Vinh Tran spent 31 years in automotive, before he became the first employee for an autonomous robotics company.

Vinh shared his story about his boxing career. He trained two nights a week for 6 months, and fought in front of a sold out room at the Grand Hyatt in Tokyo. He learned the importance of being prepared.

That same mindset - prepare for the fight before you ever step in the ring - is what he leaned on when he left a stable executive career to start something from nothing at MyBull Intelligence Machinery, which builds outdoor autonomous mobile robots.

Here’s what we covered on the podcast:

→ Moving his family to Japan and learning the farmer mindset with customers

→ The six month lead up to a charity boxing match

→ Why his wife Liz has been the reason he could take every risk he's taken

→ Building the customer trust process from scratch as employee number one

→ What MyBull is solving with outdoor autonomous mobile robots

Thank you to Vinh for making the time between running MyBull's expansion across and everything else on his plate to come on the show!

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:00 From Wayne State to CRO of an autonomous robotics company

01:56 23 years at Continental, from project manager to VP

05:09 The calculated risk of moving his family to Japan

06:49 Learning the farmer mindset with customers

12:03 Signing up for Executive Fight Night

15:11 Meeting the kid his fight was for

21:17 Inside the fight night at the Grand Hyatt

33:26 A shoutout to his wife, Liz

38:34 Becoming employee number one at MyBull

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Lori Lancaster is currently the Vice Chairwoman of Emotiv Mobility. But before that, she was a critical care nurse in the surgical ICU at Mass General.

Twelve and a half years ago, her sister asked her to come help run the family business... Lori didn't know the industry, didn't know the language, and said yes anyway.

Then the whole industry pivoted hard toward electric vehicles, and her company didn't move. Instead of following the trend, she instead built transformers for the power grid, now in testing, aiming to be made right here in Michigan!

What we covered:

→ Leaving nursing for a family business she didn't understand yet

→ Why she held her company back from the EV rush everyone else was chasing

→ Building a new transformer manufacturing business from scratch

→ Learning automotive slang the hard way, code blue included

→ The advice she'd give her 25 year old self about perfectionism

Thank you Lori for making time between running two companies and sitting on four boards to sit down with me to Talk Real Shift!

Chapters

00:00 Welcome to Talk Real Shift

01:00 From critical care nurse to Vice Chair

03:00 The pivots that got her here

07:00 Choices, not sacrifices

09:00 The servant leaders who shaped her

12:00 Betting against the EV rush

22:00 Turning transformers into a new business

26:00 Her sister's White House moment

31:00 Advice to her 25 year old self

36:00 Code blue, and other lessons from the plant floor

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This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

Joe Fadool is the President and CEO of BorgWarner, a company with 38,000 people and products riding on some of the toughest trucks and SUVs in the world.

His path wasn't a straight line… Joe took a role too early in his career. He missed deadlines on a launch and was ultimately pulled from the job. In a later role, he was missing his son's birthdays for two years because of the travel.

He went to his boss and said he had to get off the road, but he was instead offered a turnaround: a billion dollar unionized manufacturing plant in Huntsville.

Joe calls it the best thing that ever happened to him - it got him home for dinner, and it was the operational experience that opened the door to BorgWarner.

In this episode of Talk Real Shift, we covered:

→ Why operational experience is the price of entry for leadership at BorgWarner

→ The difference between one way and two way decisions

→ How to tell when someone is in the wrong role instead of the wrong company

→ What generative AI means for people who didn't start on the same line as everyone else

→ The moment he got pulled from a job, and what he did with it afterward

Thank you Joe for making the time to Talk Real Shift - running a company doesn't leave a lot of open time, and he still showed up ready to talk. Glad to have this conversation with you!

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:00 Trivia, the pink hat, and a shoutout to the Livonia team

06:30 From a kid tearing down engines to an engineer at Ford

08:00 The leap from engineering into sales

19:41 The failure that got him pulled from a role

20:39 Choosing family over the road, and the plant that changed everything

22:09 Why the shipping doors are the most important doors in the company

33:08 Right person, wrong role: the nine box problem

37:18 One way doors and two way doors: how he makes big decisions

51:10 Advice to his younger self, and where generative AI fits in

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304