially, was it more of a technician? Then in your first career?
Jared Stearns 4:30
Absolutely. Yeah. I started there as a technician, and then I ran the AC servo motor shop. We called it. And then, then I ran the whole shop as we grew, you know, I was employee number two or three in a little one bay garage with a, you know, a car garage door on it. Now, I think they have a 20 something 1000 square foot building. And, you know, there was a dozen or a dozen and a half employees there. So. So the end of my tenure, I was running the day to day operations for the company, which was a lot of fun, still small, right?
Matthew Allred 5:07
Yeah, yeah. So in coder products became one of your vendors. How did you actually make the switch, if you will?
Jared Stearns 5:16
Well, a couple years into working for servo tech, you know, it’s always fun. I would call them very much a startup. The owner was very practical, and still is very pragmatic, but also very good at estimating risk. And he took a lot of risk, but he took risk very smartly. So it’s always fun to be in that environment where you get to do cool new things. And the servo motor world is very secretive. Most of these motors are built in Europe or Japan.
Matthew Allred 5:46
Secretive. That’s an interesting term. Like, top secret or no?
Jared Stearns 5:52
No, not top secret, but secretive in a way, where which kind of like cars are. Now you download a data sheet for a motor, it’s not going to tell you what’s inside of it. So if you’re in the business of rebuilding servo motors, you’re not going to find a manual you’re not going to go to NAPA Auto Parts and get the guide of what the torque specs are for each bolt on that motor. You got to figure it out as you go. You reverse engineering. And you know, there’s a lot of the school Hard Knocks in this type of thing. But we start investigating encoder companies, because that’s a major component in a servo motor, is the feedback device. That’s what makes it a servo motor right closes the loop with the control. And we found some major brands of encoder manufacturers that would work with us once they saw what we were capable of. And we actually became factory authorized for some brands that had never authorized anybody before and for in the repair world anyway, for commissioning their encoders and installing them in motors and encoder products, was one of those I had become good friends with the outside regional sales manager Bill Faison, who’s retired now, wonderful man. Still go to see him in North Carolina, and he, when he retired, they asked me to take his role. And sales has always interested me. I got a big mouth, and I love to run it. And you know, storytelling is half of sales, after all. So I jumped at the opportunity, you know, and I still work. In fact, that ServoTech is one of my customers. Very fond memories, and I still work with them
Matthew Allred 7:23
Right on. That’s cool. How did being in being a technician essentially prepare you for your sales role?
Jared Stearns 7:31
Oh, my God. And I’m not the only employee of server tech to say this. I you know, towards the end, I was hiring our our entry level technicians to train. Well, nobody goes to Tech High School or even college to learn how to rebuild servo motors. And you know you have in Connecticut anyway, in the Tech High School program, you have automotive departments. And you know kids who go to school to learn how to repair cars, you have electrical to be residential or maybe commercial electricians, and you have carpentry, and we would hire kids out of automotive or out of residential electrical, because they understand how to use tools, you know, they could read an ohm meter, and that’s, that’s pretty important. And some of these kids now, I have kids that are not kids anymore, you know, they’re adults with families, and they’re working in top secret applications, designing, you know, defense related projects, and it’s because what they learn there. So my hands on technician time at servo tech, just like theirs, was invaluable. You’ve got a lot of of candidates being interviewed for sales engineers, roles, for example, who have all the knowledge, but they have no wisdom. You know, they so when they approach a problem, when you when you visit a customer site, and they have a problem, they’re trying to overcome, you can only apply what you’ve already been taught. You haven’t had to think on your feet and develop a new solution. So invaluable, for sure
Matthew Allred 8:55
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it sounds like that, you know, there’s a lot of knowledge that is not being taught. So you know, unless you’re learning about the job, unless you know you bring so back to your teaching career. It sounds like you, you are in a teaching career. It’s just not public schools, right?
Jared Stearns 9:13
Yeah, I do enjoy teaching. And that’s one of my you know, this role I have now as sales manager. That’s one of my favorite parts, is, is helping my guys, you know, improve.
Matthew Allred 9:26
Yeah, yeah. Very much. A teacher, obviously, not biology, per se, but no, it’s still definitely a teaching profession. And especially if someone maybe doesn’t have the technical background, maybe you’re hiring a salesperson and they don’t have as much technical you’re probably digging into the technical to help them understand the whys and wherefores of what they’re trying to sell.
Jared Stearns 9:48
Exactly, right? Yeah, definitely. You know, in the biology aspect, actually comes into play more than I thought it was, you know, because of the amount of medical device that we get into. And I had no medical training, you know. It was just a biology degree, but somebody comes in, oh, we’re working on this machine that does PCR reactions. You say, Oh, polymerase chain reaction. Are you doing genetic type work? And that’s a very basic thing, but only if you’re in that that world a little bit. So sure that always helps me as a salesperson look a little little smarter than maybe I am.
Matthew Allred 10:19
Right, right, right. So, tell us a little bit about, like, the, you know, the encoders, right? Obviously, that’s, that’s what you’re doing now, kind of on top of servo, and I’m not, you know, super technical and, you know, but, how does that work? And what’s, what’s the application for elevators, for example, or, you know, I have no idea how it would work in a in a medical device, thing either
Jared Stearns 10:44
Gotcha. So encoder products specifically focuses on rotary encoders. And when most people use the term loosely encoder, they’re typically referring to a rotary encoder versus something linear, like a scale that you would put a scale on something to measure. So sticking to rotary encoders. They’re a device that used to measure speed or position or angle, which would be another form of of position. And they’re really elegant in their simplicity. We’ve all kind of made them already. If, as a kid you threw a playing card in the spokes of your bike tire, you kind of made an encoder if you, if you could actually listen and count the clicks of every time your card hit the spoke and you knew you had 60 spokes on your your wheel? Well, hey, I heard my card flick 60 times. I’ve done a full revolution taking out a beat there. That’s exactly it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s a good way to put it. That’s all we sell. So I sound much smarter than I, than I am many times, because it’s in robots, right? It’s used for extreme positioning. And you see these very complex automated systems screaming, screaming around, making products, elevators, you know, moving around, positioning themselves very accurately. And they think that must be a really technical product. It’s a disc shining a light through it, and there’s lines in the disk, and you interrupt the light, and you’re counting those interruptions. And now you can have all these boards that give you all these protocols. Well, I need my encoder to speak can because I’m putting it in a truck and all the vehicles operate on a CAN bus. Or I needed to speak ether cap because I’m working with a system that takes that protocol. Or I need an SSI protocol, and that is very big in the elevator industry, as a matter of fact. And I need my encoder to begin that. Well, that’s just a communications board of the language protocol, okay, but the guts of it are all the same. It’s a disc that spins with lines on you count the lines. It’s pretty cool.
Matthew Allred 12:34
That’s it’s almost like, you know, human beings with different languages, you know, sounds like your product can speak different languages, but you boil it all down, it’s the same
Jared Stearns 12:43
You know. I wish that was true. Unfortunately, they’ve made it so that you can trademark your language. So there are languages we’re not allowed to speak, but for the most part, absolutely true, Yep, yeah, but they’re all giving the same information, you know, and in elevators, it’s probably worth mentioning. There are two flavors, and the flavor I told you about is an incremental and I won’t get too much into the weeds, but there are two. There’s vanilla and chocolate with encoders, and that’s it. The first one is incremental, where you’re just counting those ticks, if you will, you’re interrupting the light and counting, hey, I I counted six to 860 lines. I did a turn, or I counted so many lines over a second, and I can guesstimate, well, every line is an inch, and I count a 10 over a second, I’m moving 10 inches a second, that kind of thing. So that’s your speed, right? And in an elevator, you would use an incremental encoder for the most part, because you’re just looking what is the speed of the car. But there are non rotary and now starting to see more rotary encoders that are used for position. And the difference with that is it’s more like your watch. So the disc on the encoder has a unique code, okay, kind of like our watch is 1234, right to 1212, time it is sure, sure, exactly. So you can look at your wrist watch, and if you have an analog watch, and you can see what time it is, you didn’t have to watch it move to there an incremental encoder. You have to listen and catch every count. Or you don’t know where you are. They’re all the same, all the pulses. So an absolute encoder, it spits out a word value that tells you where it is. You could stop listening to it. You could unplug it, turn it, plug it back in, and it’s going to tell you, still where it is in a position. Some elevator applications require knowing the position of something, not just the speed, and that’s when you use that encoder, yeah, maybe more than you wanted
Matthew Allred 14:26
No, it’s fascinating. I mean, I, you know, I haven’t ever worked on an elevator inside the shaft or any of that, but, but I’m always fascinated to just, I guess, in my mind, and envision how it works. You know, seeing pictures, some some videos, or whatever. But it is always intriguing to just wonder, like, how does it know where to stop, right? How does it know, you know, the next floor, I assume they’re the, you know, a consistent height, but, but I know that’s not true, because a lot of times the ground floor of a big building, you know, they’ve got a higher ceiling or something, so being able to dial in those location sounds like that’s exactly what your product is, is helping do
Jared Stearns 15:04
Correct when it’s a rotary encoder, there are elevators that use, like, tape readers where they actually put, you know, like, basically a roll of tape with unique code all the way up, kind of like reading just a very long barcode.
Matthew Allred 15:16
I was gonna say it sounds like a tape measure that they’ve they’ve pulled out and just kind of slapped, oh, we’re at eight feet two inches. That’s where we need to be
Jared Stearns 15:24
Exactly, right? But that’s a long piece of tape to install, you know? So there’s pluses and minuses, but that’s another way that they position a car in a shaft.
Matthew Allred 15:33
That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. What? What? What do you love most about the your role, your company, what you’re doing now?
Jared Stearns 15:42
Well, I’ve got a new role as of June or last year as sales manager. So now I’m covering the northeast, southeast and Midwest, which gets me into more industries than I used to be in when I covered just the northeast, which was Maine down in Virginia, over to Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and doing that a lot more exposure to the elevator industry, for example. So you know, my favorite part of the role, probably from that upbringing fixing engines, is I love getting into the nitty gritty. I love seeing a solution that others gave up on a problem, I mean, that others gave up on and trying to find a solution to that, you know, the elevator industry, some of the unique features, yeah, I can make it seem the encoders are simple, and what they do is, you know, elegantly simple, but they can’t fail. Nobody wants to be in an elevator if the encoder fails, right? No. So there’s a lot with the mechanical mounting of an encoder. Maybe there’s redundancy of signals. Maybe there’s two sensor heads. There’s a lot of different ways to solve the same problem, depending on who’s designing it and what features are looking for. But elevators are one of the industries that I take a lot of pride in. Of course, I love packaging and boxing and gluing as well, but elevators are important. And, you know, it’s, it’s a serious industry in that it’s not tolerant to mistakes. You know, so many from packaging calls. We, oh, we had a run of hot dogs go bad because the sealer was sealing too early. Alright. Well, we lost some hot dogs. But, you know, the elevator industry, it’s much more, requires much more consideration.
Matthew Allred 17:22
Oh, absolutely, I’m sure you’ve got some, yeah, redundancies, and just making sure that you’re not losing position or track of speed, or obviously you got, you know, people’s lives, people’s you know, loved ones, right? Everybody you know you’re right. It’s a bigger, bigger deal.
Jared Stearns 17:40
Yeah, it’s something we take pride in. We’re we’re very unique versus our competitors, and that we’re much smaller. Most of our competitors. Encoders, are just one product line, and they have many others, vision systems and all sorts of things, right? Things you wouldn’t even expect to be related. All we do is rotary and probably 60 to 65% last I looked at, what we do is custom. So we aren’t selling parts out of a catalog, you know, not not vacuum cleaner sales people, I guess you’d say, Yeah, most of what we do requires us to go in and come up with a custom solution, and because we build everything in house, not to make a sales pitch out of this. But it’s what makes us different. We’re machining the parts. We’re populating the PCBs and everything, we can really offer unique solutions without breaking the bank. And that’s where we excel, in the elevator industry.
Matthew Allred 18:30
That’s fascinating. I mean, part of my brain is wondering, Well, why would everything need to be custom? Right? Is there not a way to to that? 90% of them are probably the same, and you can just buy vanilla. Or does it need to be custom every time?
Jared Stearns 18:47
Yeah, not every time. It depends who we’re working with. We’ll do elevators for large contracting companies that do repairs and they’re trying to replace encoders that were manufactured by companies 20 years ago. And I’ll use the name DRC did a lot in elevators. And I’ll use their name because they don’t exist anymore, okay, so you can’t find, so this is like an A mod, right? They’re looking for something exactly, right? Okay, exactly. But there’s a lot of those elevators out there, and if they can’t find an encoder to fit that unique, you know, mechanical mounting, whether it be inside of a pulley or a shiv or on the back of a motor that was designed. Then they’re not going to want to replace that large motor, because they can’t get an encoder that mounts correctly. So there’s a lot in the mod industry, in the OEM side of things, you know, obviously we have a major manufacturer. I’m in Connecticut, right up in my state. And you know, an encoder is a sensor, just like a proximity sensor. It is. You don’t choose your encoder and design around it. Generally, you choose your motor, and you’ve got constraints of where you’re installing this thing, but you choose your motor and your gear box and your major components like that, and then you pick your encoders to fit. But hey, so. Sometimes you end up with a motor that’s the right size. It’s everything you need, but you’ve only got a two inch clearance between the motor and the back wall or something, and you need that encoder to have a low enough profile. Interesting. We get asked a lot to fit the encoder within the the inner diameter of an electromagnetic break. And there’s constraints and temperature considerations and a lot to go with that. So, yeah, it’s, it’s very much required. And I think the biggest reason because they, they choose us last, we gotta fit in whatever. You gotta make it work, right, right, which is good. I don’t want it to choose encoders first, because then they’ll buy something off the shelf, right, right? And there’s a lot of people selling encoders off the shelf
Matthew Allred 20:40
Right, right, right. Well, and you talked a little bit about, you know, solving unique problems. And, you know, sounds like there’s obviously a lot of opportunities for creativity and thinking outside the box. And I guess, along with that, what you know, as you, as you look forward, you know, what are some of the, I guess, the things that you’re seeing, Oh, hey, this could change the encoder industry is certain. Are there? Are there certain technologies that that usually look ahead, like, wow, that would be different?
Jared Stearns 21:08
Yeah, I think so there, you know, for example, encoder, optical, encoders, which is what we make. The majority of what we make is optical. So you have a glass disc that you’re shining light through. And there are other technologies out there now that haven’t existed for as long you know, whether that be capacitive, inductive, magnetic, all different ways to accomplish the same thing. Get pulses in a circle, but most of those are not anywhere near as accurate. So if you’re purchasing an encoder where accuracy is a consideration, and we’re talking orders of magnitude, typically less accurate for these technologies, so I don’t consider them game changing as much as their new solutions for the lower commodity. And maybe you’re building a vending machine, you don’t really care how accurate the claw is to get the kids toy outright or something like this. But there’s some new technologies. One of them is reflective technology, which we offer now, and that technology allows the sensor and the the LED to be on the same side of the disc, because before you had an LED shining let up through, and your disc is going by, and then you just sensor on the other side. So now you got a PCB on each side of the disc, and generally speaking, there’s an air gap in there that’s very thin. We’re talking, you know, a 1,000th of an inch, or somewhere thereabouts between the read head and the disc. So one of the common failure points for encoders, including in the elevator industry, when you when you’re running on large motors that expand and contract a lot when they warm up and cool down, is disc crashing where the disc actually contacts the sensor head. And as soon as it does, it wipes the lines off the disc. And that’s that is a problem inherent in that design, in general, with any manufacturers encoder this new reflective technology, which is really neat. It shines a light at an angle onto the disk and then bounces back up to to a sensor, and it allows for much larger air gaps, you know, tens of 1000s or larger. So we basically have completely eliminated the potential of a disc crash with this technology. So I see that. I see that really being implemented wide once you see the technology out there for a while and people begin to trust it is, you know, as if you’re an OEM of elevators and you’re looking at common failure modes, you can, like, cross that common failure mode off your list. It’s not going to happen again. I think that’s awesome.
Matthew Allred 23:44
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, what happens if a you get one of those disc crashes? I mean, if you’re maybe riding the elevator and all of a sudden that that comes, does it? Does it stop? Does it plummet? Does it blow up?
Jared Stearns 23:54
Yeah, that’s a good question. Everybody should worry about that for the rest of their life when they get in an elevator. Now, that’s where the safety comes in. Elevators rely on redundant feedback. There’s usually more than one encoder. There’s a lot of different ways. So I won’t nail it down to one specific but there is error detection potential built in. You know, for example, that we talked about the lines in the disc. I could have 1000 lines in the disc, but I have this other line called an index pulse. It’s one pulse per revolution, so my control sees that pulse, and then it counts, and it better count to exactly 1000 and see that pulse again. So if it counts to 980 because maybe there’s a crack in the disc now, then you’ll get an error that there’s something wrong with the disc. But what do you do in the middle of that you know still want a full turn. There’s ways to design redundancy in so you can have two disks and two read heads, for example, or maybe one disk and two read heads, and if you have one fail, then you will see a deviation between the output of the two they should be outputting the same exact signal at all times. And. If we have one disc crash or crack, then you’ll have a difference in signal, and you’ll e stop, as we say, you’ll have a safe stop right away. So that’s that’s typically, redundancy is everything. Yeah, you know a new word. I haven’t heard it in elevators too much, but it’s very large in automated manufacturing. And I would think we’re going to see it catch up there, and maybe it is, I just didn’t hear it. I don’t know everything, but it’s diversity of technology that’s that’s a new buzz word for safety, and that’s where you actually use two encoders in a redundant pattern of different technology. So we have a magnetic encoder for that reason, in part because we build redundant encoders where the main encoder is an optical disc, and then we have the secondary magnetic kit encoder installed on the back, and that’s for providing that redundancy error checking. But because they share no technology, they can’t have a common fault between them. You’re not going to have, hey, look, the battery failed on this one, but on that one at the same time, because it’s the exact same encoder, right? And that’s considered the highest level of safety.
Matthew Allred 26:05
That’s awesome, yeah. It reminds me of a, you know, I remember taking us to statistics class in college and and kind of that thing that once you have these redundant backups, you know, the the likelihood of failure goes down. Just, you know, just crazy. I don’t remember the numbers, of course, but it was like, if this one’s 97% up and this one’s 97 the likelihood that they’re both going to fail at the same time is minuscule. And it was kind of mind boggling.
Jared Stearns 26:31
Yeah, it’s we have to discuss a value very often, MTTF. I’m sure a lot of people have heard of mean time to fail, but there’s MTTF, little D for mean time to destructive failure. That’s a very common number you need nowadays when you’re working on a safety application, and you know, you’re talking about this number that we have to generate. It takes a lot of math. And I’m a biology major, everybody. I don’t do the math. But that number is, you know, usually 500 1000 we just did was over 2000 years expected between destructive failures, and you need the numbers in hundreds of years if you’re going to get a product in. So it’s, yeah, it’s the statistics behind it are there.
Matthew Allred 27:15
That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. What? What do you have, like, a favorite professional moment you’d like to share.
Jared Stearns 27:22
There’s been a few, and they all are along the same thread. One of them was an automated guided forklift. So fully autonomous forklift drives around the factory, moving boxes, you know, think the big box names, right? Yeah. And they were looking at doing angular measurement on the driving caster. So if you think of a typical stand up forklift you see at a Lowe’s or Home Depot, and somebody has to handle the spin. And if you look under it, it’s these two caster wheels that just rotate. You know, it’s casters in the front, and then just as one big caster in the back, they want an angle on something like this. And they had a proposal of how to do it, and came looking for a product from us. And I said, Absolutely, we can do that for you. You’d be looking at this, take this long, whatever. Hey, by the way, have you considered, you know, on old farm tractors? Here it comes. I’ve seen it done like this, you know. And what do you think of that? Could you fit it? Because you’re going to have your cost, it’s more reliable. You’re only using one gear, that kind of thing. And I’m not an engineer, and I say that up front, and they were, they came back with a day later and said, Jared, we really like that idea. And they ran with it, and we’ve sold 1000s of these things now. And so that’s a proud moment, because I walk into stores like that, and I can point at it, and I show my kids, hey, you know your dad, he’s always on his head, so it looks like he’s telling stories, which I am half the time. But I actually do do something. We had another one. It was for for cancer treatment, right? And so any of those, you know, we ended up doing a very custom encoder for a solution they didn’t think they’d be able to find. And it was for treating prostate cancer. And this actually goes on the device that determines the angle to, like, zap it. And so it was. It’s just a really good feeling when you see that you played a role in something like that, you know
Matthew Allred 29:24
Yeah, and for something especially that most people A don’t know they exist. B will never see one in their life, to know that you’ve contributed to making something possible, that, yeah, that could really serve them.
Jared Stearns 29:37
And coders are everywhere. And I, you know, anything that moves that doesn’t have a human being, a moving it and B, verifying that move. Because there’s a lot of things that human beings move and still need an encoder. You know, some of our biggest customers are, are mobile equipment manufacturers of cranes and fork trucks, and our encoders go on the the manually operated one. So we have, we’re working on with a customer now who uses two or three encoders in their salt truck. So when you see your town or city salt truck going on the road, there’s encoders on there. You go through the airport, and that machine that puffs air at you, there’s an encoder in the top of that. So yeah, we get in a lot of cool things. And it’s they’re not always sexy to look at our catalog. You don’t go, Wow. This is like, you know, amazing stuff, but it really is for what we do and what we get the
Matthew Allred 30:22
The end product, I think, is where you get the wow factor, right? I mean, yes, it’s just like, wow. That’s, that’s amazing, that that’s possible. I mean, somebody was, and maybe it was, you I don’t even remember, somebody was telling me that, you know, the steering column on my vehicle really, you know, it’s not a direct linkage anymore, but it’s, it’s encoded. It’s, you know, it’s being watched by all the electronics that you know when it tells me, Oh, hey, you’ve gone over the line and you need to learn how to steer, kind of thing, that it’s encoders gang and going, Oh yeah, it’s Matt driving again. Let’s exactly give him a notification
Jared Stearns 30:52
right, right? That’s exactly right, yeah. So that’s been the most fulfilling. And the people I’ve met you know because you’re a nuclear engineer, which did happen, and this nuclear engineer was a professional engineer and had his college doctorate, is a doctor of nuclear engineering in his 80s. So he was involved in some of the major reactor designs that are operating today. And when people like that are working on a project where they need an encoder. Even as an engineer, they don’t want to know the nitty gritty. They want to know. For me, how is it going to fit? Can you modify this? I need these signals type of thing.
Matthew Allred 31:30
Can it give me the output I want? Right? I just need to know, right? You know, how this this satellite. I remember watching the video of how they I think it’s the Jane, what? James Webb, you know, whatever station and satellite, but it’s taking these amazing pictures. And I, you know, we watched it unfold and basically position itself. And so there were a ton of encoders just making sure that every single art piece happened at the right time and in the right way. And then, you know, stage one, stage two. And fascinating. Yeah,
Jared Stearns 32:05
It is, yeah, yeah. You need vacuum rating. You need to, you can’t air gas. Anything we know about space, and it’s, it’s a lot of fun. So, but I’m telling you, people would find some of the conversations we at encoder have had getting involved in the motion of every application under the sun, because you meet somebody like that, engineer and and you get a time a very curious person. I’ve been known to run meetings long, wasting time because I’m too curious about what people do. And there’s just a lot of neat stuff out there.
Matthew Allred 32:30
What skills and education would you say are most valuable for someone if they’re fascinated by what you do?
Jared Stearns 32:37
I think experience with with a hands on application. You know, a lot of universities, and I’ve been out a long time of school, but they do internships and things. But I have found when I visit these, you know, companies everywhere. But I will tell you, I know a lot of successful people, especially students who had to work, you know, and I was one of them, you know, I college wasn’t free, you know, it’s not free now. And there’s a lot of opportunity, particularly if you live in the Rust Belt, if you live in anywhere in New England, in New Jersey, New York, areas that have a large legacy industrial base, you know, where the old ball bearing factories are, where the old and there is a lot of machine tool companies and engineering firms, manufacturing companies that manufacture with automated equipment that are desperate for employees. And if you want to be a manufacturing engineer in the elevator industry, but go work at the companies that build elevators, you don’t need to start there. Go find a role, and it’ll be easy to find where you can get your hands dirty working on machines. You know, the best engineers I meet in the field, they’re typically running the teams, are typically engineering managers, by the way. You know, for the most part, you get a degree in engineering, you’re an engineer, right? But to be an engineering manager, you gotta prove you know how to lead people and solve problems, true, and you don’t learn that at college. And a lot of engineering managers I’ve met came from backgrounds where they started doing something with their hands, having that real world application. Work hard, and, you know, you’ll get there
Matthew Allred 34:16
Yeah, yeah. Thank you. It’s great advice. It? It is a unique, you know, just that, like you say, the electro, the mechanical, the, you know, sometimes hydraulic, you know, the all the, all the pieces that come together, and, and, and you’re right, it does seem more almost rare that you can find a place where, where can you learn all those things and get your hands on them? Because, you know, you’re not going to get your hands on them in a textbook, you’ll see a picture, right? You know?
Jared Stearns 34:42
And that’s not knocking. This generation, this generation is at a disadvantage, and my generation was the beginning of that, my father’s generation, I guess I’d be the baby boomers. Well, you will meet a lot of them today as they’re getting into retirement, and ask them, How did you get into this? And a lot of them will say, I. Grew up working on cars, because in the 1970s you had distributor caps, you had carbureted engines, and you could work on your car. You can’t work on cars today, you know, so kids today, a lot of the stuff in their life is not disposable. There’s no reason they’re not getting those opportunities to get out their socket set and, you know, open up the cylinders and increase their compression ratios and all these things. And all these things that they’re not doing that so they’re not getting those skills.
Matthew Allred 35:27
Yeah, no, that’s good point. So as we wrap up, Jared, what? What else would you like say? Anything you’d like to to give to our audience before we sign off?
Jared Stearns 35:37
Do what you love. You know, I had a very jagged path. We didn’t even get to my my time in the service, which is good, but I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve worked for the government, I’ve worked for big companies, I’ve worked for small companies. I’ve worked for a lot less money, and I’ve worked for a lot more money. If you don’t like what you do, don’t do it. That’s it. You know, put your family first, put your life first, and do what you like.
Matthew Allred 36:08
Well said, Jared, thank you so much for being with me today. I’ve enjoyed every minute, and wish you the best as you continue on your path.
Jared Stearns 36:15
Thank you very much for having me.
Matthew Allred 36:17
Thank you for listening to the Elevator Careers Podcast, sponsored by the Allred group, a leader in elevator industry recruiting. Please visit our YouTube channel at Elevator Careers, or check us out online at elevatorcareers.net. Please like and subscribe and until next time, stay safe.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai