“I Don’t Want to Be the Bottleneck”: How Method MFG Builds a Flexible Aerospace Shop
Founder and CEO Rhys Andersen on systems, quality, and experimenting with technology in a high-demand aerospace machine shop.
Rhys Andersen never planned on running an AS9100 aerospace machine shop outside Austin, but he has spent most of his life learning how to build systems that hold up when things get chaotic.
In conversation with Fulcrum’s Sunny Han on the Capacity podcast, Andersen traces that approach all the way back to a sewer business in Montana and summers on wildland fires. “I grew up in a shop back home in Montana,” he says. “My family had a sewer business. We built most of the equipment for the sewer business, and then that business also translated into contracting equipment to the government.”
He remembers long winters welding and running manual machines, alongside a neighbor across the street who made competition rifles. “I just knew I always liked to make things,” he says. Watching raw material turn into precision hardware “was just really interesting” and seeded his obsession with how work gets done on the floor.
From fires to five-axis: treating problems as puzzles to solve
Before Method MFG, Andersen’s main career was fighting wildfires. “When I turned 18, it was expected that I would start fighting fires,” he says. “I worked my way up to engine boss. I would take out a crew. We’d go everywhere from like anywhere in Montana to California.”
That experience shaped how he now thinks about process and communication. On large incidents, he recalls, “you’d have 1000s of people working on a shared goal. If you don’t have systems in place and you can’t communicate, you run into issues.” According to Andersen, most serious accidents on fires “almost always boil down to communication.”
He says that is why he leans so heavily on checklists and visual cues. On the fire line, drafting water required turning valves in a very specific order while radios were blaring and stress was high. “I’d watch these guys on the back of their truck struggling to pull a draft because they weren’t turning the right valves,” he says. His solution was simple: “We’re gonna put colored tape on all of these valves, and then there’s gonna be a little card that’s like, if we’re drafting, turn all the yellow valves this way, all the blue valves that way.”
“The same mentality works out in machining,” he says. If someone runs into an issue, he wants them to have a checklist so “they can run through and be like, Oh, I forgot to do this. That’s why that happened,” instead of relying on tribal knowledge.
That mindset carried him through some rough early chapters. His first fabrication company “went horribly south” with a business partner whose goals did not match his. Later, he bought a huge used CNC mill in a dirt-floor barn, rebuilt it himself, and discovered the control was inverted only after crashing a marker through a cardboard box into the table. He sums up his attitude simply: “You just have to always figure things out. I just view things as problems to solve, and that’s all it is.”
Designing a shop where no one person is a single point of failure
Growing up, Andersen watched his dad successfully run a business “mainly without any systems.” He calls it impressive, but he also says it showed him what not to replicate. “My dad ran his entire business out of his head,” he says. “That causes a lot of problems when you try to scale something.”
From the start at Method MFG, he says he did not want to be that kind of bottleneck. “I try to shove as much into the organization because I don’t want to be the bottleneck,” he says. “If you have everything based on a key person, anything could happen to that key person.”
That principle shows up in how he thinks about skills and roles on the floor. Andersen describes a time when only one machinist could run their nicest five-axis machines. “If he didn’t come in, or if he was late, or if his dog got sick, that would affect our production,” he says. Now, he explains, “we want everybody up to speed so that everybody’s interchangeable.” He believes that is better for the business and also for employees, because “they’re not the point of failure” and can take care of life without feeling like the whole schedule depends on them.
He approaches systems the same way he approaches troubleshooting. “One of the big things that I often see is that people try to change too many variables at one time,” he says. In the shop, that means he pushes his team to “make slow, incremental adjustments” and change one thing at a time when a part or machine is behaving badly. According to Andersen, teaching that way of working lets you “bring somebody up a lot faster.”
That disciplined approach extends into software and planning. Before an ERP, he tracked everything on a large Excel workbook. As the shop grew, he tried multiple systems and even lived through a failed ERP implementation that his team eventually abandoned. Looking back, he says the homegrown spreadsheet worked because “our Excel sheet was a linear process,” while the ERP they dropped forced users to “jump around” and juggle several tabs at once. When they went shopping again, he says they looked for an ERP where “you can fumble your way through” a linear progression from quote to ship.
Betting on aerospace, automation, and constant technology trials
Method MFG is now predominantly an aerospace shop. That path started with a serendipitous connection to a spacesuit program and a customer who agreed to treat them as AS9100 from day one. “We entered the prototyping phase with the understanding that we would get AS9100 certification,” Andersen says. “They would treat everything from the start as if we were AS9100, which was painful in the beginning because we didn’t know anything about it.”
The experience forced the team to learn aerospace documentation in detail. Over time, he says, they brought in more experienced machinists and a veteran quality manager. “We quickly realized that if this is the path we’re going to pursue, we’ve got to really dial ourselves into it,” he says. “You can’t really do it halfway.” Today, he estimates that “probably 80 to 85 percent” of Method’s work is aerospace.
He believes success in that environment starts at the quote. “A lot more needs to go on on the front end when you are quoting stuff,” he says. His quality manager will comb through customer quality clauses and point out hidden requirements. “When somebody sends you that, you need to read through it, and you need to really understand what their expectations are, so that you’re on the same page,” Andersen says. He notes that two identical parts can require very different levels of paperwork depending on the customer.
Underneath the quality work is a deliberate approach to capital and capacity. Andersen says he continually reviews data on how each machine performs. He describes a relatively new machine they are removing from the floor in favor of more automation. “For the space that that machine’s taking up, it’s not worth having here,” he says. “We need to put in the right tool so that we can get through our parts faster.”
On staffing and automation, he prefers to invest in robots before adding shifts. “Right now, we’re investing heavily in automation,” he says. “I would rather have a robot work a third shift than have my people do that.” For him, automation is less about replacing people and more about raising the level of work. If the robot loads parts, he says, “they can be programming something or working on sorting out what’s going on with a first article.”
Andersen applies the same experimental mindset to software and CAM. “We are constantly testing things all the time,” he says. At any given moment, they may have “multiple CAM systems that we don’t use for our daily driver, but we’re just keeping a pulse on things” while also building their own tools. He calls the cost of that exploration “just the cost of being on the tip of technology.”
Looking ahead, he expects Method MFG to keep doubling down on aerospace and expansion, but he wants the current facility to stay as the place where experimentation happens. “Right now, we’re dialing in our system,” he says. “I view this as our incubator spot that we test things out, and then as we expand, the other locations maybe are more fixed in how we do things, but this exists as our innovation center.” He is also actively exploring different growth paths, including outside capital, and says the main question for him is whether each option “matches my goals and what I want to do, and does it still give my team the flexibility that I want.”
When he thinks about the pace of new technology and automation, Andersen admits it is hard to know whether he is ahead or behind on any given day, but his bias is toward optimism. “A lot of the technology is giving the guys on the floor the ability to do more challenging and exciting work and actually get better at what they’re doing,” he says. “If we have every machine loading itself, that’s just going to give us additional capacity to do more.”
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