Michael King has been building foil machinery since he was 14 years old, working alongside his father in Little Italy. Today his company, Eagle Systems in Ocean, New Jersey, has 1,500 machines running worldwide, and 85 percent of every machine is built from American made parts.
If you have ever picked up a box of hair color at CVS, a chocolate bar, a whiskey box, or a Pokemon card with a metallic finish on it, there is a strong chance it ran through one of Michael's machines.
In this episode, Michael explains the difference between hot foil and cold foil, why the printing and packaging world is growing instead of shrinking, and how a 19 person team out-earns the much larger company he used to run. He also gets into the remote diagnostics system he wrote himself in 1982 over a 300 baud modem, decades before the big manufacturers offered anything like it.
We also cover the tariff math that has kept American machine builders out of markets like India and China for years, what is finally changing, and why he thinks manufacturing has to come back or we become a service country.
Michael closes with some straight talk for the next generation: the 50 welders he interviewed in 4 years who could not weld, the intern who switched majors after one conversation and now works there full time, and the mentor who called him every Sunday night for years to yell at him or pat him on the back.
Guest: Michael King, Eagle Systems
