Elliot Kallen: Well, good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to another very exciting episode of Meet the Expert with Elied Kallen, top 2% of all financial podcasts in the world right now, and today will not disappoint you. We’ve been interviewing more and more CEOs, and we’re going to do that today. Kind of a throwback to America’s old world of railroads and future world of railroads. We’re going to talk a little bit about past, present, and future with Stephen Blue, who’s the CEO, and very successful, who he does for Miller Ingenuity, and an international manufacturer in the railroad industry. We’ll get to all that stuff very, very quickly. The reason we’re doing this, interviewing CEOs, is because 60% of our clients are CEOs or entrepreneurs. I know there’s a little bit of a difference there, how you see yourself, CEO, president, and entrepreneur, even founder, or different titles, but these are people that we have found that want good answers. They want to emulate success. They want to repeat other people’s success. They don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Everybody’s trying to do a better job of that. If you need to reach me, I’m an email at elliot, E-L-L-I-O-T, at prosperityfinancialgroup.com. The website is prosperityfinancialgroup.com, and it’s 314, excuse me, 925-314-8503. Stephen Blue, welcome to Meet the Expert. How are you? Thanks, Elliot. It’s a pleasure to be here. Great. We’re going to talk a little bit about, for the next 20, 25 minutes or so, about what you have done that is so successful because this man has ninefold earnings before taxes over his career, which is just amazing for anybody to talk about that, to have growth of 9X. We’re going to talk about how you’ve done that. He’s second generation. The company’s 75 years old. For those of you that are second generation or you’re the second owner, maybe you’re not family generation. You’re just the second owner of the company or third owner. You purchased the company. You’re thinking about buying a company and transforming it. He’s got a lot of great expertise from you. I want to tell you something about, can I brag about you for a second, Stephen? 

Steve Blue: Sure, absolutely. 

Elliot Kallen: All right. Why he’s on here right now, very exciting. I’ve got a book over my left shoulder called Driven by Elliot Kallen. It’s an Amazon bestseller. He’s got five. Another one coming out very, very shortly. I speak to tens of thousands of people, well, monthly over a podcast, but in live, it’s thousands of people per year. He has spoken at Harvard Business School, at the United Nations, and Carnegie Hall. People actually pay to hear him. That’s already different than a lot of speakers. It’s been in the rail industry for 35 years. You might say, well, who cares about rail or in Buffett City rail industry? I can’t repeat what Warren Buffett’s ever done, so I don’t really care about. What we can learn from him is you’ve got, theoretically, a stale, old, rust belt industry, theoretically, that his firm is making a ton of Money, and they’re enjoying great success on a very global scale. Let’s talk about what Miller Ingenuity does and then what you do in your life every day within Miller Ingenuity. We’ll talk about you on a personal level in a few minutes, but Steve, I’m going to throw it back at you. Thank you for being on here. Tell us a little bit about Miller and what you do on a daily level. 

Steve Blue: Well, I remember when Warren Buffett bought BNSF. Chances are, he knows things you don’t know and I don’t know. I remember my sales guy called me. He said, you won’t believe it. Warren bought BNSF. I said, how much of it? He said, all of it, which was just weird. I expected to hear 10% or 20% or whatever. Warren knows that over the long term, the rail industry is a really good investment. As the Economy goes, is how the rail industry goes and vice versa. Economy contracts, railroad industry contracts, the economy expands, it follows suit. Miller Ingenuity is a unique company in a lot of respects. First of all, we produce, engineer, produce and deliver everything from metal-fabricated products to high-technology safety solutions and everything in between, which is really weird. As you know, most companies will either be plastics manufacturer or there’ll be a metal vendor or there’ll be high technology, but they won’t be all of them. That’s what kind of makes us unique. We can provide a solution that we do for our customers in any of those areas that you want, dumb metal, dumb plastic to high technology. Over the years, we morphed from metal bending to begin with, and then a little higher tech. Then with some acquisitions I made over the years, we got into lower tech electronics. Then basically, we morphed into higher tech electronics. We’re very unique in that respect. We sell our products in over 100 countries. We have, I don’t know, hundreds of customers, and we’re number one or two in about 65% of our product lines. The other thing I’ll say is 50% of our sales didn’t exist 10 years ago. That’s the kind of platform, that’s the kind of profile that every CEO wants to have, but few of them have it. 

Elliot Kallen: What you’re doing now, how many hours a week are you working at this job? 

Steve Blue: It depends. If you include checking my emails about 37,000 times a day, I would say probably, I don’t know, 12 hours a day, 11 hours a day. It’s the first thing I do in the morning is I check on the company, what’s happening within it. The last thing I do at night at home is do the same thing. How are we doing? What was the order intake today? What’s the profile look like? Anything new, anything different? It’s kind of a labor of love. One of the things I tell CEOs all the time is you have to, and you’ll appreciate this, you’re a Finance guy, you have to be anal about the numbers. The numbers are everything. You’ve got to watch the numbers like a hawk. Every single day, I know exactly what our order intake is, and I get a report every single day that says, okay, what is today, the 10th or 9th? 10th of December, 2024, compared to the 23, compared to the same date in 22, compared to the same date in 21. Then, of course, you have to go back beyond the pandemic where it was kind of not normalized. And so I understand where the numbers are every single day, and that’s what I say every CEO needs to do. 

Elliot Kallen: You’re doing the right thing, and I want to pick up on something you just said, which I think is terrific, is that your company, and obviously very successful, so again, congratulations to you for that one, is in 100 countries. So for the CEOs that are listening here on how to get it out of their own way of just being a national company or a regional company, but being what you’ve accomplished, which is just an international company, even though you’re based, not internationally, you’re based right here, and you’re manufacturing. Theoretically, your labor’s too high, your materials are too high, all the complaints about manufacturing and so forth in the US, and really not going to get into labor and materials here that you’re dealing with, but you’re dealing in 100 countries. For the entrepreneurs that are listening to this, that want to be in five countries, 10 countries, how do you begin that process, and how do you expand that process? 

Steve Blue: In my particular case, Elliot, what I, my products are kind of universally used by, there are different standards in the world for railroads. The United States is the most predominant, if you will, and then you have European standards, which are different than the United States, but generally, I would follow all my products, because what would happen is, I’d sell my product to one company, then they’d resell it to another, they wouldn’t even use it, then they’d resell it to another, and at some level, it got changed like four or five times before it reached the end user, so I started following those products. Where did they go? Everywhere in the world, it’s not that hard to do, it takes a little bit of work, and then I would say, okay, I don’t want five middlemen between me and the end user, so I’m going to approach the end user directly, and that’s what I did, I started approaching every country, every customer where our products were employed, and then made deals with them, where they would save a lot of money, and we would, we’d make more profit. I’ll give an example, when I started following our product lines directly to the end user, and started selling directly to the end user, instead of these middle people, I improved our profitability by 60%, and by changing a shipping address. Now, it’s a little more complicated than that, but basically, so I improved profit by 60%, end user got a 40% discount, roughly, and the products that they were buying from me, and once you know that, once you follow that, then of course, you have to understand what are the rules and regulations and laws to sell in foreign countries, and all that kind of stuff, and that gets a little bit complicated, but at the end of the day, it’s worth it, because the margins, at least in my business, are generally better outside of the United States than they are in the United States, and that’s because in the United States, the big companies big railroads, they got lots of purchasing power, but when you move to the little guys in other countries, they don’t have so much power, so you have more leverage with them than you do with the bigger customers. 

Elliot Kallen: There’s the lesson that you just gave everybody, Steve, is that look beyond just the US, look beyond your own borders, and don’t just think about, well, I’ll look at England, I’ll look at France. Well, there are a lot of countries in the world, besides that, that if you could learn how to navigate through them, you might make more money than you ever thought you could make it here. I have a good family friend of mine, and there’s a story that goes there, if you don’t mind me kind of digressing for a second. So, he developed the Teflon-applied materials inside oil pipelines to make oil run smoother and faster, and he went in the 80s, or 70s, I should say, all over the Middle East, which was all over Texas, Oklahoma, and the Middle East, where he was selling in the US these Teflon-coated pipes, and that was a new technology, a Teflon-coated pipe where the Teflon, unlike your cookware, the Teflon would never wear out. So, you could put these pipes underground and not have to touch them for 15 years, 20 years, to replace them. Amazing technology, which is all the rage today, but at that time, it was brand new. And so, he went over to the Far East, and he goes and he meets with the different kingdoms, which is what the Middle East was in those days, and he meets with, he goes to Iraq, and he goes to Iran, and he meets with the Shah, and nobody’s buying his pipes because they’re making so much money. They don’t care about making oil flow easier and faster because they’re so profitable. Well, sometimes we get blind in our profitability, and he ends up meeting with the Fayyoud family in Saudi Arabia, and they said to him, look, you seem like a nice guy. You seem to have a good product. We don’t have an oil problem. We have a water problem. He said, can you apply your pipes, your Teflon coating to water because that’s what’s hurting us, is water, moving faster and more efficiently. And he ended up doing that, redoing the pipes, you know, like they’re different for water than they are because of pressure, water for oil. And he sold it for 18, he sold the company at that point for $18 million in the 1980s, which is a lot of money, because he developed the technology for oil, and he was swift enough to realize there was an opportunity. And that’s what entrepreneurs and business owners like you, sometimes you go in thinking, I’ve got a nail and a hammer, and I’m just going to pound away at this, only to realize that, boy, if I just had two or three more tools in my toolbox, I could really make this work. And that’s kind of the lesson you’ve learned by being an international player, haven’t you? 

Steve Blue: Yeah. And I’ve been an entrepreneur too. And one thing I say all the time is, when you have an idea, Elliot, it’s a great idea. And you know it’s a great idea. Then somebody else will go, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea. You never know if an idea you have is any good until you get it out in the world and let the world decide, not your brother in law, not people that work for you, whatever. And I remember one time I started a company in Mexico. It was a huge success. I made tons and tons and tons of money. And then I said, you know what? I think I got this entrepreneurship down, so I’m going to do the same thing in Cuba. Now, that’s a little more complicated, at least it was 20 years ago, and still is, to get into the market and so forth. But I think, Mexico, Cuba, they all speak Spanish. It’s all pretty much the same. When I went into Cuba, I lost my ass with a terrific idea. I had a terrific idea, Elliot, and I lost my ass. And so the lesson I teach CEOs when I make keynote speeches all the time is get out there, try it, let the market tell you if it’s any good or not. And just because you lose your ass on one, don’t make that stop you from doing the next one. So I say in the seed of every success is the seed of failure. And in every failure you have is the seed of success because you learn things. 

Elliot Kallen: That’s, you’re right. And we’re talking with Stephen Blue, CEO of Miller Ingenuity. They’re an international manufacturer of high-technology products in the locomotive and freight car industry. If you need to reach me, it’s Elliot, E-L-L-I-O-T, at Prosperity Financial Group or prosperityfinancialgroup.com. Feel free to reach out. We’ve got 80-plus of these episodes with people as exciting as Steve is. So that’s it. Let’s get to some challenges you had. But I want to comment on what you just said. For those of you who are listening here, Steve and I have had a pre-call where I got to know him a little bit. That’s really important to do when you’re a podcaster. And it just gave me a series of questions to ask. I’d even forgot about what to ask him when I did the pre-call, but gave me ideas. And I’m not going to ask you who your motivation was. I get asked that all the time. But he brought up two big points that every entrepreneur should think about. My father was of the greatest generation, born in 1915, and lived through the Depression. And his lesson to his children, good or bad, was nothing makes up for hard work. And so that little schizophrenic voice on my left shoulder from my dad is, are you working hard enough? That’s not necessarily a good thing, by the way, but at 3.50 an hour, I could probably get some psychologist to fix this in a year. But my mother, who was a European and an Auschwitz survivor, a concentration camp survivor, her lesson to her children is you could do better today than yesterday and better tomorrow than today. And that’s what you just talked about, is if you listen to your customers, you listen to the market, and you just don’t listen to your family, even though your family could be right. I don’t want to discount your family. You will learn so much with your eyes and your ears open that is way bigger than your brain could ever come up with. 

Steve Blue: You know, that’s a good point, Elliot. And I’ll give an example of that. When I’m introducing a really, really new and expensive product to develop, you know, if it’s plain vanilla enhancements and so forth, fine. But if I’m going to spend millions on a new product, I personally go out in the field with my salespeople so I can look the customers in the eye when they’re demoing it, see what their impressions are, see what their reactions are. I don’t leave that to somebody reporting it to me in a conference room. Now, I don’t go out in the field all the time. I’ve got a good sales team. They handle that. But if I’m going to do something really, really, really big, I want to look them right in the eye and know right firsthand exactly how they reacted to that. And then I come back and I go, you know, they were kind of tepid on that. You know, they were sort of OK. Because the sales guy, they’re paid to be optimistic, right? They’ll come back and go, oh, yeah, they love it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. You want to know exactly how they feel about something. And that’s your point of listening and understanding your customers. You know, everybody says that, right? Let’s listen to your customers. Listen to your customer. Nobody, most people don’t do it, really. They say, oh, what do my customers want? Well, I can tell you what they want. They want a high quality product at the lowest price, and they want it right now. They want it when they want it. Now, that’s a simple formula, but in its essence, Elliot, that’s what every customer wants. That’s what you want from all your suppliers. That’s what I want out of my supplier. Figuring out the path to get to that is the difficult part of it. 

Elliot Kallen: I think you’re on the right track, which brings me to the next question. In my industry, we call that how do you create relevance and top of mind so they think of you first? You’re kind of doing the same thing, but you’ve got more employees than I do. I don’t have a lot. I have one company with five advisors, one company with 50. That’s a good-sized company still, still a billion dollars. Yeah, but you’ve got more than me, and so the challenge that every CEO has for you, like you have, and I want to know how you deal with it, is how do you foster the culture of innovation, being progressive, and I don’t mean politically progressive, but innovation, innovative, progressiveness, futuristic, positivity, and knowing that you don’t win every time you go to bat. You don’t get a single or double or triple or home run every time you go to bat, but you still got to be there. How do you do that in the size of a business that you have? 

Steve Blue: It all starts with the hire, the hiring process. Now, let’s assume you have built the culture of, I say most companies have cultures by default, not by design, but if you’ve built the culture by design to suit your values and suit your customers’ values, and don’t ever let anybody walk in the door that can wreck that culture, so it all starts with the hires, and so if you want to be innovative, that starts at the top. The CEO has to say, make a declaration that we’re going to be innovative or we need to be innovative or we’ll continue to be innovative, and then you have to put everything that you can to back that up and to reinforce that. I’ll give an example. Every company talks about teamwork. We all want to, everybody, team, team, team, that’s great, we should have teamwork. Well, if that’s the case, why do they do individual performance appraisals and not team performance appraisals? Why do they reward people for individual efforts and not the team? Just an example of how corporations make these wild ideologic statements and they don’t back them up, so as far as innovation is concerned, I’ll give an example. Years and years and years ago, I felt we needed to be more innovative, so I brought in the guy that used to be the chief creativity officer for the QVC network. Now, most people think that’s crazy, and maybe it is because now he’s a consultant, and I had him come in and teach every single employee the principles of innovation, starting from the ground up, which is basically brainstorming, and then I had him come back every week and he worked with small teams of people, everybody, Elliot, not just the, not the engineers, of course the engineers, but the people in the factory, people in the office, because innovation can come from and it should come from anywhere, so he, for the better part of a year, he’d come in once a week, meet with small groups of people, shepherd them through the process, pick problems to work on, opportunities to work on, and so forth, and then after about a year, people were kind of clicking on this, and a guy in the factory came up to me and he said, this is my point about CEO support from the top, he came up to me and he said, you know, we really like this innovation stuff, we could do it better, and we could do it more if we had a dedicated space in the building where all the innovation took place, not building things, and I said, let me make sure I understand this now, you want me to take a part of my factory that actually makes money now and turn it into a think tank, and about that time, he was thinking, oh boy, I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have brought it up, and I said, I love the idea, so I, this is 15 years ago, Elliot, I spent a half a million dollars building that space, now today that would cost, I don’t know, you’re the finance guy, tell me, a lot more than a half a million dollars, three to five million, right, and, and so people go into this space they’re allowed to go in any time they want with anybody they want to choose any issue they want, any opportunity, any enhancement, any whatever and then they have the authority to go ahead and implement the solution. Now, if they need, money, be,

beyond their ability and so forth. That’s when I, one of my leaders would get involved. And so people ask me often, well, where’s the beef? Would you get out of that space? Well, I can point to specifically a couple of really big improvements and really big product developments. And then there’d be a million that I don’t know about because I don’t have to know about them. And at the time, and even now I said, I want you to spend 25% of your time innovating. But if you do, if you say that, and then you also say, but you gotta make the donuts, the same donuts with that 75%, it doesn’t work. So I brought in enough people to create that opportunity so people could, to buffer that 25% when they’re innovating and not actually making the product. And that’s what makes it work, has to come right from the top. 

Elliot Kallen: Yeah, and we were talking to Steve Blue here today because as financial people, we build portfolios for CEOs and companies and 401ks for his type of company. And we know across the board, everybody’s got those same needs. How do I make money? How do I grow? How do I continue to make money? How do I continue to grow? What’s my exit strategy at the very end here? And I wasn’t gonna ask you about exit strategy for you because I still think you’re too young to be thinking about an exit strategy here. But I do wanna ask you because you’re proving that you could make money, you could be innovative in a pretty old stodgy industry, the railroad industry. And everybody thinks I’m here in California, you’re not. But everybody thinks that unless I’m doing something that’s high tech and AI and cutting edge, then why bother doing anything? And you’re proving the exact opposite, which I love to hear because you’re brick and mortar, you’re everything that CNBC says you shouldn’t be in right now. So that’s fantastic. 

Steve Blue: You don’t have to be, I mean, high tech’s expensive, as you know. I mean, if you’re gonna do a high tech product, you better pull out your wallet. And there’s so many opportunities that are not high tech that are either not discovered or your competition is not doing very well. So, okay, how do you grow your business? Either new products, new markets, or taking it from a competition. Maybe there’s another way. I don’t know what’s one of those three ways. So you wanna look at all three of those and you wanna maximize what you’re doing in all three of those. And then it becomes a risk and reward thing. But there’s plenty of, in almost any industry, especially in mine, there’s plenty of slow, stodgy, lethargic competitors who have sort of said, yeah, I got this thing down, we’re gonna be fine. Always bought my product, they always will. And there’s a million ways to niche in there and get that business. If you get creative and you look hard enough. 

Elliot Kallen: I like what you’re saying. A million ways to be creative, especially when people get comfortable. That’s your chance to be the disturber in every industry. And it’s not, it could be you’re doing it at railroads, it could be in the baking business, it could be in the asphalt business, and it could be in a high-tech business. It doesn’t have to be just high-tech. So think broad instead of narrow. And that’s kind of what you’ve proven that it works, Steve. 

Steve Blue: Well, and I tell people this all the time. Somebody is sitting around at a conference room right now trying to figure out how they can clean my clock and tell you. Somebody’s thinking about that right now. So if we’re not thinking about that and we’re not planning on that, then we’re gonna fall behind. You have to be obsessive and you have to be compulsive as a CEO. And you have to be always looking out for who’s trying to get your business because people are doing it all the time. Anytime you sit back and say, okay, I’ll tell you, every time, Elliot, that I’ve sat back and thought I got this CEO thing down, I got it, I would think I’ll go golf now, something bad happened. I missed something. And so now whenever I start feeling that way, I go, okay, hang on, let me take a deep dive here. Let me look really hard to see what I’m missing. And in almost every case I find something. 

Elliot Kallen: Yeah, I bet you do. So as CEO, you know, the hardest thing that we have is time management. You know, I’m CEO of three entities here. You’ll see over major organization, international out of Minnesota. You’re not manufacturing in this third world, you’re manufacturing in Minnesota. So we’re not gonna get into labor and materials and all those things that, you know, the TV is talking about on why you should move your whole manufacturing operation to India. We’re not gonna do that here today. But we are gonna talk about time management for, and I’d like to end if you’re okay with the time management question. And that is that you’ve written five books. You’re a recognized speaker. You’ve got another book on the way, I think, you’re telling me about that. How do you, what are you writing about and how do you make time for that? 

Steve Blue: Well, it’s always one form of leadership or another, or one form of transformation or change or another, cause that’s what I’m an expert in. And, you know, if you’re a CEO, you spend a lot of time on airplanes. So why aren’t you writing your book when you’re on an airplane? And I love it when people say, oh my God, I wish I could find, I don’t know. I wish I could write a book. I said, of course you can. You do it methodically. It’s like a book’s perfect example. When I’m writing a book, I set a writing budget of a thousand words a day. Now there may be a day or two I don’t do those thousand, but generally a thousand words a day, okay, your average business book is 30 to 40,000 words, something like that. Your editor, and you should have one, is gonna cut whatever you write down to make it more clear and more correct and all that kind of stuff. So in about 50 days, I have 50,000 words written. And so that’s, it’s simple. You set a word budget, you find an editor and boom, there’s nothing to it. You spend a lot of time in airplanes, couple hours on a plane, you knock out a bunch of stuff. And so I always look for leverage in my time. And I don’t do everything myself. I have a leadership team, they’re a killer leadership team. They’ve been with me for 15 to 20 years, all of them. And I let them run their shows and I meet with them often to sort of skim off the top. Once a month we have a business review and we look at everything from margins to product lines to engineering initiatives, you name it, look at the whole thing. So I’m leveraging my time once a month with these guys to do a deep dive in the business and then I get out. I let them do their thing and they do it well. 

Elliot Kallen: Well, you’re doing something, right? What I did, along the same lines, is I came in every month, every weekend, either Saturday morning or Sunday morning or a couple hours for a year to write the book. And my wife would say to me, are you going in Saturday or Sunday this weekend? And I would say back, which one would you prefer? She said, well, go in Saturday because I have plans for a Sunday. Can you be home by 10? And I’d hit the gym and go in for two hours and be home by 10 and have the whole day in front of me. It was that discipline that made me write the book of saying, okay, I have to be home, I got to go to the gym and because I don’t want to die of a heart attack as CEO, I want to be in good shape. And that created, like you’re talking about airplanes, it created the discipline and, you know, discipline is a really hard thing to have and a really easy thing to lose. 

Steve Blue: You’re right. And that’s the key is discipline. People in your position and mine and all of your listeners, you have to have discipline or you have nothing. 

Elliot Kallen: Steve, if people want to reach you to get more information from you, more information about your company, how do people do that? 

Steve Blue: I think the easiest way is my personal website, which is stephenlblue.com, Stephen with a V, and then that links to Miller. The Miller Ingenuity website is a little more complicated to spell, but if they go into my personal website, it links back to Miller and my books and speeches and you can book me if you want as a speaker. You can do just about anything from there. 

Elliot Kallen: And Stephen L, not Steve, but Stephen L Blue. Okay, this has been great. We’ve been talking with Steve, Stephen L Blue of Miller Ingenuity here. Very exciting, a rail industry, a rust belt industry being made in the United States, products being made in the United States that are innovative and creative and highly profitable. And he is just, we’ve been talking about innovation and creativity for the last 20 plus minutes here. If you like these kind of podcasts, send me a note, L-E-L-L-I-O-T at prosperityfinancialgroup.com. The website is prosperityfinancialgroup.com. If you’re looking for people who can manage your 401k, if you manage your personal assets, who can help you with family office situations with money, that’s what we do. And we’d love to talk to you. So Steve, thank you very much for being on here. My pleasure, thanks for having me. You’re welcome and have a great day, everybody. We’ll see you again.