#138 Scaling manufacturing ventures, fundraising, Shark Tank success with Mitch Cahn and Audley Wilson

We discussed a few things including:1. Their career journeys 2. Roboburger and Shark Tank success3. Unionwear's long term growth4. How the ecosystem has supported them5. Trends, challenges and opportunities re manufacturingMitch started Unionwear in 1992 with six sewers and a contract to make baseball hats for Ralph Lauren.Now Unionwear is one of the largest private employers of Newark residents, with 175 employees, and contracts to manufacture baseball hats and uniform headwear, medical bags and backpacks, and binders and portfolios for every branch of the armed services, every presidential candidate for decades, domestic manufacturers like Budweiser and Chrysler, and fashion brands such as Vineyard Vines and Supreme.Unionwear won the SEAMS Domestic Textile Association's inaugural 'Reshoring Award" for bringing textile jobs back to America in 2019 and was named to Fortune Magazine’s Inner City 100 list. Mitch has received the New Jersey Manufacturing Lifetime Achievement Award from NJBIA and was just named to NJBIZ magazine's 100 most powerful businesspeople in NJ and 10 most powerful people in New Jersey Manufacturing.Mitch has been named an Industry Scholar at Rutgers Business School and is on the board of Newark Regional Business Partnership, NJ Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and the Newark Workforce Development Board, where he has served as Chairman.Mitch is a frequent panelist, podcast guest, and guest lecturer on topics including fair labor, lean manufacturing, cloud mobile ERP, cobranding with Made in USA, and has appeared on TV shows ranging from The Profit to The Daily Show.----Audley is the CEO and Partner, as well as the inventor and the restless mind behind the RoboBurger.He has been passioned by robotics and automation from a young age, and one of his teenage years robotics prototypes got him a scholarship at Carnegie Mellon.He attended Carnegie Mellon, receiving a BS in Business. During his senior year (2004) he started the Hkan Hookah Bar and Grill. There he learned what it takes to run a restaurant and the problems associated with a large staff and facility.Audley went on to start a career in the field of analytics in New York City, amassing 14 years of experience leading analytics teams for companies of all sizes. Over this time he guided many businesses to higher ROI, through cost reduction and optimization.He focuses on the operations side of the business such as partner management, the operations team, servicing units and inventory control databases and optimizations of our systems.#podcast #AFewThingsPodcast