Jeff Gluck of 'The Athletic' has penned a timely and insightful profile of a complex and thoughtful man. I don't often say such a thing about Gluck, as he rarely has much depth or insight to offer, IMO. However, this piece is among the very best he has ever written, so kudos to him.
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click here or read the article below. 'The Athletic' is offering free trials this month, so I'm sure they wouldn't mind me sharing an example of their excellect journalism.
Building a better Brad: How Brad Keselowski’s business has prepared him for a new NASCAR role at Roush Fenway Racing
by Jeff Gluck for The Athletic, August 26, 2021
STATESVILLE, N.C. — Seated at the head of an eight-person boardroom table, Brad Keselowski twirls a pen around on his chin and listens intently.
Department heads at Keselowski Advanced Manufacturing are running through the agenda for their thrice-weekly operations meeting, and the namesake of the business is all-in on the updates.
He inquires about the humidity levels in one room that recently affected a machine, asks about inventory and makes a request to put drapes over a sensitive area before a prospective vendor arrives.
Then there’s the topic of an upcoming meeting with a potential customer. It’s important enough for Keselowski to attend, and he opens his iPhone to scroll through open slots on his calendar.
“We need to be buttoned up for this one,” he says. “We need to know what we’re going to say and what we’re going to ask for. We should have our sh!t together.”
Everyone nods in agreement. Such requests don’t seem out of the norm at KAM, a manufacturing facility that creates parts for aerospace and defense needs — like fighter jets, bombers and a fuel system for rocket engines (among other things).
Keselowski invited
The Athletic to sit in the KAM ops meeting before touring the facility, and we’d love to tell you specifically what was discussed. But before entering the 70,000-square foot building, all visitors who don’t have a government security clearance must sign an agreement not to reveal the projects contained within.
What we can tell you, though, is Keselowski doesn’t just have his name on the building. He’s actively involved in the direction of his company, which has grown rapidly since its founding in 2018.
“The ops meeting is meant to be a debrief,” Keselowski says afterward, walking out of the conference room to begin our tour. “That’s one thing I took from racing, is departments have to talk to each other.”
At this point, you might already be wondering if this story will attempt to tie Keselowski’s business interest in the manufacturing sector into his upcoming ownership role with Roush Fenway Racing.
The answer is yes. But that’s not a stretch, because Keselowski himself sees a strong tie between the two. If anything, KAM has served as a training ground for the upcoming release of Keselowski 2.0: Brad The Team Owner/Driver.
“I don’t do a lot of media about this company because it gets held against me a lot,” he says. “People say it’s a distraction, which I 100 percent object to. This company has made me a better person. It’s made me a better professional. And ultimately I think it’s made me more successful — not just in financial terms, but in leadership terms.”
There are several prongs of KAM’s business. The company’s engineers, sitting in what appears to be a darkened room behind a glass wall, create and design parts with the latest in computer technology. Then those parts get manufactured in the facility, either via metal 3D printers or CNC machine tools. Finally, all the parts are inspected down to the smallest surfaces in KAM’s quality control lab.
[KAM has two EOS M400-4 machines for additive manufacturing. These machines allow for printing large-scale parts. The -4 refers to each machine having four 400-watt lasers working together to decrease the build time.]
Currently positioned throughout various rooms in Keselowski’s supersized building are 20 of the metal 3D printers (which Keselowski says ranks among the top three of any facility in the country) and 16 CNC machines.
Given the parts are both proprietary and being used for government projects that require a security clearance, Keselowski is unable to discuss exactly what each is being used for. But in some cases, he can drop hints.
“This part will be launching into space within the next 90 days,” he says, pulling back a cover to reveal a round object underneath.
[Depowdering the build. A laser heat source melts and welds metal powder layer by layer. After all the layers are complete, the technician removes the powder that wasn’t melted and leaves behind only the printed parts. The metal powder is sieved and used again in another build.]
Keselowski’s creation of KAM and the firsthand business experience have provided what he views as an MBA-level education. He’s learned about building effective cultures, running meetings and the value of exercises like OKRs (objectives and key results), KPIs (key performance indicators) and SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats).
“These are things I wasn’t getting anywhere else,” he says. “Yeah, I was sitting in meetings at the race shop, but I was just a participant. I wasn’t happy with how the meetings were being run, but I didn’t know how to make them any better.
“Now I know how to make them better. I know how to get more work done. And I communicate better. Those are powerful things I’m going to carry with me for the rest of my life wherever I go.”
Of course, by now everyone knows where Keselowski is going next. After 12 years at Team Penske — the only full-time Cup Series team he’s known — Keselowski will depart at the end of the season to
take a part-ownership role at Roush and drive the team’s No. 6 car beginning in 2022.
From the outside, it seems like a big risk for a 37-year-old driver who is in the midst of his prime years. But Keselowski doesn’t see it that way.
In fact, everything inside Keselowski’s mind and heart has guided him toward this moment.
The thing is, it’s been a journey to figure out what those things were saying.
The quality testing lab at KAM has somewhat of an ironic purpose: to find flaws in beautifully machined parts that have been manufactured in another room at the company. Each failed part can be an expensive blow to the bottom line, but it’s a vital part of the business nonetheless.
After all, if a company knowingly delivers faulty parts to the government, that’s a big problem.
“You go to jail,” Keselowski says. “That’s a little bit different than being busted in NASCAR.”
There’s a blue-light scanner, similar to a laser inspection system in the Cup Series, as well as an X-ray machine and a powerful CT scanner that is meant for metal, not humans.
“This will kill you very fast,” Keselowski says, motioning to the CT scanner. “But also very painfully.”
[KAM’s machine shop, housed in the building that used to be Brad Keselowski Racing.]
Occasionally, a race car driver plugged into an expensive piece of technology like a Cup Series car also needs to be examined with a bit of quality control. After coming off a final four appearance in 2017, Keselowski finished eighth in the standings for two consecutive years and saw his average finish decline.
People started wondering about the reasons behind his lack of performance, and Keselowski heard the comments.
“It was ‘Brad got married’ or ‘Brad now has two kids’ or ‘Brad has this business and isn’t as focused,'” he says. “My dad (Bob) has been sick for some time now, and it even turned into that — which was really heartbreaking for me to hear people say that: ‘Oh, the reason why he fell off in 2018 and 2019 is because his dad has been sick.’ It was very hurtful.”
But none of those things changed last year — Keselowski still has two young children, still has the business and his dad has continued to struggle with his health. The driver’s performance, though, went straight up.
Keselowski ended 2020 with four wins, a 10.1 average finish (tied for his career best) and 24 top-10 finishes (one off his career best earned in 2015). And he not only made the final four, but was the only driver to pose a serious threat to Chase Elliott in the championship race at Phoenix (more on that later).
“That was such a huge confidence-builder for me, because I had almost started to believe (the talk) myself,” he says. “I had fallen into the classic trap of racing: When a team isn’t performing to the highest levels, the finger-pointing gets pretty loud and strong. And I had started to wonder if it was me. But last year removed that (doubt).”
Self-examination and introspection are hallmarks of Keselowski’s personality, and it’s been that way since before he made the decision to shut down the Brad Keselowski Racing team and turn the shop into an advanced manufacturing center instead.
Looking at Keselowski, who on this day is wearing knit Pumas, black jeans, a white dress shirt and has a computer bag slung over his shoulder, it’s almost difficult to picture the hard times in his life. Like the time when his family team went broke in pursuit of Keselowski’s racing career, and Keselowski felt a deep sense of responsibility for letting everyone down.
If only he had money, he thought, everything would be fixed. But years later, after becoming anything but poor, Keselowski realized money wasn’t the answer.
“No one wants to hear a rich guy say money doesn’t solve all your problems,” he says. “Because the reality is, it does solve some problems — but not in the direct way you think.
“It solves your problems because what it teaches you is the problem was not money. It was you. Money eliminated my excuses because I could no longer look at something and say, ‘You know, I’d be happier if I only had money.'”
That’s why Keselowski says he’s spent “a significant amount of time” over the last three years working on himself and “internal matters of emotional intelligence.” He’s sought ways to grow and be happy.
So what did he discover? There are two concepts in particular Keselowski finds worthy of exploring.
One is the idea of living up to his potential as a human. He hasn’t done that yet, and it bothers him.
“Not living up to my potential creates this inner turmoil that needs resolution,” he says.
Creating a successful business like KAM and a philanthropic organization like his
Checkered Flag Foundation charity, whose mission is to honor and assist veterans, active military and first responders, has helped check boxes in those areas, but the racing side is just as important. And just one Cup championship plus 35 wins isn’t going to cut it, he says.
Second, Keselowski has bought into the John C. Maxwell idea of “failing forward.” There are two kinds of things that can happen when someone fails: People repeat the same mistakes or blindly believe things will be different the next time (failing backward); or they can learn from their mistakes and recognize that failure is part of success (failing forward).
So what does living up to his potential and failing forward have to do with becoming a NASCAR team owner? The intersection of those two thoughts, as it turns out, can be very powerful.
As Keselowski opens the door to the next room in the KAM facility, it’s impossible not to notice signs with pictures of airplanes on them. The signs say things like, “They fly safely when FOD-free” or “Every beautiful bird needs to be FOD-free.”
FOD is Foreign Object Debris, which is what can happen in a manufacturing facility when something gets into the building process that isn’t supposed to be there. Essentially, it means don’t make a mess. If an aircraft malfunctions due to a faulty part, even the most skilled pilot may not be able to overcome it.
“These are parts going into critical systems where people can die,” Keselowski says.
Winning an auto racing championship isn’t life or death in the same way, but even the most talented drivers can fall victim to a systems failure. That’s what happened to Keselowski in the 2020 Cup Series season — though it wasn’t a part that failed; it was people.
Last year, Keselowski felt he made the most out of everything around him. In the championship race at Phoenix, he passed Elliott to win Stage 2 of the winner-take-all event and put himself in a spot to contend — but bad pit stops cost him track position all day.
Keselowski was running second heading into the final green-flag pit stop, but came out fourth. With Elliott so far out in the lead, there wasn’t enough time to recover (aside from getting back to second place, which is where Keselowski finished).
“There are times in your life where you feel like you did everything right, and the circumstances just were not in your favor and you didn’t achieve your ultimate result,” Keselowski says. “On track, I lived up to my potential as a race car driver. And I’m so proud of that. I felt like a champion last year.
“But I didn’t win the championship. I didn’t have a large enough role to impact the circumstances around me that unfolded that were larger than my role as a race car driver.”
And that’s exactly where the ideas of living up to one’s potential and failing forward collide. When someone maximizes their performance and the outcome still isn’t reached, what does it mean?
“If I did nothing and allowed that to happen again, I just failed — I didn’t fail forward,” he says. “I want to have more ability to impact my success and my failures than I have today. I want to apply key lessons I’ve learned. And that’s part of living up to my potential.”
That said, Keselowski isn’t leaving Team Penske just because of a couple bad pit stops in one race. There were multiple contributing factors, he says.
“Some were external, but the majority were internal,” he says. “I would very much hesitate to say one thing made me decide this isn’t for me.”
There’s still plenty of room for KAM to grow. One large area isn’t being used for machines yet; instead, it has what amounts to a small museum of Keselowski’s history.
There’s the restored No. 09 Miccosukee car that won at Talladega Superspeedway for Keselowski’s first career Cup win, his 2010 championship-winning Xfinity Series car, a custom Dodge Challenger he received as a gift from his former manufacturer and even his custom A-Team van built in the style of the TV show.
In the lobby are trophies, including three of NASCAR’s four majors — except the Daytona 500, which he still lacks.
Keselowski says he’s not particularly attached to the area and would love if KAM needed to use the space for more machines instead. In the meantime, customers love to see the vehicles and the trophies.
His status in motorsports and name recognition, of course, helps with the business. Keselowski got an audience with the head of the Space Force because of it, he says.
But KAM is just one facet of the vision Keselowski has for his future. First, there’s much more to accomplish in NASCAR. At Roush in 2022, he hopes to take many of the lessons from KAM and apply them to the racing world.
His new ownership interest assures he’ll have a chance to build things his way.
“Racing is still very important to me,” he says. “Yes, (the business and racing) is a two-headed monster, but these things connect.
“It’s back to that fundamental goal of, ‘Did I live up to my potential?’ Now, if everything I’ve got going on fails, I’ll be able to sleep well at night — because I answered that question.”
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