In Episode 206 of Cliff’s Notes, Tungco CEO Cliff Nance turns the mic on someone who knows the company very well — Josh McKnight (Lineage Metallurgical and Cuda Grit). It’s an inside look at what it actually means to sell tungsten right now, and what Tungco is building for the road ahead.
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From Shoveling Gravel to Leading Sales
Josh and Cliff grew up together in Kentucky and both cut their teeth at Tungco doing whatever needed doing — grunt work, production, operations. Josh eventually left at Cliff’s father’s direction (the instruction was essentially: go to school, get another job, come back better), spent time in sales at UPS, and returned to Tungco with a different perspective on what it takes to build a customer relationship. He has held roles including president of one of the Tungco subsidiaries before settling into his current focus: leading sales across Lineage’s thermal spray, Cuda Grit, and their finished product lines.
Selling in a Market Nobody Has Seen Before
The central business thread of Episode 206 is what tungsten pricing is doing to the sales conversation right now. Josh describes quoting customers three days at a time — and when those three days are up, they’re calling back immediately to ask where prices stand. The market isn’t just volatile; as Josh puts it, it’s meteoric. Straight to the stratosphere. Nobody in the industry has a playbook for this.
That environment creates real anxiety across the customer base. Smaller businesses are wondering how long they can keep absorbing costs. Larger corporations have more cushion but are equally unsettled. And increasingly, customers are starting to explore supplementing or partially replacing tungsten — not abandoning it, but testing whether something else can carry some of the load. Josh and Cliff are direct about the responsibility that creates for the tungsten industry: if the material prices itself out of viability, the whole ecosystem feels it.
Building the Sales Team and the Road Ahead
Beyond the market conditions, Episode 206 is a candid conversation about what it takes to build a sales culture inside a family business that’s been operating for nearly 60 years. Josh talks through the challenges of learning to price correctly, understanding the finance side, and the lesson that’s been drilled into him since the beginning: sell the service and you’ll get the sale. In a commodity market where the product itself is increasingly hard to differentiate on price alone, that lesson matters more than ever.
