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Michael McHale bought PSA Systems in 2016 with four employees, one customer in the paper industry, and no marketing plan. Over the next decade, the company added a machine shop, a fabrication shop, and three office locations across Pennsylvania. It now serves Fortune 1000 manufacturers in packaging, heavy machining, defense, and military industrial complex contracting. Revenue has doubled five times over.

For almost all of that growth, PSA had no outreach mechanism whatsoever: no dedicated sales team, no marketing function, no LinkedIn presence. The company grew through referrals, supplier relationships, and the simple fact that engineers move between companies and take their trusted vendors with them. It worked until Michael realized it had a ceiling.

In this conversation with Arnaud Dasprez on The HEX-Files, Michael talks through what it takes to shift from a company that waits for business to one that goes out and finds it—and why that transition is harder, slower, and more rewarding than most engineering-led firms expect. 

Keep reading for Michael’s clear guidance on this topic. (And check out the full podcast episode here.)

 

"We became vertically integrated out of necessity."

PSA started as a robotics and automation integrator. A robot is the commodity, Michael explains. What an integrator actually does is engineer everything around it: the conveyors, sensors, end-of-arm tooling, risers, and custom fabrication that turn a robot into a working system. Early on, PSA relied on subcontractors for that work, and the results were slow, inconsistent, and expensive.

So the company brought it in-house, and that decision paid off in three clear ways:

  • Faster delivery, since one team controls the process.

  • Lower cost, with fewer outside markups.

  • Quicker iteration, because changes happen internally.

The machine shop and fabrication shop grew alongside the robotics business, driven partly by customer demand and partly by the practical reality that building complex systems requires owning the adjacent capabilities.

But that decision had a structural benefit beyond quality and speed. Capital equipment projects are cyclical. Some years, budgets are released; some years they aren’t. Service, repair, and contract machining generate revenue every month regardless of the capital cycle. Vertical integration built revenue stability into the business model.

"We were really good at harvesting, but we weren't very good at hunting."

The moment Michael decided to change PSA’s go-to-market approach came from an unexpected place. He joined a roundtable in the CNC and aerospace defense space to grow his network in that sector. Watching how other companies in that group used LinkedIn, a light bulb went on. If you want to be seen as a leader, he realized, you have to act like one in public.

Until that point, PSA’s growth had been entirely inbound. Customers who had worked with them at one company brought them to the next. Word spread slowly through an industry where everyone knows everyone. Michael describes this as harvesting: working the relationships you already have. It’s effective, but it compounds slowly, and it makes you entirely dependent on the contacts you currently hold.

Hunting (going out to find relationships that don’t exist yet) required a different kind of commitment. PSA hired a dedicated outreach person whose sole job is building the top of the funnel. They tried third-party agencies first and found limited success. The only thing that worked was bringing the function in-house and giving it the time and consistency it actually requires.

"Show that you're a leader and get your word out there."

PSA’s website had not been updated in five or six years. It showed who the company was when it had one robot installed, not who it was after doubling revenue five times over. Michael is candid about why: as an owner, he was always looking at where to put capital to generate immediate returns, and a website update doesn’t show up in next month’s numbers.

That calculus has shifted. When a new contact gets introduced to PSA now, the first thing they do is look at the website. If it doesn’t reflect the company’s actual capabilities, scale, and track record, the credibility gap opens before the first conversation happens. The website rebuild underway is designed to close that gap, showing past projects, current skills, and the full scope of what PSA now does.

LinkedIn has played an equally unexpected role. Michael was not a LinkedIn user until three or four months before this conversation. He didn’t see the value in it. What changed his mind was noticing that consistent posting has made him think more clearly about who PSA is, what they want to show, and how they want the market to perceive them. That internal clarity, he says, has been as valuable as the external visibility.

PSA also has a podcast of its own, running since 2018; a fact that surprises most people who look at the company’s otherwise understated market presence. It started as a vehicle for interesting business conversations, evolved into a platform for discussing technology with vendors, and has now become an internal learning tool as much as an external one. The plan is to expand it significantly, with live broadcasting and more video content integrated into the new website.

"I see it all as one."

Michael does not distinguish between sales and marketing budgets. To him, updating the website, posting on LinkedIn, appearing on a podcast, making a phone call, and closing a deal are all the same activity: building the top line. Whether a dollar goes toward a content effort or a sales call, it serves the same purpose.

That view is more practical than philosophical. PSA’s sales cycles run three to five years. In a given year, the company might price ten projects for a single plant and see none of them approved. That is the normal pattern of capital equipment procurement. The relationship stays alive, the project gets revisited, the ROI gets recalculated, and eventually one of those projects is released. The companies that disappear after a no never see that return.

The corollary is that partner relationships work the same way. PSA operates as a brand-agnostic integrator—customers use ABB, FANUC, Kawasaki, Rockwell, Honeywell, and Siemens, and PSA has to work across all of them. Co-marketing with vendors tends to be informal: joint sales calls, shared booth presence at trade shows, and a gentleman’s agreement that bringing each other leads results in purchasing commitments. It is a relationship economy, and the currency is trust accumulated over time.

“If you think somebody hits a button and sales come through the door, you’re lying to yourself.”

PSA has only been actively hunting for a few months at the time of this conversation. Progress is slow, and Michael expected that. What he wants other owners and CEOs to understand is that unrealistic expectations about outreach timelines are a planning error and unfair to the people hired to do the work. Hiring an outreach person and expecting leads within a month sets that person up to fail and the company up for disappointment.

Hunting, done properly, takes six to nine months to show returns. It requires consistent human contact, steady activity, and the discipline to measure incremental progress rather than waiting for a sudden breakthrough. The same patience that built PSA’s reputation over a decade applies to building its outreach capability.

The CRM infrastructure to support this is in place, but Michael is adamant that the tools matter less than the human contact. They help the team stay organized and maintain consistent touchpoints, but the relationship still closes because of people, not platforms.

“The AI is not replacing any staff, but it’s making us more effective.”

PSA’s AI adoption is more advanced than its marketing presence might suggest. Six months before this conversation, the company converted its machine shop to AI-assisted CNC programming and is now rolling that capability across all its programmers. The efficiency gains have been significant enough that the next phase is already planned: using AI to automate project management workflows and then moving upstream into the sales process itself.

The sales application looks specifically at the proposal and scoping process: making sure applications engineers have asked all the right questions, automating parts of proposal writing, and reducing the time between site visit and formal submission. 

Michael’s framing of the AI strategy mirrors his framing of the sales and marketing strategy: it is one integrated effort with one goal, not separate initiatives. The AI tools are part of the same push to make a small, engineering-led team more effective with the time it has, without replacing the human judgment and relationship-building that actually win and retain industrial accounts.

Explore more ideas and practical advice on this topic.

Catch the full conversation with Nir Brenmiller on The HEX-Files, HexaGroup’s energy marketing podcast for leaders who want real results.

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