Podcast: How modular factories are reshaping U.S. manufacturing capacity
Key Highlights
- U.S. manufacturing needs more capacity fast, not just policy changes or long-term plans.
- Modular, software-driven factories enable faster production and scalable growth.
- Real-time data visibility is critical to improving manufacturing speed and efficiency.
- Franchise-style factory networks help attract talent and stabilize manufacturing demand.
In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Thomas Wilk of Plant Services sits down with Justin Baucum of Isembard to explore how modular, software-driven factories are reshaping U.S. manufacturing capacity. The conversation traces Justin’s unconventional path into manufacturing and how mission-driven thinking translates into building faster, more resilient production networks. Together, they dig into reshoring, supply chain bottlenecks in defense, aerospace, and energy, and the practical realities of standing up high-precision factories at speed. The episode offers a grounded look at how technology, operations, and new business models can help manufacturing move quicker and scale smarter.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
Thomas Wilk: Hi, everyone, and welcome to a new episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, brought to you by Endeavor Business Media’s Manufacturing Group. My name is Tom Wilk, and I’m the chief editor of Plant Services.
With us today is Justin Baucum, a former U.S. Army Special Forces operator who now leads the U.S. expansion for Isembard, specifically in the Dallas–Fort Worth region. Isembard is a company that builds precision components for aerospace, defense, and energy through a network of modular, software-driven factories that deliver complex parts in days rather than months. Justin is with us today to talk about how he’s working to help bring critical manufacturing capacity back onshore and make it faster, more predictable, and more scalable. Justin, welcome to the podcast.
Justin Baucum: Thanks, Tom. I appreciate you giving the intro. I think you nailed all of the highlights of Isembard, so my job’s done.
TW: Let’s start with you telling us a little bit about yourself—both your Special Forces background and, especially, how that led you on a path into the world of manufacturing.
JB: Sure. I’ll actually start just before I joined the Army, because this connects to part of our business model. At one point, I ran a Chick-fil-A franchise. I wasn’t the franchisee, but kind of the GM equivalent. That was my first taste of the franchise business model. It’ll come up again in our conversation, but I like to call that out because there is a connection—it all is a big loop.
But yeah, I decided to join the military after that experience and was really fortunate to get the chance to go try out for Army Special Forces. I did that, spent my whole military service of about six years deployed to Afghanistan, and then went to Korea as well.
I decided to transition out in 2019 and pursue what was next. I like to highlight that pretty much my entire adult life up to that point was in the Army. There are a lot of great capabilities and experiences that you get from that sort of experience, and I was just looking for ways to take those lessons and apply them somewhere else.
For me, that looked like going to business school. I did an MBA in Seattle, WA, and then went to work for Amazon in operations in their first-mile delivery network. The reason for that was I just felt like operations was something I naturally gravitated to. I like understanding how things fit together and just driving movement. And Amazon—even to this day, but definitely back then—was the pinnacle of supply chain operations, all the things that go into optimizing things.
Fast-forward to January or February of 2025. At that point, I had left Amazon. I’d been at a startup in financial technology, just trying something different, and then spent a couple of years at a management consulting firm doing every job from traditional client-facing digital transformation projects—which sounds a lot fancier than it was—all the way through marketing and go-to-market work. So I had a lot of different experiences and got exposed to a lot of industries.
One thing I felt was missing was the kind of mission-centricity that I had in the Army. A lot of people talk about that when they transition out of the service—looking for a purpose and what comes next—and that was definitely true for me. It was part of the reason I transitioned from companies, kind of looking for the next mission to jump onto.
In early 2025, I was on the hunt again. I’d been with the consulting company for a few years at that point and got introduced to the founder of Isembard, Alexander Fitzgerald. Within the first 10 minutes of our first conversation—and keep in mind, prior to this, I had really no connection to manufacturing—the mental model that I had when I heard the term was kind of an assembly line, maybe a car manufacturing lever being pulled for some reason. That’s just what came to mind.
Hearing just how Alexander described the challenges in the industry—diminishing supply, increasing demand—and the vision he had for what the company could become [really stuck with me] – and keep in mind at that point, there was one facility in London and a team of four, so it was just getting off the ground. But 10 or 15 minutes into that conversation, I was like, this is my next mission, and I got really excited about it.
So much so that after our second conversation, I said, “Hey, what if I get on a plane and fly to London tomorrow? Let’s meet face to face. Let me see what you guys are building, and you’ll learn about me and I’ll learn about you.” From there, yeah, the rest is history. I joined the company in the spring, and I’ve been off to the races ever since.
TW: We talked a little bit before we started the formal recording here about the fact that a lot of our readers and listeners are veterans as well. And I’ve heard that at a lot of maintenance conferences—"looking for the next mission, finding the right fit.” It’s really striking that Isembard was such a strong fit from the get-go for you. Was part of that mission you responded to the goal to help reshore manufacturing in the U.S. and make it more nimble?
JB: Yeah, I describe it as having quite a few different dimensions that appeal to me. So first, just from a national capability [perspective] in the U.S., doing some research and obviously hearing what Alex shared with me, I realized, okay, these are themes—in terms of reindustrialize and reshore—that have been talked about for probably the last couple of decades. But it’s well known that the erosion over time, because we’ve offshored and kind of given up the capability to make things, has become more and more of a problem. Just being exposed to the data and actually seeing some of the numbers, it became quite alarming that this is a real problem.
I wouldn’t say that we’re so far gone that we can’t come back from it, but this is definitely a critical point in history. So there was an initial meaning to the endeavor that Isembard was taking on. Dimension one was basically: we need to do something about this, or we’re going to lose this capability altogether, or so much so that we can’t come back from it.
Secondarily, I think serving critical industries, specifically defense—you know, when I left the Army, it was kind of a clean break. No affiliation with DoD, now Department of War, and I’ll probably never be on a battlefield again. But I do view the conflicts we’re engaging in around the world now as very deterrence-driven, kind of these Cold War–type approaches.
And so I think the front line, in a lot of ways, is what we do on our supply chains and providing the capability to make products—whether it’s missiles, drones, you name it—because those are the things that are going to make a significant difference. Ideally, we avoid conflict altogether, but at the end of the day, in the world we live in, it’s really important that we can produce these things at scale.
So for me, it was like, that’s as close as I’ll get ever again. And there’s just not a lot of action being taken. I think there’s a lot of discussion around it at conferences, and nothing against that, but the speed and intensity that I saw Isembard moving with—and that I’ve tried to continue here in the U.S.—was different.
The company had only been formed for a couple of months, and they already had their first facility up and running. I had our first U.S. site up and running 98 days after I joined the company. That kind of ferocious intensity is really at the core of what we’re doing, because not a lot of other people are even attempting this.
TW: 98 days. That’s amazing.
JB: Yeah, I actually missed my deadline of 90, so I was kind of upset about that. We would have been open in like 78 days, but we hit some issues—there was weather that threw off our delivery timeframe. Uncontrollable circumstances, but I was still a little salty about it.
TW: We were going to talk about what it takes to stand up a modern, high-precision factory in the U.S. today. Could you talk about what you experienced over those 98 days—some of the easier spots and some of the hurdles you’re still working on?
JB: Yeah, in its simplest form, if you’re in the space we’re operating in, as a subcontract manufacturer—and this is almost industry-agnostic, but I’ll speak specifically to defense, aerospace, and energy, since that’s where we’re focused—bottom line, you generally need a six-inch reinforced slab. You need three-phase power. You need a CNC machine, ideally a mill, and then you need somebody to run it. That’s kind of minimum requirements to even perform the function of a traditional machine shop. And if you write it all down, it’s really quite simple.
But there’s a whole lot of what I call “implied tasks” that come along with it. Everything that I experienced when I joined, there was no legal entity formed for Isembard in the U.S. So going from that step—setting up business development motion, having a go-to-market strategy, getting a book of business and the first couple of accounts, getting a purchase order, which is really the big milestone because someone wants your goods or services—that validated the product-market fit.
And concurrently I was looking for where I could set up the quickest, what kind of machine would give me the biggest range of capability, and how to find the right talent to facilitate our ability to start production. And again, if you write it out on paper, it seems simple, but each of those things is a tremendous undertaking—especially for someone like me who didn’t have a manufacturing background.
That said, I encourage people with other experiences—whether it’s consulting, military, McDonald’s, it doesn’t really matter. If you’re operationally minded and you can make a plan, execute against that plan, expect things to go wrong, and mitigate risk, then 80% of businesses from my experience are relatively the same. The end product varies, but you need a financial system, a way to get paid and pay other people, and a legal entity.
In the time I’ve been with Isembard, when I’ve spoken with people interested in breaking into the industry, there’s often this assumption of, “I don’t have any direct connection, so how do I learn?” And I’m like, the best way to learn is just to jump in, like with anything else. I’ve met quite a few folks who have the benefit of being second- or third-generation in the machine shop setting, or their family was related—an uncle with a machine shop—so they had exposure to that, which is fantastic. But there aren’t enough of those people. We need more people who have no direct connection to manufacturing to just start getting involved.
Thomas Wilk
You mentioned that Isembard is a network of modular, software-driven factories. Does that modular aspect help you draw people in who might not be from manufacturing—like there’s a modular template to work against to get these facilities up and running?
Justin Baucum
It’s similar to any other franchise model in that what we provide is kind of the basis for it. You can think of it as the operational playbook. There are parameters that we recommend: square footage, machine types, quality management systems or software—kind of all of these recommendations—to basically accelerate someone’s ability to go from no factory to a functioning production facility.
It just takes out all the tasks that I mentioned earlier. You could list them out and then it’s like, well, okay, how do I actually go out and find a capable CNC engineer? How do I find the right space that has the right power requirements? What are the power requirements? We’ve basically already mapped all of that out. So it’s just, here’s the roadmap. We’ll support you on a bunch of different levels to get you up and running as quickly as possible. And then after you’re up and running, we continue to partner alongside you to make sure you’re able to grow your business and scale.
So no different than, you know—I’ll use Chick-fil-A, because with a Chick-fil-A, you’re going to have some big ones, you’re going to have places in the mall. They’re operating consistently, but the size and layouts are going to vary a little bit. And the same rule applies here.
Now, in those business models, they have thousands of locations, so it’s very mature in terms of, these are the parameters that work. Like, you make a chicken sandwich exactly in these seven steps. In our case, it’s more, here are the parameters that we think work really well, and we’ll continue to refine those as we mature as a business. But I think we give kind of an 80% solution on a lot of fronts. And so it just takes out all the guesswork for folks.
Thomas Wilk
I’m going to hit on the other side of that phrase you used before—modular, software-driven—and focus on the software-driven part. You mentioned digital transformation earlier, which sounds like a fancy word for a couple of simple projects, but I think that’s often the case where if you pull those terms away from the marketing and media push, what it really comes down to is using technology to help solve your problem, whether it’s large or small. A lot of times we try to preach that message at Plant Services: don’t get scared away by the big terms. Oftentimes it’s just finding something you’ve got to get done and using software or technology to get it done. Could you speak to the software side of what you’re doing?
Justin Baucum
We looked out into the marketplace early on and were like, how are we going to basically use technology to accelerate our ability to move into production? And whether that’s on the shop floor, and then definitely as we continue to grow our network of facilities, how do we stay on top of what’s happening within all of them? How do we see who has capacity, who needs more demand, how are they performing in terms of delivery timelines—all that kind of stuff. You need access to data, and then you need some mechanism to interpret that data into meaningful action.
What we found was that there are a lot of different software solutions out there that do some aspect of what it takes to run a machine shop or manufacturing facility—I’ll use those interchangeably for context. But there are a lot of fractional solutions out there, and they don’t always talk to each other super well. People will say, “Hey, our platform can integrate with whatever tech stack you have. There’s an API,” whatever the case is, and that’s all well and good. But fundamentally, you still run into the problem that if you want to take advantage of all the best software out there, you’re going to end up with maybe a dozen different tools. That, in and of itself, creates a bunch of inefficiencies for how you’re operating.
Then your data is being captured in a lot of different ways. I’m not saying it’s an insurmountable obstacle—it’s just going to be clunky, best-case scenario. And most of the folks I’ve observed who run machine shops—the business owner, ops manager, GM—they’re really focused on the craft aspect of it and tend to be later adopters when it comes to new technology.
Many businesses I’ve personally interacted with—their primary “software” is an Excel spreadsheet for scheduling and tracking. Nothing against Excel, but spreadsheets have been around since the ’80s, and there are a lot of other options out there now. Since there wasn’t a one-stop shop—kind of an operating platform—we decided to build it from the ground up. Part of the reason is that many of the solutions I mentioned do one thing really well. Maybe they handle quoting well, but not scheduling. Or you can track inventory, but not suppliers. Or you can’t invoice—whatever the case is. There are pros and cons.
A lot of those systems and tools are built around ideal scenarios, not necessarily the reality that this industry can be messy. There are all sorts of things you have to account for. Our software team sits in an Isembard facility, which allows the feedback loop to be extremely tight. What happens on the shop floor is directly reflected in our software, and if we run into something like, “Hey, the software doesn’t support this, and this is something we’re facing, then we need to fix that so it matches.” That’s a distinct advantage.
The approach we’re taking is to incrementally build out the platform to take on more and more. Today, quoting can be done through MasonOS (Isembard proprietary software), scheduling, inventory management, things like that. Long term—say, 12 months from now—the idea is that a user, whether they’re a machinist, GM, or business owner, only has to go to one source, and they can basically operate their entire business from there. They can see all the metrics they need to see, and the data is captured and flowing through that.
Thomas Wilk
I’ll get you out of here on this one, Justin. You mentioned that part of what drew you to Isembard was the sense that you could help supply chains ease up, especially in the U.S. What’s your sense of the strain on supply chains these days? Is it easing up at all in general? Or feel free to comment just on the defense and aerospace markets, if that’s what you prefer.
Justin Baucum
Overarchingly, our supply chains are not awesome. I think most folks that aren’t directly connected to the manufacturing base—or industrial base, however you want to frame it—don’t always see that a lot of these companies are… let’s cherry-pick one, SpaceX. We’ll say SpaceX because they’re in the news a lot.
Big aerospace company, incredible things that they’re doing, and people assume, well, SpaceX makes rockets. And SpaceX does make things for their rockets, and they assemble the rockets, but most of the parts for their rockets are not made by SpaceX. They’re supported by this laundry list of vendors that make different components.
With the legacy primes focused on defense—the Lockheeds, Raytheons, and so on—they do the same thing. They rely on a huge supply chain to support whatever products, the F-35, F-16, whatever the case is. Over the last couple of years, there’s been a wave of defense companies coming up. Some are venture capital–backed, others are privately started. And those businesses do not have a supply to meet their demand. Part of that is due to the current administration being very favorable toward new and faster solutions for defense-related products.
So this new wave of defense—some of them are still startups, but they’re transitioning into more of, we had a prototype, we demonstrated it really well to the Department of War or a specific branch, we got the first contract. Now they’re trying to figure out, how do we go from prototype to production? The feedback we’re getting is that there just aren’t a lot of options to do things quickly.
Historically, the industry has moved relatively slowly because demand came from the big primes and more established companies. A lot of manufacturing bases and machine shops got used to saying, I can spend a few months, maybe a year, I have a contract, and here’s my delivery schedule. This new wave of defense—and aerospace and energy as well—is trying to be very competitive because they’re still proving-out their product. How quickly can they go from one prototype to 100? They’re looking for partners who are willing to be super aggressive with how quickly they can produce things. So instead of six months, maybe it’s six weeks.
Something I’ve noticed is that speed, for me, in the context of going from purchase order to delivery, fast is like two weeks. When I ask other folks, “Hey, what’s fast to you?” generally the answer is four to six weeks. And that, in and of itself, should speak volumes about what is the norm in manufacturing. I think we have to rethink how we can be faster.
There are obviously uncontrollables—material delays and all that kind of stuff. But as demand continues to grow for more and more products, in the U.S. and even in the U.K., there’s really no supply chain built to support this new wave of businesses. They’re trying to leverage the old supply chains effectively, and the speed and delivery cycles just aren’t working out.
22:57
Thomas Wilk
And as you started out the podcast conversation, too, this franchise/modular model is really something that’s going to contribute in a huge way toward adding nimbleness to the supply chain. If the norm is four weeks and you can do it in two weeks with this model, there’s your competitive edge.
Justin Baucum
Exactly. And I think—if I had to frame it—you kind of asked this question and I went on a slight tangent, but there are really three things we’re trying to accomplish from Isembard’s perspective that will hopefully help mitigate some of these challenges across the industry and have positive impacts for the defense industry and all the customer bases we’re serving.
In the near term, we’re trying to provide more capacity. That’s the number one problem to solve. And how I define that is machines running in facilities, cutting metal. There’s no way around that. We can talk policy, we can talk training pipelines and all that kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, we just need more machines making things.
Secondarily, I think how we achieve that quickly is through our software. You can set up a factory and get up and running, but in terms of speed—just knowing what’s happening across the network—picking up the phone or sending an email isn’t the best way to make quick decisions. You need to be able to see that data in real time. That’s a really key component of why I think this model will work.
The third piece is, in order to scale rapidly, we could make the investment and launch a bunch of owned Isembard factories, but the challenge there is finding the right people and all the tasks that come with getting up and running. So instead, why don’t we take a model that’s worked in a bunch of other industries—franchising—and apply it here?
It solves a number of things. One, it gives a pathway for people who aren’t affiliated with the industry to get involved, and it’s somewhat de-risked. And then for the people who are already in the industry—I’m very passionate about existing machine shop owners—we need to unite, basically, is my pitch. There are already all sorts of informal partnerships regionally—these are the three shops I work with, I know Bill, I know Joe, whatever the case is. All we’re doing is trying to bring everyone under the same banner. We’re all doing the same thing, and it’s a win-win for everyone. The business model applied allows us to keep moving faster.
Converting an existing shop that’s already producing, the big problem most of them are facing is consistent demand over time. It’s always this feast-or-famine when it comes to generating demand for themselves. Most are too small to have a formal business development team—it’s typically the owner who knows a few people. They never really get out of that cycle of we have a contract, now we don’t, and suddenly they’re scraping by. That makes it really hard to scale beyond a couple of people.
We want those shops to exponentially grow, but they need line of sight on what’s coming. And I think we can provide that.
Thomas Wilk
That’s terrific. And you’re speaking to a lot of operations professionals who are probably pumping their fist right now. I’m hoping that when you talked about mitigating risk, a lot of their mission is reducing unplanned downtime and making sure the machines are cutting metal. So for those who want to get in touch with Justin and learn more about Isembard, I’ll link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes, as well as Isembard’s website.
With that, I just want to say thank you for sharing what you’re up to and offering some insight into how the U.S. can get back to greater manufacturing capacity. I really appreciate your time today.
Justin Baucum
Yeah, thank you very much.
About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.
Listen to another episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast app
About the Author
Thomas Wilk
editor in chief
Thomas Wilk joined Plant Services as editor in chief in 2014. Previously, Wilk was content strategist / mobile media manager at Panduit. Prior to Panduit, Tom was lead editor for Battelle Memorial Institute's Environmental Restoration team, and taught business and technical writing at Ohio State University for eight years. Tom holds a BA from the University of Illinois and an MA from Ohio State University