Aside from being one of the most successful manufacturers in all of Michigan’s Great Southwest with a meteoric growth trajectory, we can all be thankful that Vickers Engineering CEO Matt Tyler had the foresight to pick up the phone one day and call Corey Carolla. When he called Carolla on that fateful day a little over two years ago Corey was just days away from leaving Michigan to become the regional chief executive officer of an economic development agency in Texas. Fortunately, he never even got to pack his bags.
Carolla answered the phone and heard Tyler say that his decision to hit the road for Texas was “the stupidest (expletive) thing I ever heard, you’re not going anywhere.” Tyler then proceeded to hire Carolla as his right hand man for Vickers knowing full well that together they would make great things happen.
Even the two of them might not have realized that two short years later Carolla would be the Vice President of Corporate Development for the Vickers spin-off, Red Rabbit Automation of Niles.
Carolla has been engaged in the manufacturing industry or manufacturing support since returning from his tour of duty in the U.S. Military in 1998. When he walked in the door to take his job with Tyler at Vickers Engineering in New Troy in mid-October of 2016 after stints with Bowater Paper, Vail Rubber and Mach Mold, the company sat at $20-million in sales. At the end of 2017 he says, “we closed the books on more than double that, and spun off Red Rabbit.” He calls it, “a great journey,” and that’s just the beginning.
The origin of the name Red Rabbit stems from a manufacturing test often utilized to check how long a bad part, the “red rabbit” purposely placed into the system, remains until it is identified as a defect.
Red Rabbit Automation is a spin-off company of Vickers Engineering, which for many years has been very successful in both growing exponentially and staying relevant in the industry, becoming a Tier 1 supplier to the likes of Toyota, Honda, Subaru and others. They have been able to grow the business significantly, thanks to their decision to embrace and adopt automation and the integration process.
Carolla says that once Tyler and the Vickers team made the conscious decision to embrace automation internally, and created an internal team to focus on it, “They got very, very, very good at it, and moved the company substantially forward from where they were to where they are now.”
By becoming first-rate at employing automation themselves, Carolla adds, “What we realized is that we had an asset that more people in the industry could utilize. Especially because the niche of automation that we were in was from a machine-tending for the machining and manufacturing sector and decidedly different from some of our other great automation people in the area that perform custom automation work like the Edgewaters and the JR Automations, and those guys in the local market.”
Acknowledging, “There’s space for all of us, because we essentially do something really different than what they do — a true total niche — we all profit together.” In fact, he had just met the team from Edgewater Automation that week because he had things coming his way that were a better fit for them and likewise, they had things that were a better fit for our crew.” Carolla insists that they’ve all realized is that, “If you’re going to be relevant, and going to be manufacturing in any type of globally competitive market, you’re going to embrace automation. At this point you have to.”
Automation in the manufacturing sector is a multi-faceted victory from a cost-competitive standpoint…from a workforce standpoint…from a safety standpoint and especially from a quality standpoint. All of those things are of value to the market. He tells a story of when he and Tyler made a presentation wherein they would throw the common problems of the manufacturing world spelling them out in bold letters:
- WORKFORCE ISSUES? SOLUTION: AUTOMATION.
- QUALITY ISSUES? SOLUTION: AUTOMATION.
- SAFETY ISSUES? SOLUTION: AUTOMATION.
He says, “Bullet point after bullet point and across the board the solution is automation.” But, for Red Rabbit to become fully functional, they knew they had to be more than just an internal subset of extremely talented individuals focused on automation solutions for Vickers. With substantive work on the books for sometimes years at a time for Tier 1 suppliers, Vickers was only likely to take on one or two new projects a year, so Red Rabbit needed freedom to establish an external customer base of partners, as well. Vickers is still an amazing customer for the Red Rabbit Automation spin-off, but they immediately asked themselves, “What can we do with this amazing asset, to grow it, and offer it to the rest of the industry that we’re in?”
Carolla says we needed to, “Take what we learned and actually share it, and essentially, be profitable at it. So we peeled the team away, and started the completely separate company of Red Rabbit Automation.”
In the beginning, they co-existed in the same building in order to get the structure up and growing. The original team was just four, Tyler, Carolla, CFO Scott Dawson and Carolla’s management recruit, John Cammarata who they acquired following a global talent search. He came with 35 years of automation experience, having started and built up large automation companies, selling them off and starting others.
With Cammarata rounding out the team, it became, “The confidence-builder that we knew we had a market, we knew we had a solution to the automation issues that were out there for most manufacturers, and now we knew that we had the leadership to make this successful.” Carolla adds, “That’s when we decided that we were going to really peel the company off, and we bought this building in Niles in May. From that, we started to really begin getting up to term. I came completely over to Red Rabbit, so that John and I would support each other with Matt and our CFO, and began to develop what our team would look like.”
At the new headquarters in the Bertrand Crossing Industrial Park in Niles Red Rabbit wanted to build a team from an automation and integration standpoint that was different. Carolla says, “We wanted to look at principal, we wanted to look at a good mix between the old experienced and fresh college graduates, and that’s where we really started and were looking at the world and what it looked like from an aspect of the market that we could have and the team that we could grow, to be able to support that, and we quickly went from the original four to sixteen employees.”
He says they were able to recruit some amazing talent, pulling in a Notre Dame undergrad — a mechanical engineer and Florida resident — to the team. Carolla adds, “We recently participated with the University of Notre Dame in their Esteemed Graduate Program, an amazing program which engages students from all over the world who compete to be a part of it from the cohort. We originally put forth the Red Rabbit model as a project, and when our project was accepted at Notre Dame for the Esteemed program, we were essentially matched up with a student that was going through the program. He was Adrian Rodriguez, a California man, and we worked with him through the process and got about four months into it and realized that this kid is dynamic. He understands, and has an entrepreneurial-based, mechanical engineering background. So part of the study that his project entailed through his graduate program was our model. When you come back with this amazingly talented guy that says ‘All of the data makes sense, too, guys, the plan looks good, the market’s good, the data looks good,’ we were able to convince him to come to work for us rather than returning to California. So that’s two key players that we have recruited to the area that we are super excited about.”
Red Rabbit had a lot of initial contact within their own backyard with the likes of Gast Manufacturing in Benton Harbor, AACOA of Niles which was right next door, and work was underway. Corey says their first external project – not Vickers related – was with a company near Calumet City, Illinois – PolyJohn. He says we essentially went in and analyzed their process and realized that ergonomics, safety, people, and other things were issues for them. They make Portable Restrooms, and that business is booming. They couldn’t keep up. We automated a process and built a component, an automated solution for them, that allows them to triple their capacity, while minimizing their people. They’re not moving heavy parts around, any more. It checked all the boxes. An amazing solution to allow their company to grow.”
Carola says PolyJohn took a chance and Red Rabbit proved to them it would work. The team’s Adrian Rodriguez had helped create, from the sales perspective, a return on investment tool. Carola says, “Everybody knows that entering automation is key. You have to. But how and why? So we started really putting together an ROI tool that you could plug all the numbers into and it would support your gut and your heart as a business owner.”
One of the things they also were faced with was a kind of “barrier to entry.” Automation is expensive. If you look at it from the perspective that it’s dedicated. Carola says, “A lot of the customers that we were working with weren’t your typical Vickers – long run automotive contracts – they were more of what we traditionally call ‘job shops.’ You have to love job shops, but they don’t run 50,000 of anything. That’s fine, but what we’ve done is – because we have this experience from the industry that we come from – we created a component that we call the RR Unit. That’s re-deployable automation. It’s modular. It inverts the robot so that the capital investment that you pair up with other pieces of equipment to essentially automate something, comes from a process standpoint. Projects that are short-run projects, changes and go away, but with our system, you don’t lose the investment like you traditionally would in automation, because you just pick the thing up and you move it and retool, hook some other machines up to it, and you’re off and running on your next project. There’s no loss. You have incredible flexibility.”
The Red Rabbit team knew automation can be a hard pill to swallow for most manufacturers that are in machining, machine-tending, and quality and de-burring, and safety and all of that stuff that comes with it. They knew that they really had to have something that had flexibility.
Carolla says, “When you’re asking them to adopt automation and lose flexibility, it’s not going to happen. It can’t. But then you’re also telling them that if you don’t automate, and integrate, you’re going to be irrelevant in five years.”
Red Rabbit uses a hybrid of industrial trade shows and a mobile sales force. Corey says, “When we launched the company, we started looking strategically at how we were going to sell. We had some knowns. We had some door knocking. That’s my primary role right now is telling, promoting, educating and selling our company. We had a couple of different avenues. We, of course, from my background with economic development, workforce development, and knowing large groups of manufacturers would go in to educate them on what it is that we do, not necessarily selling the company but just educating them on the capabilities that we bring to the table.”
In addition to the traditional door-knocking, Carolla strongly suggested participation in the largest international machine tool show in the world — IMTS in Chicago. He says, “Through the process of putting our company together, and our philosophy together, we were approached by Fanuc Robots to become an authorized systems integrator to support what we did and utilized the technology and the background and the training that Fanuc had. They are the largest robot manufacturer in the world. Their prediction of the industry is so strong, that they currently have a facility in Japan that creates 7,800 robots per year. They are on track right now to finish up a second facility that will manufacture an additional 14,600 robots.”
He adds, “So, the largest robot manufacturing company in the world is more than doubling their ability to manufacture and produce the robots from all walks of what their ‘robot needs’ are. We early on had an opportunity, having met with some of their executives, we talked about what it is that we were really trying to focus on and they have a very strong authorized system integrators group. We came to them with essentially that niche. They right away realized that we could potentially be one of their top systems integrators so they came back to us and asked if the IMTS was possible. Could we put something together so we could display at this large show. When John and I went to Matt with that, he was like, seriously? We’ve got like two months and we said, absolutely. It was critical. It is absolutely mission critical. Our team was phenomenal. We put this thing together, essentially creating a capital piece of equipment from an automation standpoint in a couple of months that was top-notch.”
They took it to the show, and the show was amazing. They wowed them. They were honestly looking, thinking that if they walked out of the show with 40 or 50 good leads, that would be a great show. It’s a week long grind, early in the morning until late in the evening. Carolla says, “When we got back, we came home with close to 300 leads, and we’ve been hitting it hard ever since.”
They sold the unit they had taken to the show to a company in Texas. They’ve been up in Green Bay, visited Snap On Tool in Milwaukee, been in Kentucky, Minneapolis, so…”When we originally looked at the goals of the company, we were going to focus on the Great Lakes region, but that has gone out the window as we’ve gone well beyond,” admits Carolla, adding, “We also have a very strategic plan. We’re not selling for customers. We’re selling for partnerships. We’re selling to take what it is that we know and what we can bring to the table for these companies to essentially turn them into Vickers success stories, just with a different name on it.”
So now, the sky is the limit. Corey says, “We’re going to continue to grow, but very strategically. We’re not going to ever be thought of in the industry as ‘that guy who didn’t do what he said he was going to do,’ we’re going to grow by building partnerships. Anyone can sell you that first unit, it’s the three, four and five unit or solution that really creates that partnership. That’s what we’re looking for.”
Corey goes on, “Can we do anything and everything when it comes to automation? Absolutely. Do we want to, or are we going to pursue that? No way. We’re going to very strategically target the market that needs us to come in and work through the process of a cultural change with companies to get from where they are to where they need to be and why. We’re not going to limit ourselves any more to the Great Lakes. We are going to have a strong presence in Texas, North and South Carolina. You can really look at the United States and the hot belts of manufacturing. Alabama, Georgia, Texas and the Carolinas, Utah where we have four potential clients right now we’re talking to, but we also look at it from our model standpoint that we’re taking what we know, establishing a regional group of clients, and then also building up their supply chain around them with our help to be self-sustaining. The whole concept of teach you to fish rather than just dropping off fish for you every Friday.”
Red Rabbit’s holistic approach is part of the reason they partnered with Fanuc, from a robot supplier standpoint, because that’s their philosophy, too. They support cradle to grave on their equipment. Their training is world class. Their ability and desire to be the trailblazer is awesome. Corey adds, “We’ve got things on our shop floor right now that we are basically research and developing alongside of Fanuc that nobody else has right now. They want that. With us in so many shops and understanding the needs of the clients, they want us to help them understand the next generation as we become R&D partners for Fanuc. We become R&D partners for the industry. We’re pretty fortunate to have Matt Tyler and Vickers Engineering, but if get to the point of something where, alright let’s put this in place in a real life situation, before we sell it to other customers, let’s try it here, because we can test real life situations at Vickers for ultimate viability.”
For now they are focusing a tremendous amount of effort on growing a talent-based team that is very cross functional. Corey says, “Our guys are a phenomenal group of engineers from mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, control-systems guys. We’re one of the only integrators that I know of out there that we actually have a computer science guy on staff, because one of the barriers to entry when getting into automation is getting a workforce to use it once you implement it. We’re making it as user friendly as we can, so we’ve take a lot of the traditional robot controls and the CNC controls and the things that you have to have trained people to handle and mainstreaming it. Instead of DOS and Windows languages and such we’re boiling it down to a user interface that’s like your cellphone. Pictures, slides and questions and check boxes all drive it. Now the workforce in the industry that we’re putting this product into doesn’t have to have years’ worth of training.”
He likens it to the modern copy machine, saying, “When it jams, a picture pops us to show you where on the machine the jam is at and how to get to it, through which door, and so on. Why can’t that same mentality happen with industrial automation? So when something goes wrong in the process somewhere, you get an automatic read out on exactly what’s wrong and how to quickly resolve it, to prevent further downtime, and not have to call the engineers?”
They have sixteen on staff now, but will need to add to the team. Carolla says, “In the next year we’ll likely triple our sales, but we’ll probably be able to do that with the team we have now and adding four to five key personnel, which would take us to 20. So, at the end of two years we will have tripled our sales and have gone from a brand new start up to a team of 20 very talented employees.”
He goes on to say, “Our focus moving forward is now for build-out guys, because the anchor team is in place. Skilled automation build team guys come next. We have our RR Unit, but also still have custom build clients coming our way. The RV industry has been amazing. They can’t hire enough people and can’t find enough people in Elkhart and Goshen, and companies realize that. So now they’re seeking automation solutions, and some of those are custom jobs.” He notes, “We helped one RV firm to reduce a team of 36 per shift down to 4 and dramatically increase the throughput of their product, and the great part about that is that could never get 36 people per shift, it was always 22 and people were pulling overtime, and mixing and matching. Nobody lost a job. Everyone that wasn’t needed anymore to produce that product got moved to new lines and the nicest part is that the one’s who stayed had value added to their job, training was pumped in, and they moved from $11 an hour to $17 an hour because now they are automation cell techs.”
Corey Carolla proudly says, “It’s been a great journey and we’re just scratching the surface.” You can expect to hear a lot of great things from the small company that was spun off from Vickers Engineering as they innovate for the future through ingenuity, and good old American know-how.
