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Josh Schultz
President/COO Canekast 🏭🚀 SMB Ops Guy. Rebuilding US Manufacturing. Currently Buying Small Manufacturers (Reach Out). Teaching the SMB Blueprint.
Josh Schultz is the President of CaneKast, a company that acquires and streamlines non-ferrous foundries across the United States.35 He joined CaneKast in the fall of 2021, partnering with Reg Zeller, the founder and CEO.34
Prior to his role at CaneKast, Josh had a diverse career spanning various industries:
- He spent 10-12 years in supply chain and finance.5
- He co-founded and ran a supply chain company, which he later merged with his father's business.5
- He worked in Mexico, replicating his business model there.5
- After selling his company in December 2019, he briefly stayed with the platform company until April 2021.5
Josh is known for his expertise in scaling operations and building systems. He focuses on:
- Transforming struggling operations into high-performing systems.2
- Implementing decentralized authority and pushing decision-making down the organizational hierarchy.5
- Developing a playbook for running multiple foundries efficiently.5
Josh has a strong educational background, including:
- An MBA from Syracuse University's Martin J. Whitman School of Management.2
- Various certifications in fields such as machine learning, financial modeling, and Six Sigma Black Belt.2
He is also active in sharing his knowledge through:
- The SMB Blueprint, a newsletter providing tactical advice and frameworks for small and medium-sized businesses.1
- A podcast called "SMB op show" where he discusses operational topics.5
Josh's approach to business emphasizes long-term thinking, problem-solving, and fostering autonomy throughout the company.5
Highlights
One of the largest opportunities in Private Equity is a turn in strategy from Financial Engineering to Operational Engineering.
The skills and tools that built previous compounding machines
- Multiple Expansion
- Rate Compression
- Multiple Arbitrage Have lost most of their juice in the current environment.
Instead, the tools of the next PE compounding machines will be:
- Operational efficiency
- Scalable infrastructure
- Leadership and People Development
- Innovation
- Value Creation ... activities within the company rather than external to it.
AI and Agentic builds as a foundational piece of this strategy is becoming more and more obvious.
Operational Excellence requires a firm to focus all of its efforts on Value Creation, which in turn
- increase sales velocity
- increase margins
The second part of this is a rebuilding of operational systems - those that are required, but not directly value building or delivering.
The Essential but Not Important bucket of Business is where Private Equity firms should using AI relentlessly.
This bottom 20% of tasks are perfect for Agentic AI Systems and Workflows....
- Repetitive
- Predictable
- Measurable
One things I've seen from a few Capital Firms I've talked to is a lack of rigor in thinking about AI. AI
- doesn't fix everything
- shouldn't be used just because it can be used
Rather it needs to be used in the intersection of
- Positive ROI (increase revenue, increased margins, increased labor capacity, reduced errors, reduced capex, etc)
- Agentic possible - while 60% may be good for the public and chatbots, in business we often need more than 90% accuracy, and that requires a lot more work on AI workflows. Its the reason we have over 20 design principles for building these workflows - details matter and errors stack up.
- Operations Knowledgeable - a lot of the current workflows are built by those who have never spent a day in operations, and its clear. PE is going to need operations aware individuals to build tools that are actually useful and achieve the business outcomes.
Over the last 10 months I've been working with @MikeBotkin_ on a local home service business in the DFW area.
This is my last week as I prep to go into what's next...
Each project I take, allows me to build new skills and flex new muscles I didn't know I had.
Some of the things I'm proudest of over the last few months, professionally and personally:
-
Learned how to work closely with a team, and build a foundation of trust and respect. I've come to understand that if an entire team has T&R, everything else gets easier, with less friction... and friction is what keeps companies from scaling. Ideas, experiments, sharing, communication, coordination... all stop without trust and respect. This team now operates in a completely different way and on a different level - largely because of the T&R foundation we've worked hard to build
-
Operationally, we did the usual stuff like improve metrics, and scale operations. We were able to dial in systems, and promote a new mindset towards work - resulting in a 53% improvement in gross margins.
-
I enjoyed working with Mike Botkin and grew incredible respect for how his mind approaches business and operations, and his tenacity in the acquisition space.
Personally:
I originally broke away from the all out assault on growth to chase something that was falling apart at home - my faith, my family, and my life.
Over the last year, I have had more
- more sunsets with my wife
- walks with my family
- bedtime prayers with my kids
- playtime with my unit
... then in the last 5 years combined.
I've spent hours pouring over the bible and in prayer, rebuilding my walk with god.
I start building IRL friendships and largely dropped X in order to prioritize the people around me.
I made new friends in the Austin area that have become my daily brothers.
We hosted numerous brunches, get togethers, and parties - celebrating the ones we love most, and creating incredible memories.
To say I am a different person today is an understatement. While I have so much more to grow in to, the profound change on my life has built an incredible peace in our home, and with our friends.
This rebuild phase has been needed, and nice, but it is now on to the next thing. Its time for a new challenge, not one like the others. A new challenge that causes me to drop previous identities, stretch myself, and take on new challenges where I could very well fail.
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Clay is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Clay centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
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- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Clay takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Clay encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Clay work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Clay is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Clay makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Clay's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Clay isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Clay instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Clay is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Clay can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Clay's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Clay has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Clay a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Clay's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Clay as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Clay eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.