Hartford Business Journal

6 Hartford Business Journal • July 27, 2020 • www.HartfordBusiness.com By Sean Teehan steehan@hartfordbusiness.com A ri Santiago, host of the West Hartford-based "Made in America" podcast, made small talk during a recent July afternoon with his guest, Ex- cello Tool Engineering & Manufac- turing Co. Chief Operations Officer Marcy Minnick, while the show's producer occasionally interrupted to refine their audio before they started recording. "So, basically I'll just do the intro," Santiago said to Minnick, going over the show's format. "At the end when we're done, I'm going to end on a rapid-fire round of questions." With three video cameras pointing at them and audio levels set, Santiago started with a pitch for viewers to subscribe to the podcast, before jump- ing into his interview with Minnick. "It's the 'Made in America' pod- cast, so we're going to start with the same two questions: What do you make? And why do you make it?" During the conversation Minnick told Santiago about her experience coming into the company with a background in business, rather than manufacturing, and what she did to earn the respect of her Milford- based team, who she praised. "We have artists — true machin- ist artists — and without their help, without their support and without their knowledge, we would not be in existence," Minnick said. Santiago, CEO of West Hartford's IT Direct, an information-technol- ogy company that serves small and mid-size businesses, established his podcast last summer, with the initial goal of interviewing one manufac- turer or policymaker per week for a year to highlight an industry key to the state's economy. Now that the podcast passed the 12-month mark, Santiago said he intends to keep it going indefinitely, to continue promoting the sector and push out positive stories about the industry. And his interviews have run the gamut from top CEOs and policy- makers to a U.S. senator. Santiago is not and has never been a manufacturer. His interest in the industry comes through his com- pany's IT work for manufacturing clients, he said. But it's completely within his character to take on a large project, learning it on the job. A skiing accident at age 14 para- lyzed Santiago from the waist down, a devastating reality for a young three- sport athlete. But he didn't spend much time wallowing in sadness. "While I was rehabbing, my friend's mom brought me a com- puter," Santiago said. "It turned out I had an aptitude for it, so at 15 I started my first computer business." After spending much of his teens building and selling computers, he started college at Tufts University in Boston intent on becoming a law- yer like his father. But his pre-law courses mostly taught him that he had little interest in the legal profes- sion, and moved back to his home- town of Hartford after graduating. That's when his mother, a dentist, asked him if he could help rebuild her office's IT network. Santiago went to her office to check out the situation, and found more problems than the computer network. "I sort of sat down with her and explained a lot of the challenges they had: the flow up front, how the staff- ing was working, how they weren't working together as a team," said Santiago, who recalls he told her he could fix the situation. "I said, 'I have a plan, it's going to scare you, but you're just going to have to trust me.' " He fired all three non-dentists in the office, brought on a couple friends to oversee the transition, and then spent almost a year learning each position he eliminated, shifting responsibilities to remove redundan- cies and hiring permanent replace- ments for his friends and himself. Santiago actually started IT Direct in 2002 by asking his employer at the time, an environmental engi- neering firm, to outsource its IT de- partment, to him. His boss agreed, and the company became IT Direct's first official client. Highlighting positivity Working with client companies on everything from email systems to cybersecurity infrastructure, Santiago found himself talking to a lot of manufacturing clients about the industry. How things are made was always interesting to him, and growing up in Connecticut he'd see vestiges of the state manufacturing sector's heydays, mostly in the form of abandoned buildings. "Manufacturing has always fascinated me, but I thought it was dead and old, like many people did, I thought it was our history," Santiago said. "I started to learn that manufac- turing didn't die, it just moved to in- dustrial parks that no one could see." A longtime booster of Connecti- cut's business community, Santiago said he increasingly felt that people needed to hear about the interesting products Connecticut manufactur- ers make, and efforts to rebuild the industry in the state. So he set out to present those stories to an audi- ence via a podcast. Positivity is built into "Made in America's" DNA, Santiago said. It's an important foundational element because so many in Connecticut's business community are relentlessly negative about the state, he said. "We don't say, 'the glass is half-emp- ty,' " Santiago said. "We say, 'it's half- empty, the water might be spoiling, it's definitely evaporating, and there's no chance it's ever going to get filled.' " He enlisted IT Direct Marketing Manager Gael Tannenbaum to work as the podcast's producer, and hired Southington-based photo and video production company Miceli Produc- tions to handle the technical aspects of audio and video. Tannenbaum books the guests, oversees the podcast's recording and promotes the show, spending about half her working hours on it. "We want to promote manufactur- ing in Connecticut," Tannenbaum said. "We're not going to invite a com- pany that's really, really struggling. We want to focus on the positivity of the industry, that's what we're trying to pull out of every guest." Guests have ranged from the heads of lesser-known manufactur- ers like Wepco Plastics, to U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy. There was also the episode in which Back East Brewing Co. co-founder Tony Karlowicz had Santiago sample his beers as they recorded the episode at about 10:30 in the morning. 'Made in America's' prominent guest list Marty Guay, Vice President of Business Development, Stanley Black & Decker (Episode air date: Sept. 3, 2019) David Lehman, Commissioner, Department of Economic and Community Development (Episode air date: Dec. 10, 2019) Colin Cooper, Connecticut's Chief Manufacturing Officer (Episode air date: Feb. 4, 2020, April 21, 2020) U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (Episode air date: June 23, 2020) 'Made in America' West Hartford tech CEO's podcast highlights CT manufacturing success stories "Made in America" podcast host Ari Santiago interviews Excello Tool Engineering & Manufacturing Co.'s Marcy Minnick. HBJ PHOTO | SEAN TEEHAN

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