My father built industrial radiators.
You never have to think about an industrial radiator, because it is doing its job inside a truck or a stationary generator, moving heat away from the engine and keeping it running. No one notices a radiator until it leaks.
My father was a master machinist. He worked his way up through a large industrial operation and then started his own company. The shop held millions of dollars of machinery, some of it old and some of it new. Much of it was large, loud, and dangerous. When I was fourteen, he trained me to run a few of those machines.
The one I remember is the fin machine, the most expensive and finicky one in the building, and the loudest. It stamped a fine pattern into copper foil that would become the fins, the part of a radiator that actually sheds the heat. My job was simple. Make sure the copper feeds in clean and the finished fins stack straight as they come out. He showed me what to watch for, and when to call him.
Every step in that shop had a precise method and timing. How long a radiator baked in the oven. How long a header sat in the solder pot. Each step was set to balance efficiency and quality. In the early years he pressure-tested every unit before it left. Later he dropped the test, because the tests stopped finding issues. His radiators didn’t leak. As a boy, I was proud of his reputation. As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate what it meant.
The radiator belongs to someone else
It took me years to understand what I admired most. Although he had plenty of skill and intelligence, what I admired was that he built for whoever owned it next. Someone else would depend on that radiator, and someone else would experience failure if a corner got cut. He built accordingly. I can’t point to the day the lessons about reputation and craftsmanship landed on me. They came slowly, and mostly after the mistakes I made.
If you lead a church, a nonprofit, or a small business, you either do this kind of work yourself or you depend on someone who does. The treasurer reconciles an account no one will open until there’s a dispute. A clerk writes minutes that will be read in five years by a board that doesn’t exist yet, and an office manager keeps the licenses current without ever being asked how. Somewhere there is one person who knows which copy of the bylaws is actually in force. No one notices any of it until it leaks, and most of that work disappears into the organization the moment it’s done well.
Stewardship is the word for it. It stops being a church word once you see how much of the world runs on it, and it’s also the reason Aeris Labs exists.
What Aeris Labs is
People ask me what Aeris Labs is, and the on-paper answer is easy: we build software; we design, build, and host websites; and we help organizations say what they mean. All of that is true, but it’s not complete. The truest answer I have is that Aeris Labs is an attempt to practice stewardship through technology. Software and marketing happen to be the tools.
We are several people with different backgrounds and one standard. When you need something special, that’s when you call us. The lessons we learned came through years of hands-on work, much the same way I learned them in my father’s shop.
A radiator was finished when it left my father’s shop, but software is never finished. It keeps changing, in other people’s hands, so every build goes through tests before it ships, and we don’t let known bugs go out. I will never earn the right to stop testing like my father did, but that’s okay. Software is a different beast.
I’ve always been fascinated with art, but most of what I draw now is vector graphics, the kind described by geometry rather than pixels. They’re drawn by hand, sometimes animated, sometimes parametric, which is the engineer’s word for a drawing that can change shape based on data. I draw them the way he ran the shop, with a method for every step.
Here’s one example. ProPresenter is a popular presentation package used by many churches, yet icon libraries don’t include an icon for it. Our church customers use ProPresenter every week, so we drew an icon ourselves. No one asked us to, and no one would have complained if we’d used a generic presentation icon instead. We did it because details accumulate. The next person to use the software inherits them, whether we paid attention to them or not.
As a Christian, I serve a Creator whose work reflects both purpose and generosity. The world He made contains far more beauty, complexity, and abundance than bare utility required. I believe the Creator invites us into that work, not merely as consumers but as stewards.
Why is Aeris Labs a lab? A factory is where known things get made in known ways. A lab is where theory meets practice and new things are born. TrueBoard is the first thing to come out of that lab: governance software for church and nonprofit boards, built with no owner account at all, so that no one acts alone on what can’t be undone.
There should probably be a word for this
I don’t have the word to describe Aeris Labs. Stewardship is the nearest, and it’s too broad, an old church word that doesn’t fit on a business card. People have offered others. Craft is too narrow. Creative technology sounds like an agency, and design engineering sounds like a consulting firm. Each gets part of the picture, and none of them says “built for the person who comes after.” That is a practical problem: people recognize this kind of work when they see it, but people don’t know what to call it, so they don’t search for it. If you have the word, I’d like to hear it.
Before you go
If you are the person who keeps the records, reconciles the accounts, writes the minutes, or fixes the problem before anyone knows there was one, and you were not thanked this year, it may be because what you did worked. You are the radiator that never leaked. And if you lead one of these people, consider this your reminder. Let them hear your compliments and thanks.
Your care is not excessive. You are allowed to care more than the market rewards, and the extra care is not wasted.
My father built radiators that didn’t leak. Most customers never gave that a second thought. That was the point. He has been gone many years now, and I’ve spent most of my career since finding out how many other places his lessons apply. Aeris Labs is a manifestation of those lessons.
