There's still so many manufacturers that don't know that grants exist. I've spoken at a number of conferences and on a number of podcasts. And it always amazes me when I ask how many in the room have done anything with grants. Out of a room of a hundred, I might get one or two. I mean, it's almost always the case. Good morning, good afternoon, or a good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 58 of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing exclusively on the intersection of sustainability and supply chains. I'm your host, Tom Raftery, and I'm thrilled to have you here today. A huge thank you to this podcast's, amazing supporters. You make this podcast possible If you'd like to join this community support starts at just three euros or dollars a month, which is less than the cost of a cup of coffee, and you can find the support link in the show notes of this or any episode or at tinyurl.com/sc pod. Now in today's show, I'm excited to dive into the topic of grants with Micki Vandeloo and in the coming weeks I'll be speaking to Klaus Bretschneider, who's the director of Sustainability Products for Linx AS, Kenny McGee, who's CEO of Component Sense, Andrew Hargest, who's the founder of Supply Club, and Simon Kim, who's the CEO of Glass Dome. But, back to today's show, and as I said, my special guest today is Micki. Micki, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. And thank you for having me, Tom. My name is Micki Vandeloo. I'm the president of Lakeview Consulting. Lakeview Consulting helps manufacturers fund their success. And we've been doing this over 10 years and have gotten over 190 million dollars for clients. Most recently a twenty nine and a half million dollar grant for a firm. So we're, we're really excited about that. And I'm excited to talk to you today and all your listeners. Fantastic. And we'll, we'll come back to the funding bit in a second, but just before we get into that, how did you get into this? So that's a really interesting story. So I actually spent over 25 years in manufacturing. during that time I got exposure to training grants through one of the jobs that I had. And I thought, this is kind of a cool thing. You know, people can get half off their training and it really made my clients happy when I was able to get them those grants. And then I moved to an actual manufacturer. I was working at that time for a consulting firm. Then I was working for a manufacturer, one of my clients, and I kept the training grant thing going and found out about a grant For my client that it could apply to them and it was a 600, 000 grant through the state of Illinois. And so I thought, you know, let's try it. Let's apply for it. And I had so much fun writing that grant. I wrote it on a piece of paper with a pen and I don't do that now, but, I wrote it you know, on a piece of paper and I just sat there over a weekend and wrote this grant. It kind of combined my love of technical expertise with my creative side is what I found. And so I got my company, the 600, 000 grant. And over the course of the next two years, I managed the grant and it increased to 2. 3 million for a number of reasons, mainly the fact that it was 2008, 2009, a lot of the awardees were going out of business and then money was coming available and we did a really great job of spending the money. And so after that, I'm like, You know, if I wasn't bringing these grants to these companies or to my companies, if I wasn't doing this work, then nobody was because, for sure, my president of my company was not going out and looking for grants and neither was anybody else, you know. So that's when I decided that like you consulting needed to be a thing I decided that you know I was going to be the one that was going to work with manufacturers to make sure that they knew that there was grant money out there and help them access it because quite honestly Tom I knew from working in manufacturing that it's hard enough for people in manufacturing to work on their business. I mean, there's always fires. There's always, you know, a demand from the customer. Every day's a different day, every day's a busy day. So I really felt that if I could go in and help manufacturers and provide that expertise to them, that it would be valuable to them, and that's what happened. So, yeah, Fantastic and what do you think it's been the most surprising thing you've found in your shift from being in manufacturing to now being in Lakeview? I think the most. surprising thing is that there's still so many manufacturers that don't know that grants exist. I've spoken at a number of conferences and on a number of podcasts. And it always amazes me when I ask how many in the room have done anything with grants. Out of a room of a hundred, I might get one or two. I mean, it's almost always the case. And that's why I'm really glad I have this opportunity through podcasts, through conference speaking, through my articles, through my posts on LinkedIn, to be able to educate people because the more that they know, them, the better decision they can make as to whether or not they want to pursue those. Okay, and what kind of grants are we talking about? So I mentioned training grants before, and that's a pretty common one. if a manufacturer has any experience with grants, it's usually training grants, and that's usually because a community college has said, we have this grant available and all you need to do is provide this information. But there's also equipment grants. There's grants for research and innovation. There's grants for recycling. There's grants for capital investments. There's grants for expansion. There's grants to fund a number of different activities. One particular one in the United States here, and actually in my research, internationally is sustainability. That's become a huge thing. And in the United States, more, companies in California have experienced grants for these types of energy efficiency, renewable energy, they've seen more of that, but it's becoming more of a nationwide thing mainly in part, or in part because of the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act here in the United States, which put a lot of money toward those initiatives. So that's been a growing area of grants that I haven't seen in the past. The other thing that has come about in the last couple of years is there's been more grants for manufacturers directly than I've ever seen before. And that's both from the state and the federal level. It used to be that when we would look for manufacturing grants, two, three, four years ago, definitely before COVID, there were state grants, if they were research oriented, there might be a federal grant, like an SBIR or something like that. But now on any typical grant research, we will find many more grants at the state level that can apply to them and at the federal level. So that's, that's been a really big change over the last couple of years. Okay, and maybe it's just semantics, but is there a difference between subsidies, incentives and grants, or are they all typically much the same thing? So let's say I get a subvention for putting solar panels on my roof, or I get a, a subsidy or a tax break for buying a fleet of electric vehicles or something. Does that fall under the, what you would define the heading of a grant, or is that something separate entirely? So a grant is any time you don't have to pay back the money. So it's, it's a check that you receive, typically, and it's a check to fund outcomes, or what's going to change as a result of your project. It's, a check to fund those outcomes that matches what the funder wants to fund. So, when you look at grants, they are separate from tax credits in particular because grants are something you apply for. You can apply for them throughout the year, whereas tax credits you typically only apply when you have an applicable event at tax time. And grants are much more fluid than tax credits. So here in the United States, there are states that use tax credits to fund economic development. I mean, they, don't have very many grants. It's largely tax credits. I think that's also the case overseas, by the way. Tax credits in the United States are very prevalent and they are different than grants. Loans are different than grants as well because you do have to pay back a loan. So if you look at the variety of funding mechanisms, tax credits and grants and loans are different in those ways. Okay. And where are the grants coming from? So the majority of grants still for manufacturers come from the state in which those manufacturers are located. So if those manufacturers have a registered location in a state, they can apply for grants in that state. The company does not have to be headquartered in that state, for example. So you can get a grant for the headquarters and then for any other plants that are in various different states in which they're registered. So the states where those manufacturing firms reside is the primary source of grant funding. The secondary source is the federal level. There is kind of a combination of the two, it's called a pass through grant. So USDA is big on this. So USDA in the United States is the Department of Agriculture and they have several rural business programs. But those grants don't come from USDA federal, there's money that's passed to the states and then the states administer those grants. So, USDA is a common one for that one. There's also one called the STEP program, S T E P, which is an export program. And that money gets funded through SBC, through the SBC in the United States. And then it goes down to the states to help fund companies that are exporting product overseas. And it helps fund their attendance at trade shows and trade missions that the state might arrange. It will fund things like translation of websites if if they need to do that to supply to a different country. It will fund any kind of certifications that manufacturers need to have to supply to another country. So it's a really great program and it's, it's every year it's awarded to the state. So it's a, it's an ongoing program as are the USDA rural programs. So the rural programs got a big boost from the two COVID bills. And so now for, example, for renewable energy project at a rural manufacturer, if they do a solar panels or a wind turbine or geothermal, they can get half of that project's cost up to a million dollars in grant funding. So it's a very significant grant. Before COVID, it was a quarter of the project up to $250,000. So, it got a substantial boost. And I'm guessing that obviously because it's state level in the US there's got to be at least 50 different places that I got to go to look for information to find out what grants are available where? Yes, that is very true. And there's not one portal. We have a database that captures all those manufacturing grants because we saw the same issue. If a company's got locations in several different states, they're not going to go and look in each one of those states. I mean, that's going to be a huge task. So we do have a database that we offer through our website that will give a manufacturer an idea of what's out there give them some information. So that's, that is something that we do offer, but at the state level, even it's very hard to find grants. So for some reason, and I've never quite figured this out states do not openly advertise grants. They have them buried. Like you have to go to the state. You have to go to the economic development department of the state. You've got to go to something like funding or, or incentives or something like that. And then under that, so buried five or six layers deep is grants. And so it's, it's very hard to find at the state level. Okay. And you said you spent a weekend doing this grant proposal for or grant application for training. How long typically, or is there a typical length of time it takes to fill out an application for a grant? I mean, are some of them really, really quick or some of them, you know, pages and pages and pages long, or is it a spectrum? It's a spectrum. State grants typically take less time because they're less complex. They're also less competitive. So if we're working with a company, we will typically have them apply for any state grants that they can apply for before they even try a federal grant. Federal grants are much more complicated, much more complex, and require, partnerships usually, which take time to develop and they are also much harder to manage on the back end, like after you've received the grant. So at the state level, it takes us anywhere from 5 to 25, 35 hours to put together a grant application with the simplest being the training grants. If a client, if a company has a lot of information on their training, like a good training plan. It might only take us five or ten hours to finish that application. And most of what the time is spent from our end is gathering information for the grant. It's not actually writing the grant and it's also managing the project, making sure that everybody's giving the information that they need in a timely manner. If there's a deadline, making sure that it's before the deadline, obviously. At the federal level we can spend anywhere from 30 to 80 hours on a federal grant. They can be very complex. They can be 40, 50, 60 pages. That's not uncommon. So with attachments and everything in it, it's a much heavier lift. So it takes us a lot longer to do those grants. Okay. And obviously this is the Sustainable Supply Chain podcast. So talk to me a little bit about some of the sustainability related grants that are available. Sure. So at, in the United States, like I said the USDA has really supported sustainability as has the department of energy, which has gotten a huge boost again from the COVID bills. They just put out, for example, a, they're going to be releasing a battery manufacturing supply chain grant. And is the second round of this grant and it funds up to, I believe it's$200 million for companies to expand their capacity in the supply chain to produce batteries for electric vehicles and for other products. That's an example of how the federal government is, is really supporting sustainability. At the state level many states have applied for grants, for example, to fund EV charging infrastructure because it was recognised through COVID that if we were going to put EVs on the road, we needed to have a good solid network of chargers. And we did not have that when COVID started. So there's been a lot of EV charging types of grants. There are also grants through EPA to fund clean air. So there's a lot of clean air and those types of grants. Sustainability is just a huge issue in the United States right now, just because we realised a lot of things through COVID and, and there's been a lot of, of sustainability related supply chain grants over the last couple of years. There's been one for heat pumps. There's been one for semiconductor chips, mainly to bring those products back to the United States or into the United States. And to bring the supply chains for those products into the United States because we don't want to be relying on other countries again when the next pandemic happens. So that was really how the United States framed a lot of the money that was put toward supply chains and having these huge amounts of money that were available to construct facilities and to put equipment in and to retool. And so sustainability Is always part of that. And I'm also noticing in the United States that many more manufacturers, especially larger manufacturers, have very strong sustainability initiatives themselves and expect the same things from their supply chains. So as that becomes more and more and more prevalent, I believe that you're going to see even more grants that are supply chain related, because what happens at the state level is they see these big initiatives happening, And the grants will follow. Typically the money will follow because it's been recognised in the United States finally, which it's taken decades. But I think COVID brought it to bear is that if you want manufacturers to be sustainable, to be effective, to be competitive, you have to incentivise them to invest in these things because it can be very expensive to invest in sustainability issues. And so I really welcome the fact that the the federal and the state governments have finally decided that manufacturing is important, and if they don't put money toward manufacturing, then we're going to be a service society, not a maker society, so it's a big push right now with the new administration. I'm not sure that many grants are bipartisan. A training grant will always be a training grant. The STEP programs and all those things are longstanding programs that are not going to change by administration. But there has been a lot of talk here about, not supporting clean energy and sustainability as much with this administration. Going to be really interesting to see what happens with the grants. The one thing that I heard that was very interesting, I was at a conference, it was a sustainability conference, and a representative from the Department of Energy got up and spoke and said, even if all the funding is taken away, all the supplemental funding that we've had for the last couple of years is taken away, We still have a huge budget and we still have a lot of money to put toward grants. The biggest problem they have is that manufacturers don't apply for them because they don't know about them. So there's people going out now to these manufacturing conferences from the department of energy saying listen We've got this industrial assessment center program that can help you get more sustainable and you can get a grant to implement all their recommendations and you know manufacturers are like"really I didn't know that", you know So it's, it is a challenge at all levels. When I looked at the European grants, what I thought was interesting, I've known for a lot of years because we do work with companies that have multinational presence. I've known that the European Union for a long time has supported, clean energy, sustainability. They've been much more forward thinking about it than the United States has. I still see when I, when I looked, I saw a tremendous amount of funding for that. And that's always been the case with Europe. I think that's going to continue to be the case for Europe, but I think that just points out the differences between the focuses on the grants in the European Union versus the focus on the grants in the United States and, and at a federal level, especially not usually the first year of a new administration, but years two, three and four will very much reflect the priorities of that administration for economic development and for growth and manufacturing. So I don't see the grants being as in flux in the European Union as I do in the United States. And what about grants for things like efficiency projects, because if you are making your manufacturing organisation more efficient, reducing waste, that's also a sustainability win. Sure well I mentioned USDA before. They also have a program for energy efficiency. Again this is for rural manufacturers and agricultural producers. There are tax credits for energy efficiency in the United States that a lot of manufacturers don't know about. I see a growing number of manufacturers embracing solar in particular, wind some, geothermal for the more rural manufacturers has also become and so USDA will incentivise a lot of those types of renewable energy, but they have a strong energy efficiency program. So if you're replacing a less energy efficient piece of equipment with a more energy efficient piece of equipment. And there's a substantial payback to that. Then USDA will fund that to the tune of, I believe it's $500,000. And the other thing is at the state level that many of the equipment grants that are offered, one, requirement is that they are more energy efficient than what's being used. So the states are also kind of indirectly incentivising that as well. Like there's added points for equipment that is more energy efficient. And you've mentioned a couple of times now that manufacturers typically are unaware of these grants, what kind of tips or tricks would you offer to manufacturers who might be listening to this for them to find these grants that are buried five or six levels deep across 50 different states and federal agencies? One thing I tell manufacturers is, is get to know your economic development people. In every state, there's an economic development department, have them into your facility. Let them take a tour of your facility. Let them get to know what you're doing as well as your state senators, your representatives, people that are in the political system, the more they know about your company, the more likely they are to tell you when there are grants coming about. Just now, we just had a grant that was awarded to like six states. To support their automotive supply chains to convert them to electric vehicle production. And I can guarantee you that the companies that knew their politicians and knew their economic development people, were more aware of those grants when they came out because, you know, they thought, Oh, we went and saw that company and they produce for the automotive sector. And so that's, probably the number one thing I tell companies is, if you don't know if you're going to go for grants, at least find out where they are and talk to the people that generate them. And sometimes they can even help inform those. The other thing I tell companies is, if you're going to do research into grants don't just do it once because those grants will change. So I tell people typically monthly to refresh their research and make sure that the grants that they are interested in are still out there or that there are new grants that they might be interested in. So that regular research is really important and quite honestly and it's not self serving because there are a lot of grant professionals out there, but not being afraid to obtain expertise when it comes to this, because what I have found is that manufacturers can do it themselves. I mean, I'm not saying they don't have the ability to do it, but what we tell companies is let us do best what we do best so that you can go and do what you do best. What you do best is manufacturing. If you're going to spend 10 20 40 hours putting together a grant application That's 10 20 40 hours you are not spending doing what you're what you do best Let somebody come in and help you and also we also take that research responsibility off them. We do the research for them and we refresh it monthly and we fill out the applications for them. So, you know, it's just a great practice and, don't be afraid to go out and look for help. If you're sick, you go to a doctor, right? If you're, if you have, problems with your teeth, you go to a dentist. You know, you hire a plumber to do it. So, Yeah. And you've talked a little bit around it as well, but the changing administration, and the changing focus of the new administration, how is that going to impact the grant scene, particularly obviously with respect to sustainability? I would love to say it won't impact it a lot because it, again, it's bipartisan. You know, every representative, every senator that's out there loves to give that big check to a company in their district. So, do I think it's going to change drastically? Probably not. But I can tell you that, you know, some organisations that do really great work in this area might see a lot less funding. You know, the Department of Energy might be cut back to what they were before COVID. And again, that's substantial, but it isn't what they had during this last 3 or 4 years. So, there's a lot of efforts to try to make the government more efficient. Right now and I think that's going to have an impact on both the staffing at the federal level for these grants. So there are program managers for federal grants there's a lot of staff that come around a grant to make sure the grants get awarded, and get administered effectively. I think you might see a drop in those as well, which I think will lead to less funding possibly going out for things like sustainability and and again, president Trump has been very vocal. He really does not love clean energy. He's not a big believer, even though he has a very close ally that, is an electric vehicle company. So, it'll be interesting to see. There's a lot of dichotomies right now in the American political system. So, I think what that's going to lead to is probably not a lot of effect just because you know, if it gets diluted at all, the biggest effect I can see is at the staffing levels for these federal agencies, which again would result in less grants, but right. Okay. But I guess bottom line anyway, is if you are thinking now is the time to try pull that trigger just in case. This year is probably the best time because after this year, the budgets are going to be in the hands of a new administration and a new Congress. So, it's going to follow that administration's priorities. Which again, I'm now, I'm not seeing a huge difference. I don't, I don't know that it's going to change a lot, but I, I do know It's probably going to change some. Okay. And if I were filling out a grant application, what kind of typical questions would I expect to be asked? So the biggest thing funders want to know is what are you going to be doing? What activities are you going to do? There's always a section on your work plan and your activities and your timeline. So, when you're going to do it, how you're going to do it, who are you going to use to do it? And do they have the expertise to do it? So for example, if you're applying for a state grant for training. They want to know that the training providers have the expertise to do the training. If it's an internal person doing the training, they want to see a bio. So they want to know who's going to do it and are they qualified to do it? And a budget. The budget is important because it has to be applicable to the project. For example, you can't ask for $5 million for four training courses. They would say that's way too much, right? On the same side, if you're putting in a huge sustainability effort and the state is funding it and you're saying, I only need $100,000, they're going to question why you're only asking for $100,000. You know? So the budget is really important. The budget justification is really important. How did you come to the numbers? Did you get quotes for your equipment? Did you use historical costs? You know? So there's, there's a big push for that. And then the final area is outcomes. They want to know what's going to change as a result of getting that grant. Are you going to be more energy efficient? Are you going to have better trained people? Are you going to save so much in greenhouse gas emissions? Are you going to be reducing the impact on landfills? So all of those are different outcomes because what happens at the end of the day is the grant funder will look at your application. And it will look at what they want to fund. And if those two match, you will get funding. The long and short of it is that, that is the way that they look at things. So the outcomes are really important. And identifying what those are is really important. And why is there such a difference in the length of the federal versus the state applications? States tend to keep things a little bit more simple. Tend to fund simpler activities. So for manufacturing readiness grants, for example, in the United States, basically, all they want to know is what are you going to purchase? What piece of equipment are you going to purchase? Is it an eligible piece of equipment? You know, it's a pretty simple application, relatively speaking, whereas federal grants require partnerships. They usually require a large scale effort. So there was a tax credit program recently through the Department of Energy that was substantial and the ones that got funded had the biggest impact because they were in locations that were really needing energy efficiency and energy savings. And we had a client that applied for three of those and the one in Hawaii got funded because it had the greatest potential, they have a solar facility in Hawaii and Hawaii has the greatest amount of solar energy. But it was a huge application because they needed to say, here's what we're going to do with the community. Here's how we're going to get a workforce for our facility. So, they had to get all these partners to do all these things, you know, all the things that they weren't really good at doing. And then finally they were going to make an investment and they had to quantify that investment. So it can take two to three months to fill out a federal application because they are so complex. There's a lot of attachments that are typically required. There's a lot of information that's required. So you have to have a really good idea of what you're going to do and how you're going to do it if you're going to apply for a federal grant. Okay, talk to me a little bit about some success stories you've had or your customers have had, or clients. What are we yeah. And I mentioned earlier in the podcast we wrote a grant for a telecommunications company this last year and it was a very competitive grant and they ended up getting 29 and a half million dollars to grow their telecommunications network partner with some large telecommunications providers. It was a, it was a really nice grant. During COVID there was also some substantial supply chain grants that were happening. So I helped a company in Kansas get about$3.1 million in grants for two different manufacturing lines because they were in a sanitizer, hand sanitizer and cleanser. That was their product, and so they were getting bottles from China, and they were also getting product filled in Mexico and in Canada, and so they really wanted to localise those supply chains more, so they brought that product in house. And they got funding in order to do that. So and they added people and they invested a lot of money and, they're, thriving now. So that's what I love to see by getting these companies grants, because I know that when they get a grant, they will hire people, they will grow, they will expand. And I'm sure it's the same way in Europe as well. You know, these companies put money into these grants because they want to see the economy grow. They want to see a more stable economy. They want to see a future for workers. And I know that's the way it is in America. And that's really what we're committed to. Our purpose is to ensure prosperity for current and future American workers, because that's what it comes down to. If there are more profitable companies, they are going to hire more people. Those people will spend money in their communities. So, it's, a very noble purpose and it's a great outcome from what we do. Okay, cool. Left field question for you, Micki. If you could have any person or dead, or fictional as a spokesperson for evangelising grants for manufacturing companies, who would it be and why? I think the ideal person to evangelise for grants is honestly the top of the administration, know, and that will flow down. Any change has to happen from the top. So, You know, we've seen a lot of grant programs be generated through people saying this is important. Mm mm. The more people that say that certain things are important, like manufacturing and at those top levels, the more money that's going to go toward those. So I would say the president, you know, I would say whoever the president is at the time is the best person to evangelise for manufacturing. The more manufacturing focus we have in this country, the more grants there will be to support manufacturing. We are coming towards the end of the podcast now, Micki. Is there any question I didn't ask that you wish I did or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of? You know, I think we covered a lot. I think I would go on a little bit more on the tips and tricks, you know, just making sure that you define a good project plan. We didn't really talk about that a lot, but when you're looking as a manufacturer or anybody in a supply chain at a project that you're wanting to invest in, a lot of times people will say, well, we just want to buy this piece of equipment. I try to take them back to what are you going to do when you buy the piece? Because we can actually find two or three grants. We call it stacking wins. So basically if you really define your project for an equipment purchase, for example, you might have an engineering firm that has to do a study and you might have to purchase the equipment and then there might be training that's associated with that equipment and there might be software. Well, there can be grants for each one of those pieces for the equipment, for the training. So the better a manufacturer can define their project in great detail, the more grant funding we can find for them. So, that would be the only thing I think we didn't cover, but I think it's really important. Okay. Superb. Micki, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? Our website lakeviewconsulting. net is probably the primary way they can contact us through the website. I also have a lot of articles about grant funding, pretty much answering any question a manufacturer might have. You can also access our manufacturing grant database from our website. I also have a significant presence on LinkedIn. So if you want to follow me on LinkedIn, it's under Micki Vandaloo, M I C K I Vandaloo. And I post at least once or twice a week about different grant opportunities and different questions, answering questions that manufacturers might have. So those are two great places to find us. Superb. I'll put those links in the show notes, Micki. So everyone will have access to them. Thank you. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast. Micki, it's been really interesting. Thank you. I appreciate you having me. Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.