When Demand Outruns the Factory, Metal 3D Printing & Earning Buyers' Trust with Gary Yeager

Sure. I’m Gary Yeager. Out of college I bounced around with Chubb Group in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and New York, then left to join a startup in Atlanta that got bought by Verizon. I came to Philadelphia forty years ago, just as cellular was kicking off. Everyone forgets how hectic that period was, with systems that were very expensive and service that wasn’t that good.
I left the phone company and we started buying businesses for our own account, so I’ve owned several businesses over the past twenty years or so. We started SOUL Performance about ten years ago with the idea that we could provide a great product, great service, and great fitment and performance. It has been a really great ride.

Leaving Chubb had to do with the fact that all of a sudden there were people making decisions about my career who didn’t even know me. That was uncomfortable, because I might not be everyone’s cup of tea, though I’m relatively capable. At the phone company, I was thirty-five years old and they said, “We really like you, and in twenty-five years we’re going to give you the same kind of responsibility you have today.” That didn’t seem very attractive.
So I went on my own and started buying businesses for my own account. I like manufacturing an awful lot. The first one was a turnaround, store fixtures. I grew it from two million to twelve million, and then, with consolidation in the industry, sold out. I goofed off for four years, traveled the world, played three hundred rounds of golf a year, and went back to work. I always say I’ve already had my retirement, so if I work to the day I die, I’m okay with that.
So we started SOUL Performance, and we’ve done incredibly well. We grew the company significantly through COVID, and I’ve come to the conclusion that any business that can grow during COVID is a good business. We’ve continued to grow and invested heavily. This year we expanded our manufacturing space from 15,000 to 30,000 square feet, and we invested in two metal 3D printers.

The idea of the 3D printers is that we can print metal in ways that you can’t bend it or cut it. One of our significant builds might be twenty pieces, where I have a welder piecing parts together for six hours and welding for two. If we can reduce those twenty pieces to five that fit perfectly, I have someone welding for six hours and fitting for two, so we’re looking to double our productivity.
That being said, we have the longest lead times we’ve ever had, and we’re doing everything we can to fix every bottleneck. The bottleneck in shipping, we expanded and took care of. Heat shielding was another, and we doubled capacity there. And then there’s the way we finish our product. The industry standard was polished stainless steel, and if you’ve ever polished stainless steel, it’s the worst job in the world. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. It’s dirty, it’s wet, and you’re pressing against the wheel the whole time.
So we wanted to find another way to finish our product, which is always a risk. When I first started working, I went out with an inspector to the house of a wealthy guy in western Pennsylvania who turned out to be the CEO of Channellock. I asked him, “What’s the biggest decision you ever made?” He said it was when they had to switch from brass, which was getting too expensive, to stainless steel. He said, “I didn’t know if I was ever going to sell another one.” I felt the same way about our decision to go with glass bead. The industry’s over here, we’re over here, is it going to work? It turned out that people love the finish, and once it’s heat-soaked it turns into this bronzy gold with a great look. We got very lucky, and it’s become one of our signature attributes.

We have one guy in particular, John Gatos, but our other salespeople are also the most knowledgeable guys in the business. There isn’t anything they can’t answer, so you understand exactly what you’re buying and that it’s the right thing for you, whether it’s a full system, just the cat-back, or just headers. What are you trying to do? We’re going to get you to that spot. It should be easy to do, but there’s always skepticism with first-time customers, so we have a policy that if you’re not happy with it, send it back.
I’ve changed my position on that a little bit. We had a Cayman GT4 RS that we bought to develop product on. Before that, we would borrow a car from someone like you for a couple of weeks, and we wouldn’t do a great job of developing the product and tooling it properly. Now that we had our own car, we could do a first-rate job, and we’ve bought four cars now. We’ve sold two and a half million dollars off that platform alone.
I love that car. It’s nothing more than a street-legal race car with a nine-thousand-RPM engine, and it was the last naturally aspirated flat-six Porsche is ever going to make. It was loud and fast and I loved everything about it. So when someone would say, “My wife thinks it’s too loud,” or “My neighbors think it’s too loud,” I would say, “No problem, just send it back.” Now I add, “But you’re a wuss.”

Yeah. Really, it’s just complete customer satisfaction. And like I said earlier, we could be doing $200,000 more a month if we had the capacity, because some people just aren’t going to wait. Our customers are the type of people who want it and want it now, so we’re doing everything we can to fix that.
The whole goal of this expansion, the metal 3D printing, the more efficient shipping, the second glass bead machine, and the heat shielding, is to get to lead times of one to two weeks with half a million dollars of finished inventory. Until we’re there, I don’t consider all the things we’ve done a success.
You also want to be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. I’m actually thinking about that with the third metal 3D printer, because it’s four times as big as the larger one we already have. The manufacturer is coming in for three weeks to set it up and get it running, so it’s a significant endeavor, and not an insignificant amount of money.

We’ve really soft-sold it. We got the first printers last November, and I can guarantee you there are 3D printers out there that people spent half a million to a million bucks on that aren’t running. The software to run the machine is thirty thousand dollars a year, it’s that much more sophisticated. We had to spend twenty-two thousand dollars on a computer to run it, and you can buy a great computer for a thousand bucks. That’s not even close to what we need to run this machine properly. It was a learning curve.
There’s a lot of romance to metal 3D printing. It’s a great concept, and when you see a piece that can only be 3D printed, that can’t be bent or cut in that shape, it’s pretty gratifying. But the process isn’t nearly as romantic. When you look in the machine, all you see is lasers dancing around, taking stainless steel and making it into a form. Then you have to finish it, and we’re looking to give it the same appearance as a regular piece of metal.
The other advantage is that there are no seams and no welds, so it’s inherently stronger than any other way you can do it. Reducing the number of pieces from twenty down to five also speaks for itself. It’ll help us close that gap on lead times and finished inventory.

It’s a combination of the forums, like Lamborghini Talk, where those guys hang out and our salespeople hang out, so the forums are important. Social media is important too. And we try to put as much content out there as we can so people can get an idea of what their car is going to sound like. There aren’t many cars we don’t have a video of. When you have somebody talking about our product on your car, you can expect a similar experience with it.
And we keep bringing out new product. I hated to give up that GT4 RS, because I think in ten years it could be worth a million bucks, since it’s the last naturally aspirated flat-six Porsche is ever going to make, and everything’s turbocharged now. The second car we wanted wasn’t available, so we got a base 911 Turbo and made product for it, and we’ve sold several hundred thousand dollars of that product. The car we wanted was a 911 GTS, the hot car a year ago, and we’ve been really successful with that product. A few months ago we purchased a 911 Turbo S, and we’ve just released the first products on it. This is the first product line that significantly introduces metal 3D printing.
Part of it is the shape. It’s common sense if you think about it, but you never think about it because it’s not really a possibility. Brass instruments, whether it’s a trombone or a bugle, are shaped the way they are because they produce different sounds. We found that by changing the shape of the metal tubing, we can get a different sound.
When we were kicking off the 911 Turbo S product, these guys kept saying, “Let’s print another one.” Before, a system was so difficult to make or change that we were reluctant to do it. Now that we can print another one overnight, they say, “Let’s change it a little bit. Let’s change it a little bit.” And I’m going, “Guys, it’s good. Quit. Let’s get this product shipping, and if we have to make changes, we can, but let’s move forward.” It’s a funny reversal of what we’ve had for ten years.

It’s really not a significant part of our operation yet. We’ve spent time on it, we’ve purchased AI, and it’s available to our employees. I really can’t tell you how much it’s used. I know two people who use it significantly, but for the rest, our business is so hands-on. It’s guys like you calling us and saying, “I want to do something like this with my car,” and you go through the whole thing. From a sales process standpoint, it’s very much a hands-on, trust-development sort of thing. We’re just going to have to wait and see.
There are a lot of things I like about this business, and one is that it’s relatively simple once you have the right people in the manufacturing positions. You purchase ahead so you’re never short on anything. We spent five hundred and fifty thousand dollars on catalytic converters that will take us through the first year. If demand picks up, we’re able to fulfill it, short of our production limitations. And hopefully the bigger 3D printer will do significantly more. If the old machine could make five of something at one time, this one can make twenty.
Say you want one piece and it takes eighteen hours. If you do five pieces, it takes twenty-five hours. So we’re starting to get some productivity out of it, but it’s a process. Some of our guys are even frustrated, saying it doesn’t look as good as they’d like. I tell them, “Guys, the first time you ever did a weld, was it as good as you can weld right now?” Same kind of thing. In the next three months, you’ll still be able to tell that it’s 3D printed, but once it’s in the box and shipped to you, it’s going to look almost exactly the same as non-3D-printed parts, and it’s going to be better.
With 3D printing you’re down to the thousandths of an inch. The way I set the business up, and other people do it differently, I didn’t want to invest in metal bending or CNC machines for cutting metal. We purchased that. What we are, with about forty-five people now, is great welders. People come up to me at a show, and you can tell whether they’re interested in buying or not, but they look at it and say, “Man, that’s the best welds I’ve ever seen.” So we’re great welders, our product has really good fitment, and as we’ve talked about before, we stand behind it. You have a problem, we’ll fix it or take it back.

We have a large runway in the things we’re doing. Ancillary to great customer service and a really good reputation, we’ve expanded into a line of wheels. We do a couple million dollars in wheels and a couple million dollars in reselling other people’s products.
The first goal, as I’ve said, is to get lead times down to one or two weeks with half a million dollars of finished inventory. Then when guys like you call and say, “Listen, I’ve got a race next week, I need this tomorrow,” we’ll be able to fill that need.
The next step is to keep developing products for the cars we do a lot of, which is Porsche, Lamborghini, McLaren, a couple of Ferraris, a couple of BMWs, a couple of Mercedes. One possibility is that we move downscale with the 3D printing. I expect my guys to learn and get better, and they should expect the same from me. I did the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. I got up every Friday at five o’clock, went downtown to Philadelphia to the community college, and spent the entire day with those guys from September to December. From that came the idea of, what if we move downscale? The guys with the BRZs and the Lexuses want to do the same thing to their car, but they’re not going to spend what a guy spends on his three or four hundred thousand dollar car.
My partners laughed at me. They said you can’t compete with the cheap stuff coming out of China. Well, the world’s changed. When you add in tariffs, duties and shipping, all of a sudden I think there’s that possibility. I could still be wrong, but we’re making it here, we have a great reputation in one area, and we can carry it over to another because we’re going to make a great product there, the best you can buy.
The other possibility with the 3D printing is this. The two machines we have run ninety-eight percent of the time, twenty-four hours a day. But if we ever get spare time, I know there are a lot of guys like us who, when they order a part, have to wait four to six weeks. If you ordered a part from us, we could have it back to you in two or three days. What I’d look for is a company that wants a hundred widgets a month, and I could have five or six customers like that. A lot of people who buy these machines go into aerospace and medical devices, making hips and that kind of thing. We’re never going to do that, but there are other people who need quicker turnarounds. That’s six to twelve months down the road.
I was just loading this machine off the truck yesterday, and it’s so much bigger. I wonder if we didn’t bite off more than we could chew. But we have a leg up because we’ve been very successful. I’ve talked to the people we buy our machines from, and they can’t believe what we’ve been able to do in less than a year. It’s a really good partnership, and from the big-picture standpoint it’s very exciting.
Like I said, the romance can go quickly when you’re watching the laser dance around and you don’t see an end product until it’s completely done. The other time the romance ended for me was when I had to get a part out of the finishing machine. You put a big plastic sleeve on, put your hand down into this muck, and you know what it feels like. And it’s like, okay, the romance is over for me.

Sure thing. Thanks for having me, and good luck.