GA 211 | How to Navigate a Kaizen Journey with Jeff Kaas

When I look at the business, I don't consider myself successful. I consider myself hard working. But when there is a harvest, it's a, hey, thank you. That came from above. Because if you look at the business plan, you say, oh, you're making money in Seattle building furniture. It just doesn't make sense.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to sustain a continuous improvement movement for more than 20 years? If so, you're in luck, since that's precisely what my guests and his company have done. His name is Jeff Koss, and he's the president of a Washington based company called Koss Taylor. Now, during today's show, Jeff walks us through their journey, starting from the beginning before bringing us up to the present day. Now, as you may have noticed, I'm battling some allergies and a bit of a cold. So I do apologize for sounding a bit like a frog, but I did my best. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 211. Again, that's gembapodcast.com and just look for episode 211. You can also check out GEMBA Academy's Lean learning system over@gembaacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now let's get to the show. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

All right, so where are you calling in from, Jeff?

I'm calling from my shop in Mukilteo, Washington.

Nice, nice, nice. Yeah, and it's pretty early out there right now, so thanks for coming on Solar Lab. Have you had some coffee?

Yeah, I'm drinking coffee. So if you hear that on the audio, you might have to edit that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've already warned you, I warned the listeners that I'm battling Texas allergies and a cold mixed together. So I sound a little froggy. So I apologize, but we'll work through it.

Yeah, well, I don't have any excuses for how I sound.

You sound really good. You got a very silk radio voice, man. You sound great.

There you go. There you go.

Hey, so before we get into your business, let's talk about Jeff. Talk a little bit about your background and, you know, how you got into what you do today.

So I'm 50 years old, so the idea that I'm about half dead or maybe a little over. And the business that I operate was given to me by my father. So I'm second generation. And actually it was given to my marriage mainly so that I protected my Marriage and my business. And so I've had responsibility for the business for about 20 years. I'm a father of four, grandfather of one and a half.

Nice.

And, yeah, my. My. Kind of. My. My. My life story is really try to be a guy that honors. Honors God first, then. Then wife, then kids, and then way in fourth place is business.

Yeah.

And so. But the business is still what. What opportunity to. To grow and learn and serve other people. So. And then the background on Kaizen or Lean, I don't actually use the word lean. I use Kaizen was really just. I'm not the smartest guy in the group, so I'm not the most motivated guy. So I'm not the ambitious leader who goes out and sets the world on fire. I'm a guy who looks at the business and says, how do we make this do what it's supposed to do, serve other people, have sustainability? And when I got the business at 30 years old, I was like, oh, crap. Not only am I not so smart, I don't know what I'm doing.

Yeah.

And, yeah, we had a customer at the time that makes airplanes out here in the Seattle area. Kind of strongly recommend that we would be learning about Lean. And that's when I first met John Miller. So one of your colleagues. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he and his partner came out and started teaching us about the seven ways. And at some point, I looked at. My dad had just retired, I think, and I called him up, and I'm like, I think this might be true. Like, I think this. These seven ways, I think those are really, like, at that time, I wouldn't have called it sin, but I'd say those are for sure wrong. And I don't know how to get rid of it. But it all sounds too good to be true. So would you be willing to go with me to Japan, go see it for ourselves? And I begged John and Brad at the time, just said, please take me. I just. It just sounds too good to be true. And, yeah, our journey started that day, really, when we got to Japan, my dad, like, day two, he's like, yeah, dummy. This is what I've been trying to teach you. Yeah. And then his next question is, what did you learn in college? And I said, actually, I learned everything. The opposite. So I have to unlearn a lot. So does that give you a good background?

No, that's really good. That's really good. So when was that? Like, was that in the 90s or.

Yeah, it'd be about 20 years ago. So, yeah. Yeah. And it was really, you know, I saw it. Of course, my first impression was, we're different, so it doesn't fully apply.

Yeah.

And it wasn't until I went my third trip with those guys, I came back, I'm like, oh, crap. It for sure applies. We just have to do it differently.

Right.

And it was really at that moment we. Because we're a high mix, low volume operation in the factory, I realized at that moment, just pure luck, whatever you want to call that, everybody in my company needs to understand the seven ways it has to be a culture, can't be a tool. And that really put in motion activities that caused what we have today.

Okay, let's talk about your business. Cost tailored. What do you guys do? And. And then. Yeah, just start there. What do you guys do?

Yes, we say we're a furniture company. So we build sofas and loveseats for organizations that are selling coffee or shoes like Nordstrom. And so we have commercial contract. We also have a line of furniture that we make called Design on Stock usa. It's a Dutch designer line for consumers. So that's also sofas, loveseats, chairs for home. And then really the bulk of our business right now is aviation. When there's a presidential airplane that needs to be reupholstered, we do VIP aircraft, we do flight attendant seats. Quite a bit of production directly for the big players. Wow. And yeah, we got about 200 people that work together to do. And it's all high mixed, low volume. I think our average order quantity is two and a half. So we automate what we can. So we're really good at mass production of order entry and pack lists and packaging. But, you know, the shapes of the things vary day to day.

Now, is it true that it's rare to see a business such as yours.

In the U.S. yeah, I think we're one. You know, for sure. You know, the business was hollowed out, moved from North Carolina to China, you know, 15 years ago. There are a few people coming back. Obviously there's some players are moving back. There's, I think, a bit of a change. Building furniture in the Seattle area is extra stupid. If you wrote a business plan and went to investors, I don't think you'd even get an appointment. Okay. So, yeah, it's just not a great idea. High cost, high cost of living. If we weren't doing kaizen, this business would be dead for sure.

Now, you mentioned earlier that you used the word kaizen over lean. Just curious why is that?

Yeah, so lean. So I might End up swearing, so you might have to edit. But I'm sorry, it's really kind of a four letter word to me because we have all these tours, so we've probably had 40,000 people visit us over the past 10 years trying to figure out what they're doing. And I always ask the question, hey, so what is lean? Why are people doing it? Why are you here? And it always comes down to, well, the bosses are trying to cut, and there's an acronym. Less employees are needed at some of the companies. And. And to take it a little further, I never once saw a company that was actually improving continuously, like what I expect from a kaizen type of mindset and actually use the word lean. Lean is actually a destination. And if you understand waste, like, we're never going to get there. So. And then the next part is, when I went to Japan, I never once heard a Japanese person say lean. They always say kaizen. If you look at the word kaizen, it actually means something totally different, which I know you know about. Yeah. And when you look at the root of that and you look at the behaviors needed from leadership all the way to cleanup, boy, which is where I started, it's sacrifice plus discipline. It's the idea that we're always room to improve. So I don't know, it's like it's calling an airplane a car. It doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it, I got it. So, all right. I want to jump back 20 years to the beginning of your journey. And I think is. Is it safe to say the why of your beginning? Was the supplier coming to you? Was that why you started Customer?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Boeing or.

Sorry. Yeah, okay.

Yep, okay, yep.

So, all right, so that's the why. Like, what did you do? I mean, I know you. You brought John, those guys in, but were you just. Were you really just focused on the. On the seven ways? Is that kind of where you began or talk about those early days?

So I can say the early days was absolutely. I was confused by everything I saw and read. And. Yeah. So the earliest motivation was just fear because the offer coming from the Boeing company at the time was, hey, we'll teach you lean. We'll bring out our consultants and we'll teach you how to do this lean thing. And if you save a dollar, we'll keep half and you can keep half. And you know, usually when a big company comes to a small company to help, that isn't. That isn't such good news, if you know what I mean. Yeah, so it was really fear and a little bit of like, man, if they come in and find a bunch of money laying around, shame on me. So we hired John and Brad and said, hey, will you just come teach us this crap? Like just come out. And first thing they wanted to do is do like a four day workshop. And we're like, hey, sorry, Nordstrom's a really good customer. We're not shutting our factory down to learn something for a different customer. Would you be willing to come in and teach us these seven wastes at lunch? And I think we had seven lunches and they taught us the seven wastes. And in the early days they did the right thing by saying, hey, the core issue is really this waste stuff. They would tell me later that on the first tour they were a little bit intimidated because we didn't have the usual easy consultant things to do. So it wasn't a dirty shop. We didn't have a lot of inventory, didn't have a rework area. We were doing one piece flow, kinda not knowing. But the business required it because we were kind of made to order shop. So yeah, it was learning that and then going to Japan, I was absolutely overwhelmed by, okay, there's Kanban, there's visual management, pokyoke. Oh my gosh, what does this all mean? I didn't understand it was a system, didn't understand that the very core of it you were talking about, this is the bad stuff, get rid of the bad stuff. And it was really just my ignorance that kept it from moving forward. I could not get it. Could not. And literally I went to Japan with my dad and another guy and we brought back some tools. So if you think about our shop being a garden, let's say we're growing corn. I brought back a chainsaw and I was so excited about the chainsaw. I brought some back for my colleagues. So they're using the chainsaw everywhere they went. And turns out we not only got rid of some weeds, but we got rid of some corn. So it was chaotic. But when we actually did eliminate waste, all of us would sit back and go, okay, life's better. And then like a few months later we'd be back doing our own bad habits. So we basically had this. If you were watching us from the moon, you'd be like, oh, hey look, the animals are going to water and they're drinking water. Yeah. Now they're running back to the desert and what's wrong with those animals? Why don't they go back to the water? Yeah, that's what we were doing for the early years. Yeah.

So, okay, talk about. Was there a tipping point to where you kind of finally got it? And if so, what did that look like? What did that feel like? What was going on?

Yeah, boy.

Yeah.

Several times. If you think of it as like an onion, I hate that analogy. But it's been several times in my career that I'm like, oh, crap, I thought I knew. And then I've. The layer comes off and the lights come on. You're like, oh, it's a totally different show. The first one really was with my dad, you know, in. In Japan.

The.

Yeah. Dummy thing. It probably had a few f words around. Was a real serious. Like, this is. Yeah. So I could see the anguish, like. And it was. He was frustrated with himself that he didn't have a way of teaching it. But I got all 40 years of his understanding of the world in that moment. It was Jeff, go, yeah, this is the right way. So that was probably big number one. The next one was after our third trip. I went with current general manager and a current operations manager. Guys, you actually know, I think. And we sat around, we got packing. Like, can we agree that whenever we're different than Toyota that were fricking wrong, and instead of discussing why it won't work, let's just fricking copy them and discuss what we learned instead, let's take all the energy, move it on the learning side rather than the shall we do it side. So I would say that was the next layer where we really felt deeply convicted. Like, we are wrong, they are right. Not only are we wrong, but we're hurting. People started to understand that it's not really a business issue. It started at that point to become a moral issue for me. And so, yeah, so the third trip, for sure. I can picture their faces and yeah. I swear, too often. And I was really pissed. Like, what is wrong with us? Yeah. And then we have to fast forward probably about eight years ago. We've always done these tours. We've had people touring us for actually the whole time because we had applied this as a very black and white because we were told these are principles. So when I say principles, I mean these are like laws of the universe. So I'm like, well, if it's a law of the universe, then it's always trustworthy. So let's just copy it and we'll find the hole in the system and then we can tell everybody we found the hole. So five or ten years into teaching people about this, we're like, hey, we haven't found any holes. Seven wastes are always the seven wastes. Doesn't matter what industry you're in, it always adds anxiety and causes quality and lead time and crap. It's true. So we had a group of doctors come over from Holland on a trip to kind of tour local places, I think Virginia Mason, maybe Seattle Children's. And somehow we got on the dance card, and they walked away and called me a little later and said, you know, we paid a lot of money to go to some of these other organizations, and all 25 of us agree that we learned the most at your place. Would you be willing to come to Holland and teach? I'm like, well, yeah, on one condition. I'll pay my way. So I won't accept money right now because I don't know if I'm competent. So I got to go to Holland with a colleague. In our presentation, we try to make things really simple. And we had. We made a drawing of a dog taking a dump in the house. And basically, the idea is, in most organizations, and I'm sure many of the listeners can relate to this, is you can see the waste, but your structure prevents you from getting rid of it. So you're in this place where you're like, I can see overproduction, I can see motion, but technically, I can't remove it because of some organizational structure issue. So our teaching at the moment was, hey, look, when you see a pile of crap, do you ask for permission? Do you have a meeting about it? Do you polish it, or do you just get it out of the house? Basic kaizen is just knowing that that's bad and getting rid of it. So at the end of this, it was kind of crude conversation, but it was a really cute dog taking a dump. So a woman at the end of this presentation, and literally, like, I want to find this woman. Every time I go back to Holland, I'm like, okay, one of my friends there, have you found the woman who asked this question? I need to punch her and hug her. I'll probably hug her first. I'm standing for everybody. She said, jeff, my last name means Cheese in Dutch, which is really fun. Mr. Cheese, who is the dog? I'm like, oh, crap. I mean, literally, my knees got weak. I'm like, I'm the dog that ruined me. Like, ruined, ruined me. Like, literally at that moment, I felt like, yeah, it was emotional. It was like. Like, the. A ton of bricks was just. It hit me in the head. Like, I am the one causing all the waste in My factory, and it's hurting my family, my colleagues, my customers. I got to change. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty big from that. Yeah, it sucked. I'll just tell you that. Like, it was. It was a solid year of. Yeah, yeah. Heavy stuff. I know it sounds weird, but just at that moment, I'm like, it's a moral problem. It was a collision of my business, my faith, my maturity as a dude, kind of. Yeah. And that's when we really stepped on the gas. I will not be the guy who's going to run a company that will hurt people and these people that are touring our factory. If you're in my factory and you're here to learn, there will be no punches held. So especially if you have authority, if you come and ask a question, you're going to get it.

How many different languages are spoken in your company?

I think 11. Yeah.

Wow. So how does that work as far as kaizen and teaching and so forth? How do you do that?

Yeah. So it's a blessing. So some people call it a challenge. I'll call it a blessing. The coolest part of this is it's not the language. You look at how my colleagues got to America, and all of them have stories that should be. They could be movies like each one of them, their escape from Vietnam or behind what they live like behind the Iron Curtain. It's not the language that is such a deal. So the blessing is I've got colleagues who have incredible stories, and it drives us to say, well, what if we had to go to another country and provide for our families? So it's really a blessing because it caused us to say, well, we want them to fill up. We want them to be able to move forward. And body language is 80% of communication anyhow. So what are we worried about the words for right now? When you want to use words, yep, you're screwed. So when you. When you. I think you've been in our factory a few years ago, it's even more visual today than it was before. You know, eyes. Eyes, people. And math is, you know, pretty straightforward. So most people, you know, regardless of where you. You've been, you understand math. And if you've been to an airport or a train station or you drive a car, there's a lot of systems we can harness. So it's. It's a massive blessing. But if you're trying to explain something theoretical, you have to be able to do that visually. And my colleagues pay attention to actions more than words anyhow. And that's true everywhere. By the way. So if I'm a hypocrite, which I am most of the time, they all know because they're watching. Yeah, yeah.

Talk about your tours now. So obviously you've been doing them for a long time. Understand you've recently started to charge for them, right? Is that right?

Yes, yes, it's a change.

So what was the. Why that change?

Yeah, so the tours, we really. It was. Yeah, it's a great question. The tours we've done, we were doing three tours a week. There was usually 40, 50 people per tour, and we did that for 40 weeks a year. And I attended and taught every one of them. And so for 10, 12, 13 years. And what we found was there were some organizations that were taking our gift because it was literally four hours of free, decent training. Maybe not the best, but it was high energy and high effort anyways. And a lot of organizations were sending the middle people, and all we were doing was letting them know that they're victims. Leaders weren't doing anything about it. Now, there were some companies who were running like crazy and doing great stuff, and it kept coming back.

And.

And so we have this ambition. If our company, if our most valuable thing to this world is, you know, growing people, growing our own and growing colleagues, there should be a financial model behind that.

Yeah.

And I was really torn between ministry and work. Like, okay, well, I'm trying to love my neighbors. And a woman came in, she said, you know, I sat down with her, and she was explaining her business model, and she's like, well, how much do you charge for tours? And like, oh, we don't charge. And she goes, that's stupid. You're doing pro bono work for Fortune 500 companies. And as soon as she said pro bono, I thought, wow, I feel super stupid. And then we were talking a little bit more, and she said, jeff, does your pastor, you know, at your church, does he get paid to do his job?

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah. Do you read the Bible? Like, it says, you know, don't harness the ox while he's working. Like, okay, I'm so glad you're not my wife, because your poor husband, he's screwed. So it was really that moment where, like, okay, if we're truly valuable, we're gonna actually go big on this. We want to grow people. Selling furniture is not gonna finance the ambition that we have. And frankly, when people pay for something, they value it. And we've already seen that. We've already seen that. Yeah. Yeah.

So what is Truthbit?

Pull Yeah. So when we started to charge for it, we're like, okay, we gotta set up a company. And it doesn't make sense to call it that because it's super confusing. But as we've gone through the teaching, we really have made a connection in the seven ways. So we can say, hey, defects are kind of outcomes like profit or harvest, you know, you can influence that stuff, but it's really, you know, it's an outcome. The other ways are usually the root causes of defects. And the most evil of all of them is overproduction. And overproduction in a factory, it's bad. But the blessing of overproduction in a factory is you can see it. You can see piles of inventory. You can see people pushing. You can see all the stress. It's a little harder to see in a hospital or in the way that we lead or the way that even I do Kaizen with friends and family or my soccer team. So we started looking, okay, what is the evidence for overproduction when we're not really just in a factory? And so we said, okay, whenever we see batches, batch work for sure, that's overproduction. And what is the opposite of batch? And we came up with the word bit. Because if I say one piece, flow, and actually, this is kind of what John and Brad taught us earlier. One piece flow freaked me out. So I didn't do anything for three years because I could not imagine doing one at a time. I thought they were crazy. I thought that was the one part of the doctrine that they were wrong on. So we just said, hey, if you're doing batch work, start moving into bits, and you'll be on the right track. So think of it as a train track. Point towards bits and just start cutting your batch size until you get to one. But don't get overwhelmed. Second thing that we're looking for in a factory or especially in healthcare, we're looking for push. So if I see anything that moves along through the work being pushed on somebody, I think, okay, we've got ourselves overproduction. And that could even be the way we run our business. So if I go out and say, hey, you know, we're doing this lean thing. Here's some medicine. Take it. It'll fix you. That's a little bit push. The opposite of that is pull. So, hey, change the framework of your conversation from push to pull. An example of that would be if I go home and I try to fix my wife by changing her kitchen for her, and I actually did this as a family I went and changed my wife's kitchen because I saw, okay, I see you're really wasteful. I see anxiety and I see anxiety is going to kill you. So, hey, I'm going to fix you. And it turns out that pushing that on her really caused a lot of trouble in my family. The method of my service to her was pushing. If I were to pull, it would have been a little bit different. I would have said, hey, Stacy, I want to be a better husband. I'm going to go get some counseling and, you know, would you be willing to help me if the counselor guy gives me some assignments? So pull is the opposite of push. And if you look at any kind of. Oh, we see a ton of this in healthcare. Most of the work that's set up is set up around silos. So it's almost all the work moves through a hospital batch. Push. So if you add to that. So if you look at a lot of motion, for example, motion, waste. I'm trying to get to truth. If you look at most of what my management job was before we had a visual management system, my job was sifting through emails, reports, meetings, conversations to find the truth. I was always searching for truth and then trying to do something with it. So the antidote to overproduction is if I have a system based on sound principles and I have access to truth. Truth. If I work to the customer's pull and I work in little bits, it's really hard to have much waste. So the antidote to the seven wastes in our worldview is moving in the direction of truth, bit and pull.

Wow, that's awesome.

It's been fun. And we've been testing it and we're pretty, we're excited about it because we haven't read it in a book. We don't really read books. And, and we see that it's working. Yeah.

So, last question for this section and we'll jump into what we call the reflection section, which is some quick fire questions. But if people want to come and you know, experience your truthbit pull or Kostaylor or attend one of your day camps, what do they do? Where do they go?

Yeah, they go to a website. So truthbitpull.com or costtailored.com and select tours and both of them will get you to a place of where you can enter in your information. Otherwise you can google me. Jeff Koss K A A S and I'm easy to find.

Yeah.

And you can call me and we can talk about it. I would say that it's normal for somebody in an organization to say, we've done programs, we've done projects, we want a culture, and that's really who comes and visit us now is how do we lead this in such a way that we can leave a lasting impact in this culture and bake continuous improvement into the cake. And that's really where I would still call it ministry, because it's, yeah, you're paying for a tour, but you get a connection to us and at that point you have access to our tools. We FaceTime people all the time and we have organizations that we have deep, lasting relationships. And the waste tours are kind of introductory deals. So that's a four hour deal. The day camps, which are our most impactful, we spend a whole day teaching and experiencing. And then we also have a boot camp for leaders who just want to. The one thing that when we went to Japan and previous trips with John is, hey, park us in a place for a week and let's just see all the crap. Let's see what it really feels like. So the boot camp experience is just come hang out and we'll show you all the dirt. Because we are absolutely really still wasteful and struggling. And yeah, so you get that's really only for leaders, people with authority who like, they really want to get a full sense of systemically how does this all work and how is it all connected and you know. Yeah, yeah.

Awesome. Very good, Very good. All right, so let's jump into this reflection sec section. Jeff, I got just a few questions I want to ask you. First one is, is there a. An area of kaizen that you struggle with? Or maybe you wonder if it really works?

So when I say kaizen, I mean, the seven ways are bad. Everybody in the organization should have the right to learn what they are. Do I think there's a lot? Do I think that it hurts me? Shall I give a shit? Do something about it. So kaizen to me means, do you know the seven ways? Do you believe that they are hurting you and your family and your community and your shareholders? And do you care enough to help remove those wastes? That version of kaizen, I've never ever, ever, ever, ever found anything that is wrong with that. It's pull the weeds from your garden, do it in community. Do the weeds when they're small, don't wait till they're big and watch your crop grow.

Okay, well, let me rephrase.

Does that answer your question?

Yeah, it does. Let me rephrase it then. I know you don't call it Lean, or even so called practice lean. But just maybe on a broader sense of continuous improvement, let's call it that. Is there an area of continuous improvement that you struggle with or wonder, does this really work?

I think when you violate the principles, I think for sure it doesn't work. So for example, if you look at a lot of Kaizen, when I say the word kaizen, most big company people think, oh, that's a five day Kaizen event. So by definition, a five day event is overproduction. So we don't do five day events in our company because it's leading with the worst waste of all. So if you think of a five day event, I look at that and say, ooh, that's somebody who doesn't understand that overproduction causes all the other waste. It's a batch, it's very frequently pushed. And if it's a big kaizen, there's a lot of opportunity or motivation to focus on those results at the consequence of other things. So we, we, when we look at some of the tools, that is one tool that would say, hey, if a consultant says, let's do a five day rapid improvement workshop, it's probably more about her travel schedule than it is about actually continuous improvement. Yeah, it's, it's batch work. Does that make sense? That's one example. Is that what you're looking for?

I got it. Yeah, it makes sense. Total sense. All right. What's the best advice you've ever received, Jeff, over your years?

Yeah, you know, the best advice I ever got was actually from my dad. And I'll explain it a little bit. My dad, he started the business, he ran the business, but because of the way that he ran the business, the consequence, and it had a lot of waste in it because he didn't understand this, which meant he wasn't home much, which meant his marriage kind of didn't work so much, which meant his relationship with his kids wasn't so great. So when he gave me the business, he said, if you have to work more than about 10 hours a day, you're a failure. Do not let this business ruin your life. And I look at how that relates to Kaizen is if you walk into most organizations and you actually quantify the seven ways, most of us are still spending more than 50% of our time on one of the seven ways. And what that means is every minute of waste is stolen from our shareholders, our colleagues, or our families. And this is where it becomes a moral question. So my dad's worldview and Kaizen and Then, you know, when I'm 80 years old and I look back on my life, if I get to live that long, I look back and say, well, what do I want to fail at? You know, I don't want to fail at being a husband or a father or business person. Right. So, yeah, the best advice was don't let this thing be your God, kind of. Yeah, yeah.

Last question. What are you most proud of as it relates to your journey with all things improvement?

Yeah, pride is a hard one for me. I'm thankful. I can say I'm thankful for the people in my organization that have allowed me to lead the moment. A leader understands that voluntarily, people show up and allow you, as a leader, move the ball in a worldview, it's a massive gift. Whether that's your kids allowing you to lead, your spouse, your colleagues, it's a gift. So I'm not proud of that. Thankful for.

Yeah, we actually, last episode, Steve Kane, one of my colleagues and I got on and we talked about pride, vanity, and what we call sensuality. Kind of like just being, you know, chilling and enjoying the, you know, beer is good, so more beer is better. Right. You know, so. So, yeah, like, I'm just kind of going off path. You just mentioned pride. Like, how do you. You're a man of faith, obviously. So, like, how do you. You've been very successful. Right. So how do you battle. Battle the temptation, if you will, to be proud and maybe even vanity a little bit kind of thinking what people think of you and stuff. How do you battle that?

Yeah, that's an interesting one, I think. Yeah. So you're a business owner. You know this. There's always something horrible happening and always something good happening. And if we allow the good in, we need to let the bad in. And so when we really, really, really get to it, spending time on the farm with my grandma, actually, she would actually teach me, you know, Jeff, we can't make the corn grow. Those raspberries there. I didn't make the raspberry. All we can do is we can water it, we can pull the weeds, but you don't actually make it grow. So when there's a harvest or when there's not, either way, you didn't make that happen. You influence it. Yeah. When I look at the business, I don't consider myself successful. I consider myself hard working. But when there is a harvest, it's a, hey, thank you. That came from above. Because if you look at the business plan, you say, oh, you're making money in Seattle building furniture it just doesn't make sense. So it's. I'm still. Most people say he's an arrogant ass, 100% true. I am. To do a job that you have where you have to guess what the future is, convince people in some way to move in that direction or put resources and move, there's a whole lot of arrogance that goes with that. However, the way that I make those decisions are based on what are the laws of the universe. And based on those laws, where should we go? And there's a heck of a lot of prayer involved with every harvest. So when you look at, like, how I run the business, even when we've had our best years or our worst years, I walk out of here saying, okay, Lord, what do you want to teach me from this? I'm not making it happen. Does that make sense? So I am high ego. I would just say, but when it comes to. About the business or about any of these things here, I'm not successful. Like most business people, they'd walk in and say, this guy's an idiot. Like, he's just lucky. It's a simple business. Yeah. I wouldn't say anybody could do it. I would say anybody who has a passion to serve other people, who will trust the laws of the universe and move in direction those laws probably could lead this company. Yeah, well.

Yeah, well, you're doing a fantastic job, Jeff, and I'm happy to know you and work with you guys and, you know, keep up the great work again, give out the websites again for Truthbit Poll and Cost Taylor for folks to go check you guys out.

Yeah, yeah. So the consulting or the tour business is truthbitpull.com, not to be confused with Truth Pit Bull, which is a dog. Yeah, yeah. A little bit bad marketing there. And then the company name is Koss tailored, so it's K-S-T-A-I l o r e d dot com. But if you're super desperate, just Google Jeff Koss K A S and you'll find me and call me. I'd be happy to talk.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, keep up the good work, my man. And next time out in the Seattle area, we'll have to meet up. For sure.

For sure. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Ron. This has been great fun.

All right, take care, Jeff.

Okay, Have a great day.

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