Episode #72: High‑Velocity Supply Chains & Banking: Chris Hale on Reshoring, Working Capital and Critical Minerals
In this episode of U.S. Manufacturing Today (powered by Veryable), host Matt Horine interviews Chris Hale, founder and CEO of Klear, about how reshoring and rapid scaling compress timelines and expose a mismatch between fast-moving factory operations and slow, backward-looking traditional banking. Hale explains that step-change growth driven by aerospace, defense, energy, and other demand can break order-to-cash cycles, stressing suppliers, buyers, and internal coordination, and argues this is an operational risk shared by plant managers and finance.
Links
- Matt Horine on LinkedIn
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
- Klear Website
- Klear on LinkedIn
- Chris on LinkedIn
- Forbes Article
Timestamps
- 00:00 Podcast Intro
- 00:41 Reshoring Speed Crunch
- 01:52 What Breaks First
- 04:05 Banks Versus Step Change
- 05:58 Relay Race Capital Flow
- 08:52 Origins In Global Supply
- 12:07 Building Klear Platform
- 13:33 Critical Minerals Finance
- 17:14 Geopolitics And Small Suppliers
- 22:58 Right Sized Capital
- 27:58 Back Office Fix
- 31:38 Series A Update
- 32:53 30 Day Action Advice
- 34:24 Where To Find Klear
- 35:00 Podcast Outro
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: [00:00:00] Welcome back to U.S. Manufacturing Today, the podcast powered by Veryable, where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of manufacturing, the changing policy landscape, and more.
When a company decides to reshore, everything compresses.
The timeline to stand up a plant, the cycle to source parts, the window to get paid. All of it moves faster than it used to and faster than most back offices were built for. You can install the most automated assembly line in the country, but if the cash behind it is still moving at the speed of a '90s corporate bank, [00:01:00] the parts don't show up, the shipments stall, and the floor can grind to a halt.
My guest today has spent the better part of a decade inside that exact failure point, first in mission-critical healthcare supply chains internationally, and for the last several years, across American aerospace defense and advanced manufacturing. Chris Hale is the founder and CEO of Klear, a company building the financial infrastructure specifically designed to keep high-velocity domestic supply chains moving.
We're going to get into the mechanics of what actually breaks when a factory scales faster than its banking, what it takes to finance something as sensitive as a critical mineral supply chain, and some news about what's next for Klear. Chris, welcome to US Manufacturing Today.
Chris: Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me. Great to be here
Matt: We're very excited to have you today. I think this is something that has come up over the past couple of years as America is looking to re-industrialize and build out the manufacturing sector. But we can just jump right into it and, start on the floor, not necessarily the balance sheet.
When a manufacturer reshores [00:02:00] and stands up a modern automated line, which we're hearing a lot of news about, what's the actual failure point that you're addressing? And if you can walk me through, what breaks first when the financial plumbing behind the plant can't keep pace with the plant itself?
Chris: Sure. Yeah, there's kind of a, a phased approach to things, and there's a lot of this going on across the country, in the southeast of the country specifically but everywhere where, you're standing up a factory or a lot of times acquiring an existing factory but taking it to another level. And when you do that, when you make the acquisition and you start shifting gears to accelerate production to win bigger contracts, you find yourself selling into this kind of massive increase in demand. The environment we're in today, whether it's aerospace and defense energy is a very big one autonomous systems, specialty logistics, you know, there's a lot of demand out of DC, there's a lot of demand for corporates who are either keeping pace with DC or changing plans, and a lot of these factories, either brand newly stood up or [00:03:00] acquired haven't done that kind of thing before.
They haven't scaled into that demand. And I think the way I describe this is a lot of these companies are winning contracts that completely change the face of the business. So the way that they did things the day before the contract will not allow them to fill the order, and they have to rewire the company, and starting from kind of the things that they know, like how do we build this thing revamps order to cash, it revamps the way that you communicate across the organization, it revamps the way that leadership behaves and it really changes the way that money flows through the business.
I think a lot of companies are reinventing themselves in real time is what I'm saying.
Matt: No, de- there's definitely a need for it. It's almost a day-to-day basis. And, we've talked a little bit about when we first met, the mismatch between how fast physical operations can move now versus, how slowly capital can move through traditional banking and through traditional structures.
Where does that gap, really first show up? Is it suppliers who can't get paid? Is it the, the buyers not moving fast enough in some [00:04:00] cases? I know there's some folks that sit on the sidelines waiting for that. Is it somewhere in between?
Chris: Yeah it's a bit of both. I think fundamentally it's a competency that, that needs to be built inside the organization when managing multiple large contracts. So if you're growing at, 5 to 10% a year, which is a nice growth rate, like that, that means your business is doubling every seven years you don't have this pressure.
You don't have this like massive step change and you can solve for the capital needs and the throughput of money inside the company in pretty traditional ways, right? Your line of credit might increase accordingly. You might be able to fund it out of cash flow. But if you're talking about step changes, 2X, 3X, 5X kind of step changes, you have to take a different approach and traditional finance isn't built for that.
It's, banks are heavily regulated. I will say bankers wanna help you, right? It's not a banker problem, it's a bank problem. Like your banker wants to solve this problem with you, but he doesn't have the tools in the toolkit or she doesn't have the tools in the toolkit to solve it because banks are backward-looking animals, right?
They're looking at [00:05:00] what happened last year and if you're talking about a, a 3X, 5X jump from last year to this year, there's just no way that they can see through the rear window what they need to see to help you scale. So that's really what Clear is built to do is look through the f- the front window and help the leadership look through the front window, and it's not just Clear it's a way the, the industry needs to adapt to this environment.
So it's just a, a structural problem of being a bank itself. It's not a new bank, it's not an old bank, it's not a neobank. It's just banks are regulated animals and this is what they have to do.
Matt: That makes a lot of sense, and I like, what you said. Most, all bankers want to help, their end use customer at the end of the day. For the operator who's listening who thinks this is a finance problem for their, their CFO to solve or it's just strictly something in finance, why do you think this is more of the operational risk that belongs on the plant manager's desk just as much as it does, in the finance department?
Chris: Yeah. So in my time in asset management, I [00:06:00] learned this a little bit but it wasn't really until I started doing things in physical space, out-- healthcare supply chains internationally that I understood that running a business is about the transformation of capital, right? So you start with some money, you turn it into unfinished goods, you turn the unfinished goods into finished goods, and then you deliver the finished goods, and it turns back into money. And that sequence I've described in the past as a relay race, right? And so you have your starter, and you have your people in the middle, and you have your finisher, and the, the... Anyone who knows anything about running a relay race, like a four by 100, it's as much about the stick as it is about the running. And the handoffs that need to take place between, leadership, who's saying, "Okay, let's either raise capital or deploy capital," into a plant manager whose job it is to transform that capital into raw goods and then ultimately a finished product, and then the, the, the finance team, whose job it is to actually collect and turn that back into liquid capital again and [00:07:00] restart the cycle. I think that in a slow business, you can afford to drop the stick or, roll the stick to each other. In what we're talking about today, you're at a full sprint, and you really need a single source of truth to be able to make those handoffs the way that they need to be made. 'Cause it's... The capital changes state, but it also changes owner, right? It goes from leadership and ownership to that plant manager. They're the ones that are stewarding and shepherding that investment that was made by leadership, and it's their job to transform it into a finished product by adding value. And so that is super important.
And then ultimately back to finance, who's starts the cycle over again. So that loop and that, that feedback system is really challenging to run at speed. And then the kind of multiplier is when you're doing it across a bunch of contracts in an environment where the world is changing all the time, whether it's, shipping lanes changing, tariffs, whatever it is, geopolitical stuff cancel- orders being canceled, orders being doubled.
If you sell [00:08:00] to a defense prime or the government,
they love a change order. There's nothing they love more than a change order,
Right
So all of that compounded, you just need to have this system to be able to run it together. And I think the way that the enterprise has solved for this is, number one, really expensive and complicated, but number two is in a lot of bifurcated individual licenses,
a CRM, an accounting system, an ERP. And maybe they talk to each other probably not well. Today, in the age of artificial intelligence, they can talk to each other all day, every day, right?
But you thinking of this as a unified system and building it as a unified system is really powerful.
Matt: It's a really good way of framing it the relay race. I was never the anchor myself, but, that's something it makes a lot of sense that, in, in certain environments, if you're competing to win it's a critical component. Let's st- take a step back and talk about, your experience and what brought you to Clear.
You didn't start necessarily in American manufacturing and, from our when we first met, my [00:09:00] understanding is you spent years working on mission-critical supply chains in Africa and internationally before turning to the US market. What did that experience teach you about how small suppliers can get squeezed by the organizations that they depend on?
Chris: Yeah. So I think, very differently than asset management, when you're working with real world supply chains the number one thing a lot of people are thinking about is risk. There's a lot of things that can go wrong in the real world whether it's shipping, whether it's money movement, whether it's currency, whether it's ownership, a title transfer, whether it's sort of the behavior of a customer or the behavior of a supplier. There's a lot that can go wrong, and the transfer of risk happens throughout that order process, throughout that supply chain. The bigger you are, the, the more input you have on who gets to bear the risk. And so if you're a small supplier sitting between a, multinational OEM like Becton Dickinson or Abbott, and you're selling to the United Nations or the Gates Foundation, guess what?
Everybody gets to choose except you. So the risk goes right on top of all the small suppliers, right? And [00:10:00] so I really couldn't believe how much risk some of these small businesses were being asked to take in the context of national level mission-critical healthcare supply chains, right? It was like people were mortgaging their houses to bring malaria diagnostics into East Africa. That doesn't make any sense. And so as a, a trained finance professional, you say, "Okay, when things don't make sense, prices go like this," right? And when prices go like this, there's an opportunity to actually deploy solutions to make prices go back like this. And when they come back, you make a good amount of money. So that was the idea behind the previous company called Countable. And when my board came to me in 2020 and said, "This is just as broken in mission-critical supply chains in the West," I didn't believe them, Matt. I thought, they're just trying to, have me come back and do something that's more aligned with what they know and what they wanna do. But then I interviewed founders, and I was like, "This is incredible." The same kind of problem [00:11:00] is happening with, things related to national defense with our sovereignty, with energy independence, with transition to, to clean and sustainable solutions. All of it was being thrust on these small businesses.
And so giving them the tools to actually push some of those risks back out where they belong or mitigate them is really a big part of what Clear was founded to do.
Matt: Yeah, it's it's a surprisingly fragile ecosystem and supply chain, and I think we hear a lot about, agility, resiliency, those types of words, but some of these pain points are just so fragile. I don't-- There's not really another word for it. And you bring to, top, top of mind in zero fail type environments when you're looking at aerospace, defense, advanced manufacturing, which is, to your point, critical for sovereignty most of all.
It's the same problem, different supply chain, and, by, with, when you built Clear and launched specifically for the US market, what did you build differently because of [00:12:00] what you'd already seen play out, or what was really unique to the space?
Chris: Yeah, I think we were very fortunate with our timing. So we have some partners that we work with Stripe and Fifth Third Bank through our, their embedded treasury solution, Monex as a currency partner. We have some investors that are like a large Japanese institutional asset manager that we work with. And I bring all that up because when we were doing this for healthcare supply chains, we were taking everything on as, as almost a, an expediter, supply chain manager supply chain financier, and had to build a lot internally. And I knew that wasn't something that was going to work for this market.
It's just too big, too fast, too much to do, too high demand. And so we worked with all of those partners to build tools based on everything that we had done and learned in the international markets, in the African markets, to turn them inside out to deliver them to our customers. So the kind of [00:13:00] platform strategy that underpins Clear is the turning inside out of all of those critical tools that we depended on to run the healthcare supply chains and giving them to the leadership teams of our users.
And that, y- it, we had to invest some money, we had to invest some time and take some risk to do that. But it's really what's allowed us to scale across the customer base and work with very large buyers because the, they see their suppliers scaling up and actually meeting the demands of their own growth
Matt: Yeah I think, it's a pretty fascinating look at how, things, how fast they are moving which kind of brings us into our next segment and talking about critical minerals. It's something that's been brought up on our show a number of times from the national security standpoint, from, like, how they actually do, the resourcing of it.
But the financing piece is, has eluded us, so this is-- it would be really insightful. They're probably the sharpest example of a fast-moving, high-stakes supply chain that I can think of, right [00:14:00] now. And your company's done recent work in this space, and what does financing even mean in a critical minerals context and, versus financing a normal parts order as an example?
What's the differentiator?
Chris: Yeah. So I'm sure your audience, as experienced as they are, understands that a lot of this is about processing, right? It's not even where the raw minerals are in the ground, it's about who has the capacity to turn those raw minerals into a usable product for industry. And that processing capacity is entirely situated in the eastern part of the world. We have very little of that over here for
Many different reasons. I'm just gonna leave that there.
And it's almost like doing the healthcare supply chain backwards, where, all the counterparties that you're working with are sourcing this stuff from all kinds of different places. You don't know where it's been sourced from. You have provenance issues, you have quality control issues. There's lots of bad actors jumping into the chaos of that universe. And so the, the identity management, the governance, the KYC, the [00:15:00] KYB, and then ultimately mapping the risk transfer as the, the raw product gets processed, turned into something useful, and then imported into the Western industrial base, is something that requires really high levels of diligence and care, and therefore a high level of sort of sophistication around event management and around sort of the supporting documentation and the risk transfer. There's a lot of people that are just like, "I found some, let's buy it," right? And it's like, okay, what does that mean? Who buys it? When do you pay? If it's no good, who's on the hook for it? And a lot of people aren't asking these questions. I would say, and I don't wanna downplay the sophistication of some of the actors in the space, but some of them look like it's a, a PPE situation all over again, where we're trying to find, rubber gloves. And that's not this, right? This, these stakes are way different, way higher. Interestingly, there's a lot of big industrial companies whose supply of rare earths is shockingly low and really quite a bit alarming in terms of timelines. And [00:16:00] demand is going straight up. The need for this stuff for modern, data centers and autonomous systems and batteries and all kinds of different things is going straight up. So it's something we have to solve for, but it's gonna take a lot of time, like to build the infrastructure locally or more domestically and have sovereign control over that infrastructure is, is a 10-year journey. It's not a two-year journey. And so we have to figure out this procurement problem in the near term, and that's, requires a lot of effort and energy on, on mapping discipline and governance.
Matt: Yeah, that's pretty spot on in terms of the level of diligence that's required for it. A lot of people see this as kind of a, far-off mystical thing, like talking about critical min- minerals as an umbrella term for, a lot of... Y- great example, the PPE and gloves, right? There's, nitrile gloves, critical for industrial applications, but it's also, people don't understand that the processing is actually a, a major component of it.
It's not necessarily just raw [00:17:00] material, finished product. It's, how to- how that that material gets processed. So thanks for highlighting that 'cause it's so critical to, to understanding it. When you look at the different risk profiles and we kinda touched on it a little bit, but where does that geopolitical exposure, is it baked into the supply chain from your point of view, or is this something that, you're, that Clear can account for the fast-changing mo- motion in supply chain where things are sourced from?
It's responded to kinda tariffs, it's responded to the major geopolitical events. That glove example comes to mind in 2020, but it's, it sounds like it's pretty adaptive to the changing environment
Chris: For sure. For sure. And I think, when we c- when we go back to the smallest player in the supply chain, I wanna illustrate the fact that a lot of the, the most innovative contributions to Fortune 1000 products come from smaller companies, right? It's where a lot of the innovation is driven, and so you have this mandatory participation of a large [00:18:00] population of small companies in our most innovative supply chains, right?
Whether it's space or robotics or autonomy or energy, there's a lot higher concentration of small players in those supply chains than in more mature, traditional supply chains. And I bring that up because when you have smaller players, your optionality and control over what route, what boat, what ship, what, lane, goes down dramatically, right?
These guys are just trying to figure out how to get the order filled and get the goods delivered and get paid. And you add in geopolitics and straits closing and ports closing and tariffs being imposed and so on and so forth, and it gets even worse. And so there are solutions that enterprise customers can handle and afford and plan for and fund that these small players just can't. And it's a problem. It's a problem because the components to these larger solutions are being pushed by the small players in response to the pull [00:19:00] from the large players, but the funding is coming from the small side of the equation. So you don't have optionality control. You'll just take whatever ship, whatever lane, whatever it could be. And then you get informed that, the, the s- the Red Sea cl- is closed because of, this is a couple quarters ago, a- and now you have Strait of Hormuz and whatever else. You just get told, and then you're like, "Okay. I guess I'm waiting then." Which is tough, because if it's a critical component to an important solution we miss the window. And so getting out in front of that is part of what we're trying to do with some of these suppliers.
Matt: Yeah, that's a, a really-- kinda think back to some of the supply chain war stories over the past decade or so, and triggered a reminder for me of the the ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal, like something like that. Or, obviously the, the examples that are going on in current form.
There's a lesson I think to take away from that. If you are a manufacturer that you're not really anywhere near the critical [00:20:00] minerals space, so that doesn't really concern you on a day-to-day basis, what lesson can you take away from that? 'Cause I think there's a bigger story to it.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah, I think, I th- I think the level of visibility and control and responsiveness that should be the goal of most organizations is much higher than it has been in the past. Partly because of geopolitics, partly because things are so dynamic today, but also because of customer expectations.
If they're building this infrastructure in one vertical, it's coming to your vertical. It's not like I'm impatient and, under incredible stress for this part of my supply chain, but I'm gonna let everyone else be slow and lazy compared to what, we are now. And I don't mean slow and lazy as a judgment.
Just 10 years ago, if you're behaving the same way now as you were 10 years ago, you're gonna be considered [00:21:00] slow and lazy because people are elevating the game and stepping up the game and using technology and solutions and and artificial intelligence and different kinds of manpower and integrations to up their game.
And that's just gonna be, or it is already table stakes for everybody
Matt: Yeah, that's-- Y- I, I think that's a really good point. We talk a lot about, from our perspective, labor flexibility, labor access, some of the other things that people need just faster response. And there's not, anything that's clearly defining that or what d- what does good look like?
They're having to find this in parts and pieces. And to your point, if you're, like, staring at the vertical next to you in a supply chain and you're not moving in the same direction, you're gonna be behind.
Chris: Yeah, good example. Sorry to interrupt you, but I just wanna bring this up 'cause it's
Matt: No
Chris: right there, and it's something that I think advanced manufacturing understands. Five years ago, BESS, battery energy storage systems, was like a green technology, right? It was like a way to elevate [00:22:00] sustainable energy capture, whether it was solar or wind, and store it so that you could use it at night or whenever the grid needed it, and that was-- it was kinda niche-y, right? And then now you have data center using BESS for everything and a lot of people in the batterg- battery energy storage vertical are going through this exact transformation right now, and they were in an industry where it was kinda like, "Oh, this is a nice-to-have green solution," and now it's core to, the AI revolution, the, the energy transformation we're going through, and our national sovereignty strategy all at the same time. I think a lot of suppliers dream about that, but maybe should have a nightmare version too that they think about because it's really hard.
Matt: There's a lot of headline-grabbing capital moving into the reindustrialized-- reindustrialization space, now nine and 10-figure government and institutional commitments. But you made the case that the companies actually driving [00:23:00] the innovation need something much smaller, something like six or seven figures that-- and that mismatch is a real threat to supply chain resiliency overall.
Can we-- can you unpack that for us a
Chris: Yeah, so you have, we talked about minerals. You have big government mandates like Project Vault, or you have, the $1.5 trillion commitment by JPMorgan. Like $1.5 trillion is 1,015-- or sorry, $1,500 billion loans. That's a lot of billion-dollar loans. I don't know 1,500 companies that I've ever heard of in this my space that can take a billion dollars.
They would all love to, but they just can't do it. What they need is, half a million, 750 grand, two million over and over again to help them meet this, this demand. And so part of the challenge is taking that demand signal and that capital commitment from these very large, well-funded players and fractionalizing it into the parts and pieces that cascade down through tier two, tier three, tier four suppliers so that they can fill the orders. And none [00:24:00] of them want to take massive debt on the balance sheet that they don't need, right? They don't wanna go through a brutal six-month underwriting process because everything is moving so fast and is so dynamic. The solution that we try to deliver and what I think a number of others are also trying to help with is this capital solution that is technology-enabled, software-defined, that matches the speed of the need and is right size for the problem. And that's really what I think, a lot of companies are needing and a lot of providers are starting to solve for. But again it's not a traditional banking product. It's not like a, traditional balance sheet loan. We work alongside traditional solutions very well, right?
You might wanna do equipment leasing. You might wanna... there's a lot of cool startups that have built these giant factories, right? And they put like all this either equity they sold, hopefully not, but probably or, debt they took on the balance sheet into building this huge factory.
Now it's time to actually turn the machines on and [00:25:00] think about throughput, right? And think about turning raw materials into finished product and doing that over and over again. And that's gonna be solved by, high velocity, right-fit capital that understands the problem statement.
Matt: No that's a, a really good way of framing it just because, you said that gap was pretty significant. When we first met, you had shared an example with me about a defense prime that had s- assessed, something like 45 of their suppliers, and the numbers are-- that came back were, they were pretty stark.
I would love to share that example with our audience just as a real world
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. And this is, this was a, a defense prime who was committed to helping solve this problem, right? They were doing this assessment and doing this analysis 'cause they were like, "We need to help our suppliers keep up." And they, the suppliers want to, and we wanna order from them, and they have great products and great solutions and we wanna support them. And there was... They went through a, a, a handful of suppliers, as you mentioned, and there was one of them that did over $100 million in volume with them, one, right? And most of them were doing somewhere between [00:26:00] five and 10 million. And so it's like, how can we even afford to build a product at that size as a defense prime?
You can't, right? It's like you can't, and private equity's not really gonna solve that problem, and so who's gonna solve that problem? And that's really where the relationship has started to build with them, is, we got intimate with this, as I mentioned, doing, national level cross-border healthcare supply chain solutions. And the problem statement, as I mentioned earlier, is not that different. And so if you don't under- if you haven't sat in the chair of one of these advanced manufacturers or one of these, companies that builds a, a valve or a dial or whatever it is, and now have to build 30X you just don't understand the problem, and it's just not something that a lot of people have experienced.
And we have the, gray hair and everything else, but the fortune of having experienced it for the last, seven to 10 years
Matt: That's a really good way of framing it because the, if the mismatch doesn't get solved, you, makes you wonder what actually happens to some of the supply chain [00:27:00] resiliency over the next five to 10 years. A lot of these things are, 10-year time horizons, but as you said, anything geopolitical, anything can happen at any moment.
Chris: And I would say, Matt, given, the business that you all are in and that you solve for all the time, the population is aging, right? And so that's the other thing is I think the need to solve this problem now and translate this information into a system of record that persists across the, the transition that's gonna take place over the next 10 to 15 years. It's an interesting time to be re-industrializing and reshoring when the ownership of most manufacturing firms is thinking about the next phase of their lives. So how do we put those pieces together is another question to be asking.
Matt: No, it's a really great point. The world's moving a lot faster, but it's changing, just as, as fast as as the technology pace is going. Let's talk about the operational fix, and, some of the, the nuts and bolts of w- of what Clear does. If the diagnosis is that traditional banking, fragmented data are what's actually, capping ROI on the factory floor or some of these big [00:28:00] projects that are coming out, what does the fix look like, and what has to change in a manufacturer's back office infrastructure before the automation upstream can actually pay for itself or before you actually get some type of ROI?
Chris: So I'll come back to the, the relay race a little bit, but I'll break it into the way the business runs. Th-the solutions that typically are offered to small business are versions of enterprise solutions, shrunk down or maybe not even, and just sold to them, right? So you have Salesforce is Salesforce is for Toyota and big, global brands, but small companies buy it too.
And then you have like imitators of Salesforce, or you have, NetSuite, which is kinda an Oracle miniaturized product for this kinda problem. But enterprise companies have divisions. They have departments whose job it is to do this all day every day, right? And they have it's a vertically constructed department that talks to the next department, like at monthly or quarterly meetings, and it's all kind of runs that way, and they're super well capitalized for the most part. And so hitting the [00:29:00] third rail or going off the edge of the cliff is not something that they have to worry about on a regular basis. When you talk about small companies trying to scale fast, it's the opposite set of problems. There's no department, there's no vertically integrated anything, and so you have to make sure that ownership is cascaded across the organization, right?
Ownership for your part of the company, but certainly ownership of solving the problem. And I think that's, one of the things that, that we certainly try to do, but it's hard because it's a new paradigm for a lot of these companies, where you might have top-down, down control. You might not have high levels of transparency on working capital and sort of liquidity needs. You might have operations and finance, don't even talk to each other. It's like totally separate processes. And as you start to, to scale and you start to really start to turn the wheel faster, those divisions break down, that you don't, you can't afford to have them separated. And the communication, the transfer of knowledge, and the throughput of information needs to be real-time.
It needs to be [00:30:00] accessible from anywhere You probably know this 'cause of your background, Matt, but a lot of these organizations are still using on-premise document storage, right? Or they're using like whiteboards or Excel spreadsheets on like Fred's computer, like to manage this whole thing. Like that's nuts.
But, y- you're traveling all over the place trying to s- sell and solve and learn and design and whatever it is. Like it, it has to be relatively real time. It has to be in the cloud. It has to be ca- cascaded across the organization. You still have to control information, right? You don't wanna share everything with everyone all the time. But for the most part, empowering the operations team to actually consume the information they need to keep up with the demands of sales and demands of leadership is really important. And ultimately, it allows that, that team that's often been backroom, back office type people that are the, the wrench turners to have some, some influence on the company because the [00:31:00] quality of the product and the ability to even make what needs to be made is very much dependent on getting this right
Matt: Said. I think that it does bring a little bit more not just transparency, but like a little bit of ownership to the process overall. Where, like you mentioned, folks who maybe have been unplugged from that or, I think of the operations space, it's usually the interaction with finance is someone chasing you down about the AR or AP those types of things, and not necessarily the funding of the business.
So a lot of transparency there. You mentioned that there was some news about Clear and your next steps and, wanted to have you- let you have the chance to share that with our audience as well.
Chris: With all this experience and stories I'm telling about, Africa and everything else, we're still a pretty young company. We launched in October of 2022 and have primarily raised capital from our existing investors who are part of the Africa program. But we just launched more or less yesterday officially our Series A.
So we're out in the market raising a Series A and, we've been spinning about [00:32:00] $50 million in capital through companies to support their supply chains. We're in market to increase that almost tenfold as well. We have demand, we have some pretty meaningful partnerships lined up and so yeah, we're excited about it.
It's a lot, given everything else we're trying to do. But yeah, we think that this is got a good 10 plus years in terms of timeline, and so we're doubling down on investing in the business.
Matt: Excellent. It's very exciting to hear. I think there's a lot of there's a lot of optimism in the market right now, a lot of things going on, and so the timing seems perfect. Really exciting next stage for your company and looking forward to hearing about that once it's once it's closed.
I know the diligence phase and everything else.
Chris: exciting moment. It's an exciting moment. It's it's daunting, but it's really exciting, and the team is pumped to deliver
Matt: That's, it's great to hear. We'll be keeping an eye on that. Last question that we have for you, and this is something we ask of every every guest, and i- if you're a manufacturing leader listening to this right now who suspects the back office infrastructure might be capping their ROI, maybe something as as simple as that, what's the one thing they should [00:33:00] look at in the next 30 days?
Aside from reaching out to you and your team, but what's the one thing that you would put on, in their field of view to, to make a change?
Chris: So I think, I think the, the leaders that I've seen do this well have done it either in the context of a near-term goal or near-term documented demand. It's easier to do this when you have pressure, believe it or not because it's a wholesale change, right? It's not an incremental change.
It's not a step change. Like you- you're making a wholesale change, and if you are able to go out and either identify or even better originate that external pressure, positive pressure, demand for this opportunity, then making that wholesale change is much more realistic because when you sit across the table from your team and you say, "Hey, we're gonna not grow 10%, we're gonna grow five X," everyone can kinda come to terms with the fact that the way that they've been doing things is not gonna get you there. And so you n- need a new playbook, you need a new MO, and you really need a new paradigm inside the [00:34:00] organization, and it's a little bit scary to say, go out there and make that sale, but like we talked about, the demand is there. And so if you're willing there are people that will help you get there because the opportunity's right in front of us
Matt: Said. Where can our listeners go find out more to find out about you and Clear and probably follow along as you, as your company grows over the next few months and years?
Chris: Yeah, important detail. Klear spelled with a K. I wore my vest here so you can see it. The the website is klear.capital, and you can find us on LinkedIn Chris Hale working at Klear
Matt: Awesome. Thank you, Chris. And I did come across in the time that between we met and now your article in Forbes, so we'll be sure to link that in the comments as well. Really nice breakdown of what it takes to, to re-industrialize America. Thank you very much for joining us.
Chris: Thanks so much, Matt. Enjoyed it very much
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