One of my favorite people in the world, Alan Evans, CEO of Unusual Machines. We went to dinner when he was in studio a few weeks back. We found out that we were very close, similar people.
But it's funny because his wife said—he's a serial entrepreneur. He's only able to do three things at once. How dare she? Unusual Machines is one of them. I can't tell you the other ones yet, but I can't wait. Alan, I can't wait to be able to lift the veil off the other stuff that you're doing because it's pretty fun and it fits in pretty well with our set. I'll just say that.
Fits in pretty well with the bar here. Good to see you, man. How are you?
You know, I'm doing all right. Just got into New York. I feel like I'm your beat reporter.
Right. Like here we go. I'm on the scene. I'll get out there. Someone give me a mic and a boom. Let's go do it.
Hey, I want to talk about—I mean, our viewers are very familiar with you. I love the sticker on the sign on the front door: 'We make drone parts.' I'm pretty sure it's as simple as that. And why make it complicated? But it's a brilliant model. And of course, it's the only pure play US drone component manufacturer in the country. But we got to talk about shutdown. We got to talk about the government shutdown. When we first started talking to you about six, seven months ago, we talked about tariffs and how that was going to affect you. I think some of these things that you think are going to hurt you end up being a big beneficiary. How does this government shutdown, if at all, affect a public company like yours?
Oh, it affects all these types of companies differently. What it really does is for the drone companies, all the money in the big beautiful bill—multi-year money for drones—nobody can write the check. So you're like, 'Oh, okay, great. No POs.' But it doesn't change when they're going to want drones. So we're well capitalized. We just are still investing money in the supply chain. I think we have like 20 new people starting to build drone motors in a week or two. We just keep going forward. So what it does for a company like ours is it adds some uncertainty, makes it real kind of wobbly out there, but because we're in a position to have the money and not wait on the PO, we get to get further ahead, right? If you're a small company and you need the order, you got to wait.
So, Alan, wait. The government is saying, 'Listen, we can't send you the money, but that December due date, December one, we expect Unusual Machines to deliver for us, right?' Is that what I'm getting?
A little bit. So if you're in the military and you know you need drones, they kind of want them as fast as possible. Yeah. So our customers, which are the drone companies, are like, 'Man, we still need drone parts. We better build these drones.' Because if any company doesn't build drones, they're just going to lose. People will go buy the ones off the shelf.
So it takes every company that has the cash to just start to build and go do it anyway. Okay.
Right. All those companies are advantaged. So I'm sitting here just watching the big public companies with huge war chests get beat up and you're like, 'Yeah, okay. Okay.'
Right. So when you guys go to plan for Q1—we're in Q4 now, you're already probably planning on Q3 for next year at this point the way you guys plan things—does this kind of hitch in the giddy up that happens—it happens every year anyway—is this something you guys—government or outside forces—because look, if you don't think we're in a global economy, look no further than what happens when we get a bad news story, how it affects the stock market. And look at how this government shutdown's affecting foreign markets. Do you plan for stuff like this for next year?
Yes and no. Like when we feel like we're at a good valuation, we put a bunch of cash in the bank. And so we've done that. Otherwise, we're right now at least—we're not in a mature market, right? It's not stable. So it's kind of go as fast as we can grow for the next year. So for us, the external market dynamics, they're really noisy and really uncertain. But if we build 100,000 motors or 200,000 motors, we're going to sell all the motors. Like we're building into a void still. So I think our need to pay attention to it and really do forecasting and steady state planning, it's not really going to be a problem for a company like ours or anybody in the drone segment really for another couple of years till we get to kind of that steady state of a mature industry.
