How Perfect Point EDM Took a Seven-Minute Job Down to Ten Seconds
Most founders we meet sell a new product, but today’s guest, Larry Harrell, sells a new way to do an old job.
For as long as there have been aircraft, mechanics have removed fasteners with a twist drill. On aluminum, that works. On titanium, Inconel and composites, it means three to seven minutes of hard, focused work per fastener, a real risk of damage to the hole, and sore shoulders at the end of every shift. Perfect Point EDM built a handheld tool that does the same job in about 10 seconds.
While the technology was hard, in speaking with Larry, I learned that it was far from the longest part of the valley.
About Larry Harrell
Larry started as a flight test engineer, testing NASA and military aircraft. He led flight test for the first flight of the B-2 and delivered the first two operational B-2s, the Spirit of Missouri and the Spirit of California, to Whiteman Air Force Base.
That success built him a reputation as a hard worker who could be trusted to deliver the goods. Still, he was awfully surprised when a former boss asked him to come to corporate and help run the company’s M&A deals. Larry was shocked, responding that him he tested airplanes and knew nothing about mergers and acquisitions. But his boss insisted that “I can teach you that. What I need is somebody that can get something done.” Larry spent the consolidation years of the 1990s and 2000s on the Northrop Grumman M&A team, building out a pure play defense portfolio.
He has, in his words, “failed at retirement three times.” The third failure was Perfect Point.
About Perfect Point EDM
Perfect Point EDM is a Huntington Beach, California company that makes the E-Drill, a handheld electrical discharge machining (EDM) tool for aerospace fastener removal. The tool cuts a ring through the fastener head with controlled electrical sparks while it flushes the cut with water and vacuums away the debris. A computer runs the whole cut. The operator lines up the tool, pulls the trigger, and waits for the tool to finish the job.
The company started in 2005 on the machining side. A Navy visit around 2009 pointed it at fastener removal. Larry joined around 2010 to raise capital, took over as CEO in 2016, and later moved to Executive Chairman. In July 2025, the Air Force awarded Perfect Point an SBIR Phase III contract worth up to $9.4 million for E-Drill 2.0. Today 22 people build about 20 machines a month.
Key Takeaways
1. Find the “job before the job”
The Navy first asked Perfect Point a narrow question: On an F-18, the center barrel section catches the wire on a carrier landing. After about 5,000 landings it cracks, and it must be replaced. The question was whether the team could match drill the old holes to the new ones?
But it turns out that the drilling was not really the problem. See, before any drilling could begin, someone needed to remove all the fasteners just to get to the job. And therein lies the rub!
Perfect Point’s whole product came from the step the customer did not think to mention.
2. Your real competitor may be a habit
Perfect Point does not see their competition as another startup, or even another company, per se. Their technology is a replacement for the twist drill, and they are therefore trying to win over engineers who have trusted the twist drill for their career.
When the Perfect Point founders came into contact with those engineers, they encountered a significant fear: that you cannot run a 3,000 degree process inside an aircraft structure without hurting the hole. Rather than argue, team Perfect Point filmed their cuts at 1,500 frames per second with thermal cameras and showed the heat staying inside the fastener. They also anticipated he next question: if the tool ever does hit the side of a hole, it can be fixed the same way as with a drill. You go one size up.
Larry says they “did more testing than a drug goes through for the FDA.” In seeking to replace a habit, you cannot win on features alone, but had to systematically dismantle objections, one at a time.
3. Hire the true believers
In 2017, Larry and his chief engineer spent a full day on a V-22 in a Boeing MRO hangar at Miramar. At the end, they received a purchase order. A man in the doorway had one question: “You guys hiring?”
He was a skilled A&P mechanic who had been promoted to run the shop. He had done the twist drill job for years. He knew what the E-Drill meant. Perfect Point hired him to run sales.
Hiring a customer who can personally attest to the value a product delivers is an unmistakable advantage. That credibly cannot be faked.
4. Build for purchase
In 2023, the Perfect Point team redesigned the machine to snap together and build time went from one week to four hours. Power needs went from 220 volts and 40 amps to 110 volts and 4 amps.
That second change mattered a ton, because it ended the need for special power and unique considerations. A tool that did not require those unique considerations could become an easy purchase rather than an experimental project.
5. Map who approves before you finish testing
The E-Drill passed thermal, fatigue, structural and damage repair tests with OEMs, services and programs. But approval was still split. Sometimes the OEM signed off, sometimes a service, and sometimes it was the platform, the program or a single depot.
Larry’s point on this is that “the fastener that you’re removing [does not] know what platform it’s in.” The process is the same on every aircraft. He wants one evaluation at the process level, through bodies like the Aircraft Structural Integrity Program (ASIP), that flows down to every platform.
So in selling a process change, it behooves the seller to learn who owns each step in the process, and build a test plan for that signer.
Closing
Larry calls Perfect Point a darling of the SBIR process. The company moved through Phase I, Phase II and into Phase III. But I also think the timeline is the lesson. It took about 16 years from the first Navy call to a $9.4 million Phase III, and at one point during COVID the company was down to three people.
What Larry showed us is that the hardest part of crossing the valley is sometimes not building the thing. It is getting the right person to say yes.
Learn more: https://ppedm.com/
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