BluePrint Engines Owner/Founder Norris Marshall Tells His Story (Plus Priceless Life/Success Advice)

so this is the first engine that i ever built so jack roush sent this intake manifold to my mom and dad's house cod for 75 yeah i don't have all the advice in the world but i would say one thing that i absolutely believe in is that there's always somebody out there that can help you and wants to so we're in the main lobby of blueprint engines with the man who started this place the camera is just here as an accessory i want to hear your story for my own knowledge library when did you start how did that happen i started a business in 1982. uh always had been an enthusiast always interested in hot rods and street rods and did some drag race and some circle track race and things like that uh i like cars but i really like the engine's the best so started out in the engine rebuilding business and that migrated to blueprint engines which you see today how did you like get into working on cars like where did that interest farm from it came from my dad my dad was a very typical 1955 hot rodder uh he had a flat top haircut had a 32 ford roadster that he built that was kind of a piece that he was proud of he's 15 years old when he built it and had a flathead ford v8 in it he went on and did some drag racing and some circle track racing uh so i grew up hearing all those stories about dad's exploits as a young man and that was really where i got interested he was done doing all that and he's trying to earn a living by the time i came along but i remember hearing all those stories and thought that was pretty cool that's interesting how like the seed is planted really really early because it's kind of the same for me like with uh i heard there was a cool story behind that yeah that engine back there so this is the first engine that i ever built the history of this is in 1977 hot rod magazine had an article about jack roush jack roush was just a young engineer working at ford and jack roush had taken a regular 302 ford and turned it into a 302 ford boss by using 351 cleveland heads so back in those days you waited to get hot rod magazine and car craft magazine in the mail and you were really excited and you wore out the pages looking at it well in 1977 in april there was this article about how to make this bogus boss ford engine i was 15 years old and i thought this seemed like a pretty good idea so i bought a used ford 302 engine out of newspaper and i found these cleveland heads this is the actual engine found the cleveland heads at a salvage yard about 30 miles away that my mom drove me to i got all this stuff bought took it to the machine shop gave him this magazine article and said i'm trying to build this engine so eventually we did get it built i put it in this 69 ford pickup with flames that i painted in my dad's barn and i got the engine back from the shop got it ready to assemble and i was missing this intake manifold so because it's kind of specific right the rest of the engine is a little bit of a hodgepodge of normal parts you can put together to make a 302 box but the intake has to be a 302 boss in the article roush said that there was an edelbrock manifold and there was a ford manifold and those were the only choices you had i couldn't afford the edelbrock manifold so i used information back in those days you would dial a number on your phone and you'd get a gal on information and you'd ask for a phone number and i'm 15 years old so i said i need the phone number for jack roush in livonia michigan i got the phone number i called him up i talked to him and i said i'm building this engine out of this magazine article and i need an intake manifold do you have one he said i have a manifold i'll sell you for 75 dollars so jack roush sent this intake manifold to my mom and dad's house ceod for 75 dollars and used that to finish this engine up put it in that pickup and that was the first engine i ever built and somehow we've managed to hold on to it and kind of had to rehab it a little bit to put it on display but it is all the original block and heads that i built way back in 1977 1978 that's really freaking cool i don't even like the fact that jack roush did that i mean how old was he at the time he wasn't that old yeah he would have been a younger guy you know i i've actually told that story to jack roush and jack and i are not personal friends but i do see him at trade shows and events and he's kind of a stoic individual when he's not grumpy so i told him that same story and he just reached in his pocket he pulled out a business card and he hand it to me and it was the one that had his personal phone number on it wow i've never abused the privilege but i don't think he was handing that card out to everybody so that's cool that is super cool like this whole place here the company as it is in your life now might not be what it is if it were not for jack roush in that article and him yeah doing that that's the coolest thing ever wow you know he was like a hero to me as a ford guys kind of a ford guy and he was a great ford guy it still is that's so cool like where did you get the idea to like you read that and you just thought i'm gonna go build one like did your dad say oh yeah you should go do that or do you just start doing it i just started doing it but i would say that my dad always told me that i could do anything i wanted it was always encouraging uh mom and dad were encouraging that whatever you want to do you can find a way to do it so i started off thinking i could find a way to do it a lot of times i was wrong sometimes i just didn't know what i was up against but i did it anyway did you end up figuring it out or learning in the process yep that's awesome always learning man my head's spinning i mean i thought i knew there was gonna be a cool story behind that but i didn't know the whole jack roush thing like how did you think that you could pick up the phone and call and ask for him well at that time i think he i think he probably was still a ford engineer he was known for street racing i'd read read several articles about some street racing he had done in livonia michigan so he was just a hot rodder that worked at ford he wasn't a nascar team owner he didn't have roush engineering uh i think he was getting started with drag racing at the time uh raced with a guy named wayne gap i think it was gap and roush in drag racing so he was not the big name that we know of today he was more approachable and his phone phone number was listed in the directory so that's interesting i think even through my own personal experience it's crazy what can be done by just like picking up the phone or showing up somewhere people rely too heavily on social media now and if they don't get a dm back they just like give up i think that's your generation probably you know we are used to talking to people making personal contact with them that still works pretty good you know what's funny is i drove three hours out of my way back in august just to show up here and see if you were here and you weren't but i posted an instagram story in the parking lot and johnny replied to it it was like used to there and said no and he said send me an email so i did and that's how this whole dialogue happened what led to me standing here right now because i just decided to show up that's cool it is cool and that's why i like making this video with that perspective so that other younger people watching this know that there doesn't have to be a an a plus b equal c ladder for everything kind of like the system makes you think it is you can just go do stuff you don't need people's permission yep that's right so you built this motor and it i guess it worked in your truck and that set the hook when did you start thinking i want to do engines as a career well uh pretty early on it wasn't long after i built this engine that i went to work at the machine shop that did the machine work i was uh i think a senior in high school i worked there in the afternoons and during my senior year the machinist there quit so the boss made me the machine so here i am a senior in high school the head machinist of a one-man machine shop so take that for what it's worth but i did take care of the customers and i did learn how to do the machining and about a year and a half later i quit and opened my own shop and kept the customers and that was the beginning of blueprint engines it took a long time to get from there to here that was 38 years ago and we've learned a lot along the way certainly when i started it was still a one-man shop and now we're more of a factory i think it's really fun to be here and take people through on a tour because they're they're quite amazed by what they see nobody expects to see what you see when you get here we're a manufacturing company we have lots of engineer support we do a lot of designing of our own products we do uh our own testing of products we run thousands of hours of dyno testing on certain items before we use them we're very much a small oem type manufacturer we're not a shop although it came from a shop environment but today the goal is to we literally look at what gm or ford are doing we look at their factories we benchmark against the way they do things it doesn't mean that we can be as good as them because we don't have the volume but we can understand their methods and how they do it for example one of the things we do is we design a lot of our own parts we own our own designs for pistons crankshaft connecting rods we work with some of the best factories in the world to have those parts made but whether we have that part made in the united states or mexico or canada it's the same piston it's our design piston that we've worked with and use over and over and over it's our design of the metallurgy that goes into that piston if a manufacturer can't meet our requirement for metallurgy and heat treat then we can't use them so we've gone from buying things off the shelf like everybody else does to streamlining and say we we want our own design and and not just so that we can say that it's our own usually there are many many improvements in the design and then sometimes it's things just to help our processes work better so we have one 383 piston instead of three different 383 pistons but i'm proud of the people that do that here that we've we've learned we didn't just start doing that out the gate but we've learned how to do that over the last 30 years how was your like priority philosophy of the inward growth like evolved over the years how did you get down that track of what's important to you well you know as far as like those parts go there's a lot of challenges to buying off-the-shelf parts that don't always fit and they don't always work and quite honestly the performance aftermarket is you know they're making parts for things that aren't oe so they don't always fit in work and we said we can do better we want to make it so it always fits and works with our engine and works the way it's supposed to so we really bring an oe level of quality to what typically would be thought of as a performance part that the crank counter weights might hit the bottom of the piston well they don't hit the bottom of the piston when we design the crank and the rod and the piston so we're able to put all that in a simulation and make sure that it works the way that we want it to so part of that strategy of being vertical is just from we got to have this so it works all the time and the other part is sometimes we really want to go to an oe level supplier and buy pistons or cranks well you have to show up with a design they don't have cranks on the shelf they make cranks but you're going to show them the design you've got to have the 3d models you're going to have the prints you've got to have the material spec and that's the way we buy cranks we go to crankshaft manufacturers with designs and material specs heat treat specs and say this is what we want and we get quotes on that and that's how we buy them that's really cool i wasn't really sure what the theory behind that was but it all makes sense when you explain it like that um like you ever just like stand outside this building and look at it and just like think about how huge it's all gotten since you were the kid who built this motor not too much i would say most of my employees are disappointed that i'm not more in awe and i'm always worried about what are we going to do next what's tomorrow so yeah i have i i do admire what what's been accomplished and certainly there's a lot of great people here that are a big part of that but i also like never satisfied and what's the next big thing that we're going to work on that seems to be a a common trait among people who have their names on buildings like this i think that's probably true i think that's cool and it's cool to hear that too but man like so if today is your theoretical day one what are you where you going now what do you want to do you know we want to uh continue to develop more products higher value products products that solve our customers problems that always work the way they're supposed to work so that you don't have to be a master technician to buy and install one of our engines or keep it running we really want oe level uh kind of durability you know you go out to your new chevy or ford and it always starts and runs and it's great and i think we need to bring that to the hot rod world so we're doing that we're developing our own ecm controlled the fuel systems and ignition systems we're using oem grade components uh we're gonna make the engine so that they always start and run and they can't hurt themselves uh i think that's what the customer wants they just want to have fun with it you know they are fun lots of horsepower you smoke tires accelerate quick whatever it is you want to do you just want to have that fun with it i don't think everybody wants to spend their saturday afternoon working on it so we're going to in continue to improve the quality and make it more like an oe level 2021 gm pickup engine as far as quality and reliability and at the same time while we do that we'll go out to those manufacturers around the world with our specs and our designs and that helps us buy better that lowers our cost so we truly do focus on making sure that we don't want to be the highest priced engine we want to bring the best value but we want to make it affordable for everybody and if we if we buy that way if we design our own parts if you look out in the plants you see us doing cnc machining on blocks from raw castings uh we can do that and those parts are a lot less than if we bought them off the shelf was there anybody like any people that you like look up to or were looking up to as you were growing they like took notes from just like i'm listening to you right now filling my own brain library uh you know i always got excited about people whose businesses were larger than ours and what and any anybody that was better than us at anything in other words i always sought out folks that i could admire and whether that's admire the an individual personally or admire a company i always wanted to be inspired by looking at my competition or other companies in any industry and seeing what they could do so yeah i i don't have any names i'm going to name but always looking up and benchmarking and trying to find somebody that's better at it than we are so we can see what the next step is because you know what if you can find that person and you can see them doing it you don't even have to invent the next step they already did you just have to do what they're doing that's a pretty easy way to get better more people should seek out information from guys like you and other people who've done things because you could explain something in 10 minutes that took you 10 years to learn that's true that skips so much time for that person why would you not just sit down and and listen to stuff and have that in your industry i mean it's easy to find other people doing what you do and i'm sure there's people that you look up to and you might be surprised some of them probably be happy to talk to you about it and you can make a jump pretty quick that way other than rather than trying to figure it out all on your own were there any like uh during the 30-year journey of this are there any times where you had to make some type of major leap or had something really bad happen that thought you were going to stop or like was there any ever thought of quitting or doing something else i would say early on you know as a young man with a lot less experience at everything especially business experience there were times when when it probably wasn't working very good financially and i remember one time in particular where it looked like we might be gonna run out of money during a certain week and i asked my accountant i said what do you what do we what do we do next i thought there was just an easy answer where he just told me how to do that he said well maybe you could sell your car i'm not sure i don't want to sell my car to make pharaoh and so i i realized then that you've got to be a little careful to make sure you don't run her so hot that you run out of money uh but there's always challenges and especially early on it seems like there were some real hard walls really challenging you know difficult situations and i concluded from that that one of the keys to success is that when it when it's really hard and it sucks and it's not working and you could quit and nobody would blame you and your family don't say oh i don't blame you that's that was too hard nobody should have to do that if you don't quit then you're doing you're doing something at that moment that most people don't if you just don't quit and just keep going you're going to separate yourself from 90 of the other people trying to do what you're doing and it will get easier but yeah when you could quit and everybody thinks you should quit and you don't you're you're making a mark you could end up broke too somebody out there did quit at that same spot and you didn't yeah most of them did went back and got a job i didn't i'm not saying that makes me brave it might make me stupid but i didn't quit i don't know if it could be and on some any possible better fire than that i don't know motivating you yeah anybody watching this should be like fired up right now you're gonna go pick up the phone and try to call jack roush or something i don't know you have to use google now and you probably can't find these numbers that's funny man i don't know do you think of anything else you want to add for anybody watching this that is either into motors or wants to work at a place like this or anything like that wants to do something that doesn't suck with their life yeah i know i don't have all the advice in the world but i would say one thing that i absolutely believe in is that there's always somebody out there that can help you and wants to and if you're sitting at home trying to solve all your own problems and it's doing about it all the time and you never reach out to anybody else and you never find somebody smarter than you to talk to you're you're really doing it the hard way i've always had mentors i've always had people that i've reached out to even today i tell all my people we've got to find somebody to compare what you're doing too to see how good we are so i would say get help always seek some help seek some counsel get somebody who knows more than you do people want to help i've found that to be true too you just got to ask all right thank you very much awesome yeah we're talking to you that was great that whole thing was totally off the cuff i wasn't sure well actually when we got there i didn't know that i'd get to meet norris at all i didn't know if he'd be there and the fact that i did got to talk to him and he was down to do a video it was the coolest thing learned so much from listen to that and i hope you did…