🔒West Hartford tech CEO’s podcast highlights CT manufacturing success stories

Ari Santiago, host of the West Hartford-based “Made in America” podcast, made small talk during a recent July afternoon with his guest, Excello Tool Engineering & Manufacturing 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 jumping into his interview with Minnick.

“It’s the ‘Made in America’ podcast, 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 machinist 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-technology company that serves small and mid-size businesses, established his podcast last summer, with the initial goal of interviewing one manufacturer 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 policymakers to a U.S. senator.

Santiago is not and has never been a manufacturer. His interest in the industry comes through his company’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 paralyzed 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 computer,” 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 lawyer like his father. But his pre-law courses mostly taught him that he had little interest in the legal profession, and moved back to his hometown 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 staffing 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 redundancies and hiring permanent replacements for his friends and himself.

Santiago actually started IT Direct in 2002 by asking his employer at the time, an environmental engineering firm, to outsource its IT department, 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 manufacturing didn’t die, it just moved to industrial parks that no one could see.”

A longtime booster of Connecticut’s business community, Santiago said he increasingly felt that people needed to hear about the interesting products Connecticut manufacturers make, and efforts to rebuild the industry in the state. So he set out to present those stories to an audience 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-empty,’ “ 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 Productions 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 manufacturing in Connecticut,” Tannenbaum said. “We’re not going to invite a company 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 manufacturers 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.

“I was probably drunk by the time we finished,” Santiago chuckled.

“Made in America’s” audience is a niche one, but the podcast is steadily getting several hundred downloads and YouTube views per episode, and clips posted to Facebook and LinkedIn get up to 15,000 clicks per episode.

But the podcast, which Santiago said probably cost about $100,000 over a year to produce, isn’t a revenue-generator. He said he’s resisted monetizing it.

“I believe that givers gain,” Santiago said, but added that there have been ancillary benefits to his company. “We’ve been introduced to people we’d never be introduced to, it helps get the word out for IT Direct.”

As “Made in America” enters its second year of operation, Santiago wants to continue working to change the perception of Connecticut’s manufacturing industry from being seen as a dying sector to one ripe for a resurgence, he said.

Tannenbaum said she thinks the show can even reach beyond people interested in the industry.

“I want it to get picked up a little bit more. I think the conversations are so good that anyone can take something away from it,” Tannenbaum said. “I don’t see any reason why it can’t become more mainstream.”