Andrew Kittleson: Welcome to the Your Gateway to Wealth and Fulfillment Podcast. I'm Andrew Kittleson, joined by my team member Candace Cline. We are Financial Advisors with Gateway Wealth Management at UBS. We’re located in Charlotte, North Carolina and can be reached at 704-362-8260. Our guests today are Josh and Tony Tarbutton of Bravo Team. They’re not affiliated with UBS and their views are their own.
Andrew Kittleson: We're always fascinated when someone in academia is successful in transitioning from the classroom into the business world. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, Josh?
Josh Tarbutton: Sure. Thank you very much for having me, we're glad to be here. I'm a mechanical engineer and a soldier. Joined the Army to kind of help pay for school. And I'm here with Tony. We actually met in our freshman year. We met at a small liberal arts college in Northeast Georgia. And I wanted to transfer to be an engineer, so I transferred to Georgia Tech, she stayed there. I was able to finish and I was deployed to Iraq my graduating semester. I had to come back. I finished and we had a baby in between, and then I decided to go to grad school. At the time, my advisor was teaching at Georgia Tech. He was moving to Clemson to take over the role of directing the International Center for Automotive Research at ICAR, and so we decided to sell our house and go to Clemson.
And it's one of the best things that we ever did because we had the rest of our children in South Carolina and got my master's and my PhD. And then I did an industry postdoc in Charlotte in 2011. And that was really my first exposure to the Charlotte area and we loved it. We got a house with all the wonderful things in Charlotte, pools and green ways and nice people. It was really wonderful. And I got a job teaching in 2012 at USC. And so the postdoc ended in Charlotte, and I went and taught at the University of South Carolina for five years, four and a half years. Four years? Four years. And then came and was recruited to UNCC and taught there for five and a half years.
I might have my dates a little mixed up. But all mechanical engineering, my research area was in signal systems, controls and manufacturing, specifically in automated tool path planning and kind of looking at how do we increase the productivity of machining through novel algorithms, architectures and using some of the new computing resources. So all mechanical engineering, and then I kind of realized that I didn't make enough money for the future. And it's funny, people say, "Oh, you're smart." And I said, "Well, if I was more intelligent, I might've figured out how money worked."
And so of course, I loved engineering and I really just wanted to do that. So then I kind of had to figure out a way to make more money than I could as a professor. I started doing some consulting and that led to us starting another company, which I got voted out of. And then eventually Bravo Team, which, we've now been in business, this is our eighth year. I know we've hit the Inc. 5000 list three times and the Charlotte Fast 50 twice and we've grown to about a little shy of 60 people.
Andrew Kittleson: Well, that's impressive. That's a short period of time to grow a successful startup.
Josh Tarbutton: It was pretty remarkable. I'm really glad I have my wife here because she's a witness to it all and the reason that I haven't lost my mind and all of those things along the way.
Andrew Kittleson: Tony, what was it like? I imagine when you were teaching and doing the consulting, that's probably a lot of hours. And life is expensive, especially if you have four kids like you do, so I get that. What was it like trying to support him when he was spending so much time in the classroom and consulting and then ultimately, I guess transitioning into Bravo Team?
Tony Tarbutton I'd like to set the record straight. We got married before we had children, he just kind of said [inaudible 00:04:18] out there. Our first year of marriage, he was deployed to Iraq. I was working on my master's at Georgia State in special ed. So I actually taught for the school system that I grew up in for two years in Gwinnett County. And so I was consumed with creating a home for my husband. Because when he left to Iraq, we had family housing at Georgia Tech, and then I had to move out because he had left. Anyway, since I was a student at Georgia State.
But moving back, I've always been occupied with creating a home, engineering memories for the four kids that we homeschooled, that we agreed to homeschool through high school together, so I was very much occupied with play dates and mom's club. I knew that wherever I went, I had to find support for myself because I'm responsible for my choices and for the home that I create. And so there was really no time. I mean, I was surprised he'd come home and I had stuff to do still. There was just always something to do until recently, whereas the youngest is now 16 and things have tapered off on the home front in many ways.
Candace Cline: It sounds like it was busy, busy, busy for chaos a little bit?
Tony Tarbutton Yes, I said I was managing chaos with joy. And that was a practice I had to master.
Andrew Kittleson: Josh, making the transition, what sort of academic reflex did you have to unlearn? You pride yourself on how fast you move as a company in designing things and bringing that timeline down for a client of yours. What academic reflex did you have to unlearn in order to move faster?
Josh Tarbutton: Well, if you ask people around me, they'll probably say I haven't unlearned many of the things I probably need to unlearn. I would say when you're in academia, it's very much about the human development, the mind of the engineer. You're trying to create new neural networks in their brains with a curriculum and learning objectives. And so I'd say that's very much in our DNA at Bravo Team, is putting people in circumstances where they can learn and grow. And I would say I probably staffed some of the projects wrong early on and didn't hire at a higher level for some of the stuff that we did, just because the academic in me wanted to kind of work with some people that were probably in more need of investment and mentoring for some of the projects. So, just kind of level setting the right level of effort on a project.
And so what would happen, and the customer wouldn't suffer, we would just spend more time. And to me, it was a good investment of time because I was thinking still very much like a professor and not a business owner. And so if we didn't lose money on a project and the employee that's working on it grew and their mind expanded and we were able to grow in the work, then it was a win for me. And so it was kind of like a constant mindset of investing versus operating and running the company. So really, I mean, I was a mechanical engineer. I had very little financial and business training other than what I read from books and listened to other people.
And so I'd say my mindset towards doing the work was more research focused, more growth in the individuals and probably less on timeline and execution and profitability. I feel like the heart of engineering is a creative process, it can be a very artistic process. And if we try to squeeze too much out of it, it's like trying to squeeze too much out of an artist and there's that tension between the two. I'd say the academic mind in me always leans towards the less profitable side because a lot of us would do the work even if we didn't get paid. Obviously, we'd have to get paid and do that, but there's enough joy in the work. That part of it is a mindset that I definitely have to be aware of.
Candace Cline: 60 people on your team, how do you get everybody to mesh well together? What's been one of your biggest challenges as far as that goes?
Josh Tarbutton: I think in business, people can be the biggest challenge in most businesses, but I think usually it's not the people that's the problem, it's the process. And so our mindset is that if there's a problem in the business, first of all, let's assume it's not a people problem, let's assume it's a process problem. It's very much the Army way, too. The Army way is you set up your soldiers for success. And if your soldiers don't do well, it's on you. And so there's this extreme ownership mindset in the military where you as a leader have a responsibility to set everybody up for success. But managing creative work with that many people, and we have a machine shop as well, we do fabrication and machining and welding and we do some service work in the field, and so organizing that is very challenging.
But it's really organizing the creative work, assembling the right people and the right teams with the right skillsets, and then managing the timeline. That is the hardest part of the business. It becomes a lot easier when you create healthy relationships with customers that already know what you can do. And so fortunately, we've finally been in business long enough where we get repeat work and a lot of that work is a little bit less chaotic to manage.
But the new work with the new customers is hard, especially for expensive projects, because there's a lot of fear associated with it because we're often creating things that don't exist. And we're telling people, "Yeah, we can create this that you've never seen before. Of course we can do that." And they don't have that domain knowledge. It's kind of like if you're not a chef and somebody's asking you to make a meal, you just have to have the right combination of things to bring to the table. And so we're better now than we used to be at that, but that is one of the hardest part, is to manage that chaos.
Candace Cline: How do you balance your work life with your personal life and making sure you spend time with Tony and your kids?
Tony Tarbutton I want to point out something that he kind of goes over. He's an expert in systems and signals. And I asked a friend who's an engineer and she said, "Basically, it's where they know that there's a solution for all." And so when it comes to managing and balancing that life work schedule, he just finds ways to connect. It's just making time, it's just dropping what you're doing and doing nothing together. And we do a lot of that together in between showing up for the things we have to when it comes to Bravo Team.
Josh Tarbutton: Well, I think a lot of it's being honest about your needs and letting other people be honest about their needs. And I think it's a negotiation of resources, but Tony has been by my side since the beginning. I've accomplished a lot in my life. None of it would've gone as well as it did without all the support that she gave me, so she gave me the freedom. It's like we kind of negotiated our needs. And then of course, we didn't know what we were doing when we were younger, so there's a lot of anger, frustration, resentment that we had to work through like any relationship with another human-
Tony Tarbutton We were 21 and 22 when we got married and had our first kid at 23, so we were kids still growing up. And when you realize you can't know what you can't know until you know it, then you have compassion for yourself. And I kind of wish that some things that we know now, that if we had known that there were phases you go through as a human being through life, it would've been helpful to be kinder to each other when we were not in those phases that we will eventually get to as we approach 90.
Josh Tarbutton: Yeah. And our childhoods, they gave us opportunities to learn resilience that a lot of other people just don't have and we wouldn't wish it on them. But my mom died when I was 13. I didn't have a GED or a diploma when I was starting to go to school, I had to get a conditional acceptance. There was just a lot of hurdles along the way that when we were adults and we were working together, it actually seemed easier because we had each other and life was hard and we made our lives very difficult for ourselves. We probably didn't need to do it like we did it, but we were like anybody else. We were just waking up and doing the best we could and reading books and listening to dreams and imagining different futures and trying to work on our emotional health and trying not to screw up our kids too much and try not to lose money and maybe it'll work out.
And this year, 2025 is the first year since we've been together in our entire marriage where we've ever had any sense of financial peace or time. This is the first year, so we pretty much have worked since we've known each other, pretty much 25 years nonstop to get to this place. And we worked together. And so we get to share in the rewards together and it was worth it. And this is what we were going for, we were pulling for this future. We had a really good, probably about eight years ago when I was voted out of the other company, very emotional time. I felt like I got hit by a truck, totally blindsided. Put my whole heart into it for a whole year and I walked away with $183.
It was a failure in many ways and I'd taken a lot of time away from the kids and all this stuff. But then serendipitously, Tony found out about different ways of managing yourself through meditation and other practices. And I actually saw her change and that's what got me into exploring different ways to manage my own ability to calm my nervous system. And so that's been a whole nother journey for us along the way. But I'd say only by really negotiating with each other, what your needs are, can you even begin to try to manage the chaos. But when two people work together, I mean, they can do so much more than they can do by themselves. And my life is just an example of that. Everything I have is pretty much because Tony worked with me.
Andrew Kittleson: It's really that one plus one is something more than two. And based on what you're saying, it sounds like you learn things the hard way, which sometimes are the best teachers, right? The failures, it's not a failure if you take that. I remember reading Napoleon Hill way back when, and I think what he called it was the seed of an equivalent benefit in any failure, and that's always stuck with me. So it sounds like you did not have any mentors or anything like that. You really did learn this kind of on your own the hard way for the most part. Is that fair?
Tony Tarbutton Okay, so when I was exploring, "What am I going to do," I convinced him to go to that Tony Robbins conference and there was someone talking about real estate investing. And so we got into that, we attended one of those seminars. And in it, it told us how we could get unsecured financing, which was the very expensive financial products like fund... Well, first of all, these 0% credit cards, blah, blah, blah. Anyways, all of that to say, we discovered another way to tap into money when banks wouldn't give you money, starting off with Bravo Team. So going from that, am I real estate investing-
Josh Tarbutton: And we do not recommend the way that we did it.
Tony Tarbutton No, we didn't. It was just the only way that was available.
Josh Tarbutton: Yeah, to that point, I think part of the reason you brought it up-
Tony Tarbutton Brought it up is going back to the-
Josh Tarbutton: Was it a failure?
Tony Tarbutton No.
Josh Tarbutton: Not a failure because what came out of it is actually we-
Tony Tarbutton We learned so much.
Josh Tarbutton: We got $70,000 of available credit, which is cash flow. And so that was just kind of one of those things where we thought, "Okay, we're going to go to this, we're going to learn this." We bought into this program, which is really just to steal money from people, and then they sold us this terrible financial product, which was also what we paid for. And we really got taken advantage of, I think, in that scenario. But it led us to be able to have that purchasing power, which, we used the cash to launch the business. And this is in 2018 because we needed to be able to do that. And it's just the managing the time. So it's kind of an example where, how do you interpret these events?
And I think that has to do with our resilience because you could go and say, "I'm such an idiot, I didn't have enough money. I just dropped $1,000 on this class and I dropped another $3,000 on this stupid financial program. And now, okay, I have $70,000 of available credit card debt." And I decided not to pay for the $25,000 upsell program, so it's like, "Well, am I just an idiot?" And then you have to reconcile that in your marriage because you're trying to do stuff.
So I think when you're trying to change your circumstances, you're susceptible to predatory people in the marketplace that will promise you your future, but they won't give it to you. And so we had to recognize that we're really stupid in one hand, but we actually have this cash and it worked out. And so it was kind of like a constant negotiation of, "Oh, I'm an idiot. I should quit." We don't know what we're doing until, "Oh, you know what? This actual good thing kind of dropped out and we have 0% interest on $70,000. And if we can get a return on investment, we're going to do a good job."
Tony Tarbutton So going back to those classes, it put our head space in real estate investing. And at that time, Charlotte was full of houses that needed to be flipped. But instead of taking that route, it actually taught us business without having to go into real estate investing. So we saw when you hire an engineer and they have billable hours, it's almost like having a house that is an income producing asset. Each engineer is like having another house that... And then listening to the podcast of real estate investing, all of a sudden I heard them talk about tribes and how awesome these retreats were.
And I knew my husband was super lonely because he was a professor and then he was a founder/owner of a company, but he had nobody to talk about the business, what he was learning, the personal issues that he had with people issues. And so I had heard about EO and I said, "Josh, sounds like you really need a tribe." So I had encouraged him to look into what does Charlotte have that he could participate in. And he had made, I think he qualified to get into EOA, which is the Entrepreneur Organization Accelerator Program.
Josh Tarbutton: Yeah, and then they taught us about people, cash, strategy and execution, and they had learning days and they had mentors. And the business owners in Charlotte donate their time and they helped these companies grow and that helped us out dramatically. At that time though, I think there's another point, thinking about real estate, we were just trying to say, "What is a good use of time and energy like you help your customers?" Well, our question was not how do we manage wealth, but how do we get from not wealth to wealth? And that's one of the strategies, was to go explore these ideas. And really for us, we kind of had to decide, "Are we going to go in this together in real estate?" That's where I pulled back and I said, "Baby, I'm an engineer. I mean, I've been in school for so long. I love engineering, let's do this with engineering."
And us trying to do something, anything led us to do what is pretty obvious, to do the thing that you've got a PhD in. It wasn't so obvious to me. I think I give myself more credit than I deserve for some of the decisions I made because it really took me a long time to kind of come around to the decision that was pretty obvious for other people. I would just say like sometimes the most obvious thing can be the right thing for us, and that's what it was for us, engineering. I think I was just afraid to do that. And I thought other things might've been a little bit easier. And certainly it's not been an easy way to make money because we're designing things from scratch that don't exist, but that's where the magic is. And I can't imagine really doing anything else. I'm loving it.
Tony Tarbutton What's nice about our relationship is that we're always kind of exploring ideas together. And so when we're learning more about, "Hmm, what about real estate investing," it kind of leads to knowledge that informs us in the future. So now we actually own the building that our business is in and it's this commercial building, and we knew exactly how to up-fit it and increase its value and hold onto it. And we didn't have to go buy a bunch of dumpy houses. It was just the knowledge was priceless and it helped inform us in our future decisions.
I wanted to bring that up because we're both educators, we homeschool our kids. We're trying to learn and then we tell our kids in real time, as soon as we learn something, we're like, "Guys, we got to tell you something. This is how it works." And we just didn't know how things worked and we figured it out together. And so that is whatever support he imagines, it's just another human who's taking him-
Josh Tarbutton: Yeah, it's like having a person.
Tony Tarbutton And exploring ideas together and future possibilities and potential outcomes. Anyway, I wanted to drop the name of that book that helped me back in 2018 when I felt like I was at my wit's end, because when he was voted out, he was really upset. And it was called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza. From having taken that into my closet by myself when there was nowhere else to go because I'm in a house full of five humans, it helped me become more aware of what I was doing that was causing my own suffering. So a lot of the piece that we are experiencing on this end is because we took the time to tune into ourselves and listen to ourselves. And that wasn't obvious, like he said. It's so simple and so available. It doesn't seem like it could be at all helpful, but it's actually the key factor in our old-
Josh Tarbutton: It's just about like letting go of your addiction to past emotions. And a lot of times we wake up in the morning and we have the same emotions we had the day before, these persistent negative emotions. And recognizing that you have some agency over the way you feel and the way you think and taking that bit of ownership, it kind of enabled us to navigate the last seven years in a totally different way than we navigated all of the previous years.
Candace Cline: Right.
Andrew Kittleson: Did you read that book together? It sounds like you've both read it.
Tony Tarbutton I read it by myself.
Andrew Kittleson: Did you finish it and say, "Hey, Josh."
Candace Cline: She read it in a closet.
Tony Tarbutton No, I read it and then I'd go to the closet to try and practice. And it was super hard closing your eyes and being still in the dark by yourself. It just wasn't intuitive at first.
Josh Tarbutton: Yeah, I didn't read it until I saw proof. She basically became a lot more emotionally healthy than me and I really needed to level up my game to make sure I could stay in the same pace with her.
Andrew Kittleson: How did he do, Tony? Did he step all the way up to your level?
Tony Tarbutton Oh, he's fantastic. We've gone to NCS at Marsha Rawl's place in Asheville's Phoenix Retreat Center. Josh Remini had said, "You guys have got to go to this NeuroChangeSolutions." And it did change our life. We met Joe Dispenzas, Hillary and Lindsay, and we love them. Then we went to the week long because the people at the NeuroChangeSolution says, "You guys have got to go to the week long meditations." And so we went to Denver for the progressive and then we went to Denver for the intensive and felt my central nervous system reset. I had no idea 37 hours in one week of meditating could reset your central nervous system.
Josh Tarbutton: And I mean, if you ask anybody that knows me, they'll tell you I have PTSD. I mean, we were mortared every week in Iraq. We medevaced almost 10% of our battalion with injuries. We supported the theater, we were in log base sites and we supported the whole Baghdad International Airport area. And when I came home, I had a four month old and I still had to finish my bachelor's in engineering school. And so I was basically a pretty screwed up individual for a long time. And only through coming back and too, as a business owner, you owe it to your employees and your customers to get over your problems. I feel like I kind of had to get through it.
And we went to our 20 year Army reunion not long ago, and there's only a handful of people there. And you're aware that things could have gone different, really different for us. We've lost more soldiers to suicide than we have actually lost in the conflict due to PTSD. And I was the guy that I couldn't even sit in a tree stand for two hours, waiting for a deer. The idea of fishing, sitting there and just waiting for a fish to come around, it's just like, "Who does this? How can people enjoy this?" So really, the entrepreneurial journey is also really tied very closely to our journey and just-
Tony Tarbutton Just a teacher. Going to business taught us.
Josh Tarbutton: Yeah, you want to grow as an individual, just go buy a company and try not to screw it up and you'll grow in character.
Andrew Kittleson: Well, first of all, thank you for your service. And yeah, there are too many soldiers walking around with PTSD, and that's maybe another topic for another day, how we can address that.
Candace Cline: And it's amazing how once you realize that you can control your mind and you mentioned the neural pathways and create new neural pathways, I find that fascinating.
Josh Tarbutton: Humans are incredible. Humans can heal, humans can forgive, humans can grow.
Tony Tarbutton Humans are beautiful. And behaviors are not the human, behaviors serve a function. It's like to escape. And that's something I learned from special ed. So if there were behaviors that were unsatisfying, I mean, it doesn't mean that the human being is not worthy of love. That is where I felt like my special ed helped in seeing Josh as a human being who went through all of these things and is fighting through. I mean, is building a business for our family. I'm not going to judge him when he's having not the greatest day. I will help him in whatever way I can, so that's just how it is.
Andrew Kittleson: And that is an ongoing journey, really.
Tony Tarbutton It is ongoing, absolutely.
Andrew Kittleson: You're talking about really trying to control your mind rather than your mind controlling you, right?
Tony Tarbutton Or trying to control someone else because you don't like the way that feels.
Andrew Kittleson: Yeah.
Candace Cline: How do you pass that knowledge on to your employees to make sure their mental health is taken care of?
Josh Tarbutton: Well, I think one of the ways, being vulnerable.
Tony Tarbutton The core values.
Josh Tarbutton: Yeah, we have core values, too. Remarkable integrity, tenacious pursuit of excellence, embrace growth, own the experience, win together. I think kind of hold ourselves accountable to those things.
Tony Tarbutton We have an assessment that they have access to, the six sites.
Josh Tarbutton: And we encourage people to learn about themselves. We do the Working Genius, which kind of helps people identify where they like to operate in their work. It goes through wonder, invention, discernment, tenacity, enablement and galvanizing. And it says everybody's good at two usually, there's two things people really don't like. So I don't really like enablement, but some people really do. I really don't like galvanizing people to get them on board, but I love to come up with ideas. And so you can see where I might be the wrong person in the room if you need somebody just to enable and help things. We try to be aware of those things, take the Myers-Briggs. Also, there's the Wilder Method, which has helped me personally a lot. Bill Wilder found a way to really help people find their instinctual drive. It's part of the psyche.
Everybody talks about the ego, not everybody talks about the id. That id is sort of that limbic part of your brain where you have that instinctual drive. And a lot of times people need that part. They need that core part of their psyche in order to do hard things. And so Bill helped me find pathways to lower more intrinsic motivation so I could continue to be resilient and show up and try to do a good job by the employees. But putting it in the culture is difficult because everybody has a unique experience. But I think if you can be honest about your experience and say, "These are the tools that helped," we definitely do that. We encourage everybody to... We find harmony by appreciating other people and knowing yourself.
But a lot of times we don't know ourselves or we judge ourselves for the things that we're not, because we're all these things, but we're not these things. And so we don't have any value as a human, we have to apologize for our existence. And so we try to avoid that. We try to let people know that it's like, "We're here together, we're here to work together and we have value, and we can each bring what we can bring." And if we can get it right by putting the right people in the right seats, then we have harmony in the organization. If we have it wrong, it's usually because we've been a little bit dishonest about what we can do or what other people can do or what we should be doing. And then you have to level set, recalibrate and try again.
Andrew Kittleson: I love the direction this conversation has gone, but before we get to wrapping up, I'd love to find out a little bit more about the business specifically. And when you say Bravo Team solves your biggest challenges faster, what does faster mean in practice?
Josh Tarbutton: Great question. Engineering, design and development, what we're talking about is we're talking about designing something usually that doesn't exist. Let's say you have a company and you make these six products and you recognize the market will take three other products, but you have to design them and produce them and you got to get them manufactured with your supply chain. Well, how do you do that? What are the right products? Who do you partner with? And so, those kind of companies that might be wanting to add product to their portfolio, what Bravo Team will do is it will help them understand what they can design and how much it'll cost and how quickly they might be able to capture that part of the market. So we help people with new products, innovation. We do a lot of automation, and this is industrial robotics or integrating robotics into another workflow.
Or let's say there's some manual process where it needs to be supported or we need to add ergonomic support to something that's causing fatigue for humans. Pretty much anything that needs to be designed for making something. Most of our customers are manufacturers. They have aerospace, automotive, food and beverage, and so we are automating things. We do quite a bit of food and beverage automation. So you can just kind of imagine we're seeing a lot more machines show up in stores and a lot more automation. And I mean, just look at coffee 10 years ago. The espresso machines were pretty manual and now people are just pushing a couple buttons. And that's all just engineering design and development. As the market changes and can adopt new products, people are introducing those products. And they need to make them, so they need machines to automate those processes to make.
And Bravo Team just comes alongside the company. The reason we call ourselves Bravo Team is we're not the alpha team, we don't have to be the alpha team. We can be the support. It's also the name of SEAL team. I mean, it's the name of one of the Special Forces teams. And it's also the Italian bravo, bravissimo. So it's like if the customer has a good experience and we can come in like a B team, getting the A team ready for the game, there's really little drama and we do a good job, then they say bravo at the end. So that's kind of the name means the experience that we try to create for the customer so they can get what they want from a development. The reason we do it faster, and I'm taking a long time to answer your question, but we do it faster by cutting out all the steps in between.
Typically if you want to do something, you may need different disciplines. Let's say you need a mechanical engineer, you'll need an electrical, you need a computer engineer. And you need to get it made, so now you got to talk to a shop and you get that sheet metal made and maybe you need it painted and what kind of paint? The details of putting it all together can just be overwhelming. And so Bravo Team is, you just need to make one call. And if we tell you it can be done, then it can be done. And if we tell you when it'll be done, you can expect it to be done on that date. And so the way we do it faster is by just getting rid of all of the stuff that doesn't lead to the velocity of the work.
Bravo Team, we say we move at the velocity of the work. It's kind of like if you can take the next step, take the next step. And so it's kind of very Marcus Aurelius. The impediment to action becomes the next action, or it's like the obstacle is the way. The next thing is the next thing. Always be doing the next thing, always be working. We try to separate parallel paths so we don't wait until we're done with one thing before we start something that could be started immediately. And we focus heavily on technical risk. And so if we can destroy the technical risk in a project quickly, then everyone knows the project will be successful. And sometimes you don't have to build a whole machine to answer a question. And that's the beauty of coming from academia. In true academia, you produce new knowledge, you don't necessarily produce another microwave.
You produce the knowledge of a novel way of shaping electromagnetic fields that you can apply. And so we also help customers with answering questions. We also help companies do their due diligence. If they're looking at buying a company, they don't really understand the technology, we can come in and help them know where those risks are. And it can be a lot faster than them trying to do it on their own. And sometimes too, companies, they have their own engineering processes and procedures which can be slow, slower than they need them to be.
And so Bravo Team can come in kind of as a team on the side to jump in and get some of those things done that are on the critical timeline. So we're not pushing projects into the next fiscal year, we're helping companies nail those budgets, nail those timelines, get that technical chunk of value into the organization when they need it. And a lot of it is just knowing what can be done and how quickly it's possible to do that, is really the domain knowledge that we can help shorten those timelines.
Tony Tarbutton And often, other shops don't have machining and that kind of available, so they have to outsource so much. But Bravo Team is unique because-
Josh Tarbutton: Us having the equipment as well, I mean, we have 15 3D printers, we have four CNC machines, we have a full shop staff. And so just even handing the work over to different companies to get done can also just totally destroy the timeline.
Andrew Kittleson: Okay, so you talked about how you have four kids, you're over the hump, so to speak, with their ages. A couple of them are out of the house, maybe doing their own thing. So your time has maybe freed up a little bit, Tony?
Tony Tarbutton Yes.
Andrew Kittleson: How are you spending your time now supporting Josh? Has that changed a bit with the kids aging?
Tony Tarbutton I basically asked him, "Would it be okay if I devote my energy to you?" And he was like, "What? This is a thing you could do?" And I said, "Yes, everything I've ever had to be in charge of is up, it's over." I don't have to tutor in my community anymore, I'm done serving in my HOA and I'm not interested in working for someone else and I'm not interested in supporting anyone else. I just want to devote my energy to him, whether it's feeding him, driving him, sitting in a board meeting with him. It's all the same because we talk about it all the time. We talk about business all day, every day, and it's fascinating to me. I mean, I'm an adventurous person and just being married to Josh is an adventure in itself. I don't know if that can translate to anybody else, but yeah, for me, this is how it is.
Andrew Kittleson: How many podcasts have you done?
Tony Tarbutton None.
Andrew Kittleson: This is your first.
Tony Tarbutton This is my very first. This is actually by accident. I couldn't find the truck keys to go to the Costco.
Andrew Kittleson: Well, thank you so much for joining us, you've been fantastic.
Tony Tarbutton Thank you.
Andrew Kittleson: Both of you. I mean, you've built a very special business pretty quickly after all those mistakes, so to speak.
Josh Tarbutton: Oh, we have a saying for that. We say we're accidentally awesome.
Tony Tarbutton Absolutely. Yeah, because we could not have planned anything that we did. We just kept doing the next thing, and that's the beauty of his system of sales.
Josh Tarbutton: And that's kind of what I was getting at earlier, is if you just keep waking up and trying, and not listening to all your head trash and all of the thoughts that tell you you're nothing, you're less than, you don't matter, you're not good enough, you suck, all that stuff. I mean, I imagine everybody has to deal with it. Certainly, I'm my own worst critic. I'm a nasty, terrible person to myself sometimes.
Tony Tarbutton Not as much as-
Josh Tarbutton: And I think just as we've grown, just realizing you have permission to exist and sometimes we do well and sometimes we get an opportunity to try again. And my mom used to tell me when I was a kid, and she died when I was 13 so this is a little shout out to mother here, but she would say that God's mercies are new every morning. Regardless of what you believe, some days I would just be like, "I cannot wait to wake up tomorrow because I don't think there's any mercy left for today because today was not a good day."
But just this idea that every day we wake up is a new day. We wake up with a brand new sky, brand new sun, brand new moon, everything is, we have a new opportunity. And I just think if we can spend most of our days waking up like that, letting go of those emotions of the past, then we can really do good work for other people and you make money. And people can enjoy life and their contributions.
Andrew Kittleson: We appreciate the motivational podcast.
Candace Cline: This has been awesome. And it's been such a nice surprise to have you join, Tony.
Tony Tarbutton Oh, thank you for having me, Andrew and-
Josh Tarbutton: Yeah, usually most people, I get invited first and they realize that I'm married to Tony. Then they're like, "Hey, can Tony come?"
Candace Cline: You two seem to make a great team.
Tony Tarbutton Awe, it has been fun. I asked my dad, I said, "How did you feel about me getting married so young?" And he said, "Well, you and Josh were always like partners. You guys were just partners from the very beginning." And I thought, "Okay, all right, I see. I agree."
Andrew Kittleson: Well, this has been fantastic. Hopefully we can get the two of you back in for a follow-up at some point. We'd like to keep up to date with what you have going on. You're one of many. I think Charlotte's done a good job having a lot of professors leave UNCC and start successful businesses, so thank you for your contribution to the community, both of you.
Josh Tarbutton: Absolutely. And thank you to the community for welcoming us and even creating the possibility for us to do business here. Charlotte's been amazing to us. We love the city, we love the people. We believe that we have a very bright future together. Thanks for having us, too.
Tony Tarbutton Thank you.
Andrew Kittleson: Absolutely. And enjoy the rest of your day and the holidays.
Josh Tarbutton: Thank you.
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