I’m not ready for work anymore, I have a job. I just haven’t started an account over yet. Over the last 3 months I have been using generative ai and some autogpt for 70% of my job. I’m a principal product manager, so a huge portion of my role is strategy documents, phasing guides and general memos. Generative ai can do almost all of this. As a product manager I could take on 3 more product stacks, synthesize a week of stakeholder conversations, and generate a memo in 1 hour. And I have. Product won’t be automated out, but companies can do as good of product work with substantially less headcount soon. The best of my peers could easily take my stack. A talented sr staff engineering Architect can do all the busywork and take my stack. Knowing this, I just signed a letter of intent to purchase a local machine shop in the suburbs of my city. $200k down for a company currently doing $950k in revenue. They have no website, their staff is only working 2 shifts 5 days a week. They work on a tight niche of commercial electrical service boxes. No mega giant is gonna take on that niche, it’s just too small for GE to care. Ai won’t come for complex manual labor yet. We’re still in the phases of figuring out managing warehouses. I’m gonna manage this machine shop and work remote from the office. When I get laid off in 1-2 years for redundancies due to ai, I have a fall back. If you’re in product or other white collar work, your moat of “no one wants to do my bullshit” is in jeopardy. Start looking for things that are too complex to automate. Tc: $435k - 260 base and 175 rsu 12 years of experience in product
I can tell that you're a good PM. Such a well written post. Was this also composed by AI?
This was written from the bathroom of a local restaurant for Mother’s Day brunch. I haven’t found a good generative ai that works well on mobile yet
Owning your own business is always preferable to working for someone else. Congratulations, you are in charge of your own destiny.
It’s probably going to be a hard life for a while and I realistically can only pay myself $140k, but it’s going be safer. I can see now why the best and brightest went to tech, the money is just easier to achieve. This shop may grow to 1.2m if I am lucky in 2 years.
Who runs the day to day operations for the machine shop? Do you have a background in said industry?
It’s gonna be me and the engineer on staff. The shop is 5 workers, an engineer, me as operating lead and a fractional accountant. I’m going to hire a sales rep soon for account management and ideally get a qa tech to support the engineer. Remote job is pst the shop is est. that’s luckily only 4 hours overlap. My BS was in electrical engineering, so on a fundamental level I get what is going on, but my engineer knows electrical shielding in and out.
AI or not, one thing I learned from 2022-2023 is that one must have at least two streams of income
You must be a “PM” at a junk company if this is your takeaway.
You might be a better pm than me, which only means you’re gonna be amazing with ai support. I can’t compete with you when you can run an entire org with assisted ai.
Lol
Sounds like you are just glorified note taker .
That’s at least 70% of pm daily activities.
Hmm yea true dat. I never thought about it that way .
Like your idea but I can imagine it would likely become a 24-7 work with less pay. Are you ok with that?
I think I have to be. I’ll be in the machine shop 6 days a week in the manager office, and working remote from there. So I can address problems live. On the shop floor though, the engineer runs the whole show. So the day to day of actual manufacturing management should not change substantially. But yes this is far more work than one job, or even two on the trend of “Overemployment”
How was the process of buying a business like? Really curious about the details and thinking of doing something like this myself.
It’s nothing like buying a small e-commerce business. Old owners don’t have great finances, there’s a lot of conversations and asking for continual questions. Most small business owners started these businesses so they never maintained records and you’re buying their child. Relationship management is crucial
Did you use a broker while searching? Can you share some insights?
Your next problem will be retaining your engineer and machinists. They might also try to unionize which will eat into any profit % you’re planning to pay yourself. There’s a reason people buy laundromats and fast food franchises instead. Low skill or zero labor is way easier to manage long term for small businesses
They’re already in a union and I already planned on offering a espp of the company to any of the employees to stay on. My business strategy here is reward growth. I’m going to be the first emi shop in the state with a dedicated sales role, so there’s a lot of room here to optimize and run it like a business.
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Hmm hopefully it takes companies like 15 years to replace us
My thesis is small startups will operate leaner from the start and tough politics at mega corps will keep product employed longer. But that is on the surface. I believe you using ai can halve your work load and you can easily start to pick up more projects. Overtime more people like you will all suddenly be 10x pm’s and the company just doesn’t need to fill headcount.