Irregardless

49: NASCC 2026 Special - Steel Industry Insights from the Show Floor

We're taking Irregardless to NASCC! This special episode was recorded at NASCC 2026 in Atlanta, where Rachel was joined by three guests from across the steel industry. Tyler Sease, President of Southern Steel Engineers, talks about building a niche structural engineering firm that works exclusively with fabricators, detailers, and erectors. Haylee Fort, Business Development at Willbanks Metals, shares her unconventional path into the steel industry and what she loves about the supplier side of the business. And Mike Brown, PM and Structural Engineer at John A. Martin and Associates (JAMA), gives us a look at how a 75-year-old LA firm serves steel fabricators and contractors nationwide. Three guests, one conference, a whole lot of steel industry insight.

48: Jonah Myerberg Pt. 2 - Inside Desktop Metal's Blueprint for Manufacturing

In Part 2, Rachel continues her conversation with Jonah Myerberg, CTO and co-founder of Desktop Metal. Jonah breaks down exactly how Desktop Metal's binder jetting technology works and why it's fundamentally different from the laser-based metal printing that came before it. From printing green parts at room temperature to sintering in a furnace, he makes a complex manufacturing process surprisingly easy to understand. The conversation gets into the real economics of scaling a deep tech company, what it actually takes to bring metal additive manufacturing to mass production, and why Desktop Metal's approach has the potential to change how things are made across industries. If you've ever wondered how metal parts go from powder to a finished product, this is the episode.

47: Jonah Myerberg Pt. 1 - From Power Tools to Formula 1 Podiums

In Part 1 of Ep. 47, Jonah Myerberg, CTO and co-founder of Desktop Metal, joins Rachel to share his unconventional career path through mechanical engineering. He discusses his time designing power tools at Black & Decker, developing speaker systems at Bose, and later revolutionizing battery technology for Formula 1 racing. Jonah covers his work at A123 Systems developing high-performance battery packs for Mercedes and Porsche, and how hybrid regulations transformed motorsports.  Part 2 will dive deeper into Desktop Metal's founding story and what makes the company different in the additive manufacturing space.

46: Emmy Ross - From Weddings to Welding

Emmy Ross, Director of Business Development at Astro Metal Craft and StellarCraft, joins us to talk about growing a custom metal fabrication business and the unique challenge of marketing to two very different worlds: architects and industrial buyers. Emmy walks us through landmark projects like the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport and the Minnesota State Office Building, and explains how StellarCraft is carving out its own identity in architectural metals. Emmy's path to metal fabrication is anything but straight. After 15 years running a wedding and event planning business, she came on full-time at the family business in 2023 and hasn't looked back. We cover industrial marketing, the time/cost/quality tradeoff, a fresh ERP rollout, and what it takes to spin StellarCraft off as its own women-owned certified company.

45: Matthew Nix - From Horseshoes to Heavy Industrial

In this episode, Shep Hickey sits down with Matthew Nix, founder of Nix Companies and fifth-generation owner of what started as a blacksmith shop in the late 1800s. Matthew shares the story of a family business that spent four generations quietly defying the odds, never growing, never dying, staying strictly mom-and-pop. When Matthew joined, everything changed. He walks through how he spotted the opportunity in the baby boomer wealth transfer, built a roll-up strategy around adjacent metal shops, and created a shared services model that lets each location stay lean while punching above its weight. They also dig into the entrepreneurial mindset, the cash flow lesson he learned the hard way during a record growth year, how mentorship has shaped his career, and why watching his 11-year-old build a video game with AI in an afternoon was a wake-up call. Oh, and his family's full story is chronicled in the book Forging Ahead, available now on Amazon.