GA 227 | How to Leverage Lean in Banking with Danny Conroy and Daniel Lichty

I think the stigma out there is that, you know, still today, even though liens become more prevalent, is it doesn't work for service industries and things of that nature. But we have plenty of opportunities here at the bank where we can improve.

If you've ever purchased a home, you've likely gone through the mortgage process, which, as you may know, is highly complex with lots of steps. That's the bad news. The good news is the same Lean thinking principles used in inside factories and offices can most definitely be used to understand and improve the mortgage process. And as it turns out, my guests today have done this very thing. Their names are Danny Conroe and Daniel Litke. Now, on today's show, we learn how the banking industry can and does benefit from Lean. We also discussed the daily huddle and visual management system their team utilizes with tremendous success. Show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we talk about, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 2, 2, 7. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning System over at gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. And if that's not enough URLs for you to remember, I want to give out one more, and that's to a page dedicated to the upcoming AME conference that's going to be in sunny San Diego this year from October 29 through November 1. Now, as long listeners know, we're huge fans of this conference, and as always, we'll be there. We're also going to do another cocktail party on Tuesday night, and we'd love to meet as many podcast listeners as we can. Finally, we can also save you 10% if you use our promo code. Now, all the information you'll need can be found over@gembaacademy.com ame Again, that's gembaacademy.com Ame. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Danny and Daniel, thanks for coming onto the show. How's it going, guys?

It's going great. Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here.

Yeah. Really excited to be on.

Yeah, it's going to be easy. One's Danny and one's Daniel, Right?

No confusion.

Yeah. All right. I like it. I like it. All right, well, guys, tell us a little bit about your backgrounds and how you first came to learn about continuous improvement and then what you guys are up to these days. And let Danny or Daniel start, whoever wants to start. Sure, I can go ahead.

And this is Daniel. I've been with First Source bank for two and a half years. I am the mortgage processing and closing manager. I'm a certified Lean Daily Manager through First Source, which is our Lean Daily management program here at the bank. I'm currently working towards the Lean Master. I've been out to Colorado a couple times with Lean Methods Group and been out to some trainings out there, as well as our stuff here at the bank. I'm fairly new to Lean. I was new to Lean when I joined the bank two and a half years ago. So that's been something that I've been learning since I've been here. Longtime listener, the podcast, so I'm excited to be on and just. Just really looking forward to having a good conversation today.

Awesome. Awesome.

And I have been with the bank for about 12 years now. FirstSource began our lean journey about seven or eight years ago. And three year, I guess about five years ago, I took over the position of our continuous improvement leader. So I head up all our Lean efforts. Just like Daniel. I've been out to some training in Denver with the Lean Methods Group, been to a couple LEI conferences, some Lean Frontier conferences, read a lot of books, continuing to learn that way, and have loved it since I started this job five years ago here at the bank.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good stuff. All right. Well, hey, I know you guys both listen to the show, so as you know, we like to kind of begin with a. With our guest sharing a quote. So I believe both of you have one. So, Danny, do you want to go first?

Yeah, I'll go ahead and go first. My favorite quote, kind of when we're going around and talking to different groups in the bank is no problem is a problem. We've been a successful bank prior to starting Lean. We've been around for about 150 years as a bank here in northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan. And when we started Lean, we were really looking to take our bank to the next level. And Lean was the tool that we wanted to implement. And when we go around to different departments, we start with that quote, letting them know that the biggest problem of all is if we can't admit where we have chances for improvement, where we have chances to get better. So no problem is a problem.

Yeah, I love it, Daniel.

Yeah. I don't know what book it's from. I was from college, but it's stuck with me ever since. And it's that before you can manage something, you must first learn to manage yourself. And I really like that a lot. I think it's applicable in many areas. Lean in particular. I think when you start learning lean stuff, especially when you come back from a conference, you're always really amped up and excited to start putting that stuff into practice, but you can quickly kind of get bogged down with daily stuff. And I think it's really important as a manager to look inwards and kind of understand that you need to be able to manage your own time if you're going to use any of these tools with your group and with your teams.

Yeah, yeah. It reminds me of. I've been listening to this guy named Jordan Peterson. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of this guy, but he just kind of came on the scene a few years ago. He's kind of a psychologist, but he's. He's just really into. Just a really interesting dude. Anyhow, he's got these 12 rules of life and. And one of them is set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

Right. That's good.

Yeah.

So, yeah. Or the other one is I have found the problem and he is I.

Right.

Yeah. So good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Well, guys, I'm. I know we've got some questions that we're going to work through, but I want to begin with just a real general question of, like, what does lean in a bank look like?

It's a million dollar question there. It's. You know, we've taken our lean journey so far is we've tried to take pieces that we've seen successful at, whether it's a manufacturing industry, whether it's insurance company, whatever it may be from people we've partnered with, whether it's through training. We're part of what we have here up in South Bend called the Michiana Lean Network. And it's a collaboration of different businesses who all share kind of that. That lean gene where we get together, we do site visits. And what we've come down to really, is if we look at a process that we're going to talk about here today, like our mortgage process, it's not that much different than, let's say, an automobile manufacturer. There are steps of the process. It kind of follows its own flow. So we can certainly take from other industries and tweak it, determine how to make it our own fall on the ground a couple times, stub our toes. But it's not too different when we really start breaking down our processes, looking for waste, looking for improvement, looking for ways to get better. I don't know if there's a huge difference. I Think the stigma out there is that, you know, still today, even though leans become more prevalent is it doesn't work for service industries and things of that nature. But yeah, yeah, we have plenty of opportunities here at the bank where we can improve. Yeah.

I remember somebody say, you know, a non manufacturing company telling me, he's like, well if, if all we had to do was build cars like Toyota, you know, it would be, it would be easy, but our business is different. Uh, hu. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Because building cars is super easy, you know.

Yeah.

All right, well let's jump in a little bit on this mortgage division guys. And I don't know, let's start at the beginning of the day. Like what does that look like? How do you start the day?

Sure. So I'll go ahead and answer that. This year we've started a couple months ago, started doing a daily, what we call a daily huddle. So that is a group of managers all that oversee the various areas of the process from start to finish for a mortgage. Get together every morning at 8:15 at our big board is what we've kind of deemed it. And we meet there and we talk about. Basically we're only looking for loans that are, that are outside of a standard set timeline that we've set for individual process areas. So if a loan has not been in and out of underwriting in a day, that one may get talked about, it'll get put up on the board for the morning. If it hasn't been through my processors area in 12 days, then we're going to talk about that one and see what the deal is with that. So it's kind of our first, first step towards getting everybody together and highlighting problems and talking about them as a management group, which sounds, you know, kind of obvious and when you talk about as a concept, but not something that happens very often, it wasn't happening at all prior to, to us getting together and doing this daily meeting.

What is this day? What is it? What, what does it look like? Or how many people. Are you standing around a board at someone's desk or like, you know, talk us through the. Paint a picture if you will.

Sure. So it is standing at just a very large whiteboard. It started with paper that we taped up on a wall. Then from there it went to a board. It's basically got various stages of the process. So it starts all the way from initial disclosures. It goes all the way up until closing. And then each process in between has its own column if you will. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I think six, I think eight or nine.

Six managers and then two division heads and then Danny, that makes nine, I believe. So nine of us total at the board every morning that is on the floor with, with, with the rest of the group and we stand there and we talk about it every day out loud for 15 minutes.

Do you ever miss that?

Isn't. I mean people can, but you have to have a coverage person there. So everybody needs to be there every single day.

Yeah.

Or at least some representation.

And like this morning, Ron, I was at a meeting at one of our banking centers and the meeting goes on without me. It would go on without Daniel. It, it's meant to go on every day. Of course we're not open on weekends and holidays so we take those days off. But Monday through Friday if the bank's open, we're there at 8:15 and the expectation is everyone's there.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. So what about visual management? Are you guys doing anything with that?

Yeah, so we are, you know we're really utilizing this board as a, as a visual management board. Ultimately our goal here with this visual management is to try to get shorter turn times for our customers at the end of the day. You know, we were talking about car companies earlier. If we don't meet our customer demand and getting out loans quicker, getting them into their new house, the house of their dreams, on the timeframe that they want, we're failing them as a bank. So we're trying to use that visual management really to drive the process and make sure that we can meet our customers needs. And this tool has been a great example of how we can get together, use visual management. Anytime one of those loans pops that Daniel talked about, it goes on a little 3 inch magnetic sticky that goes up on the board and that gives us the indication that we could have a problem with that loan. We need to talk about it as a group. So what we do then is we talk about that loan, why that loan didn't meet the standard and then we Pareto all those reasons for here's why disclosures didn't get out in our set time frame. And we also have a Pareto board then where we Pareto all these reasons. We kind of get to see the common trends, what's going on so that we can then try to problem solve those at a later time.

Can you give it. I know, I know it's a sensitive topic so I don't share anything confidential, but can you give us an example of, of maybe a generic issue how it might look on the board and then an example of some root cause analysis that you did and some countermeasures. Kind of tell us a story about that.

Yeah, certainly.

So we have. I'll take that on. So we've got. Our disclosure desk has to get. When you get six pieces of information from the reg, we've got to get a disclosure out within three days. So three days is what the reg provides for us. However, we have a goal set for our area that we want it out in two days. So in that sense, anytime that anything triggers that's two days or more, or I'm sorry, that has exceeded two days, we're going to put it up on the board and then we're going to talk about it. Typical reason that we might see for something like that. Perhaps maybe the lo or what we call the LOR originator or our sales staff has asked us. Hold on a second. I'm not sure that the borrower did apply this way, but they're thinking maybe they want something a little bit different. If that's the case, we can. Absolutely. It'll get reported on. We'll discuss it as a whole, as a group, with the management group. So they're aware of it and kind of problem solve from there. If that's a reason. We have seen some areas where maybe they had a little bit of trouble accessing electronic files. We all know that we forget our passwords. It's kind of difficult to memorize all that stuff. So that can be something that we can run into at times that we have to actually problem solve and see what we can do for not only for that particular customer, but as a whole, what we can do to solve that problem.

Yeah, yeah. Another example too, if you want one more. We obviously an important part of the mortgage process is the appraisal. So the appraisal has a lot of moving parts into it, especially if a borrower is buying a new house, not doing a refinance. So we have to work with the appraiser to get them into the new house. And that sometimes requires us to work with the realtor of the. Both the buying agent and the selling agent. It requires us to rely on the seller to actually let the appraiser into the house. And that can certainly be a sticking point for, for any mortgage if that appraisal comes in at a lesser value or that appraisal takes a long time to come in. So early on when we were doing the board, we saw that we were having a lot of appraisals kind of pop on our Board, meaning they were outside our standard. So we've. I recently actually went to one of the Lean Frontiers class and taught by Jeff Leiker and Karen Ross, and they introduced kata to us. So kata is something new that we've tried with the board kind of at the same time. And Daniel's in charge of the appraisal department. So we kept seeing that appraisers were rejecting our orders. So we did a kata board on why are appraisers rejecting our orders? And Daniel and his team came up with some solutions. We're able to make some tweaks within our internal process where we're able to see more appraisals come in within our standard. We had about a. I think we were at about a 37% success rate on that portion of the board when we initially rolled it out. Through his first KATA experiment, we're up to 52%, kind of within our acceptable range. So now we're going back to that and saying, all right, we're at 52. How do we get to 60? Once we get 60, how do we get 65 and continuously improve that? But it wasn't easy that. That 15%, while it seems like a small amount, took us, what, a month and a half? Yeah, yeah, about a month and a half to get there. So a lot of discussions about it, a lot of experimenting to try to find the best solution.

So I'm curious, when did you guys begin this? And also, and I want to know, like, you know, how it's. How it's, you know, impacted your. Your business. But I'm also curious not just when, but why, like, what was the, you know, the driving force to begin this. This form of, you know, this meeting, Visual management, that sort of thing.

Well, I mean, so we started doing the visual board in April of this year. But this kind of does stem from a larger project back a year and a half ago, now, 2000, where we did a WE value stream, mapped the entire mortgage process from the borrower coming in to give us an application all the way out to funding, so an entire mortgage loan through all the departments. We mapped it in its entirety. It took a week, so 40 hours with all the managers and the various stakeholders in there from that then broke off into a various amount of projects and things like that. And that's kind of where this came about. It was a sustainment method. It was looking at something for that.

How many steps are in your value stream map?

I'm just curious.

I want to know the answer to that.

That's interesting.

Tricky.

Question, Rob.

When we value stream mapped it, we had I think about 25 different members come for different portions of the map. In all, we ended with over a thousand steps. We ended with over 400 pain points. We use swim lane maps when we do our value stream maps here. And we had, we're up on the 8th floor of our building. We had about 120ft of wall covered with value stream map in swim lanes and various individuals coming in and helping. So it was the largest map we've ever done. I mentioned we've been on our lean journey for about seven years. It was by far the largest map we had ever done and quite an undertaking.

Now we left it up there. So Danny and them left that, that whole map that 120ft up on the floor. It wrapped around hallways and it stayed there for at least a month. Yeah, we let other people walk through it. They could see see it. Other maybe members who weren't a part of the VSM could walk by and throw up additional pain points that maybe they felt we didn't capture well enough or they want us to be aware of.

So that was like a current state map. Did you guys do any sort of future state map or was it just more of a understand a current state and make improvements to it?

So we did a, we never officially did a full future state map. We did a vision of we wanted to get to a 30 day close and from the current, the current state map we picked at that point about 10 or 15 projects we wanted to work on. And those were a combination of Kaizen teams, a threes. We had a couple of just do it or research projects we had to do. So we picked what we felt were and the team felt were the most important things to work on immediately to get to that 30 day close. I think one of the other questions you asked with that is kind of why did we start this project? And what we saw in the industry is everyone's seen the Quicken commercials. If you're in the Midwest here, there's guaranteed Rate Field that the White Sox play it, which is another mortgage company. The mortgage industry pushes the advertisement pushes fast, easy push button get mortgage. And when we looked at our process, we certainly saw a lot of room for improvement. So that's kind of what started us from a competitive standpoint. We want to be the primary bank of our customers. And if we can't do their mortgage or if they're going elsewhere to get their mortgage, that's not good for our customers. And we want to make sure our Customers are taken care of by us because we truly believe from a service standpoint we can compete with the best of them. So we wanted to make sure our process can support that though. So that was really kind of why we started it.

Have you guys in your lean training and whatnot, have you gotten to the concept of quick changeover smed, single minute exchange of dies, like internal external tasks. Have you guys explored that at all?

Not here at the bank. I mean, we haven't explored quick change over here or anything like that. I mean, I think both of us are familiar with the concept of it and what it is. We haven't quite seen an application necessarily that would be easily put into place here. Do you?

Well, yeah, so we're actually read. We, you know, we've had this SMED course forever, is like the third one that we ever made way back in the day. So we're refreshing it right now. And one of the things that we're doing is we're adding a module on, you know, non manufacturing examples of smed. And so we're kind of just touching some different folks out there who we know work in the service industry and whatnot. But I mean, the whole idea is kind of like the classic example is an accountant. You know, at the end of the month, you know, the, the, the machine stops, right? Like if you want to use the manufacturing.

Right.

And how fast can they close the books? Right. Well, what we find is that, you know, once the, once the process, the clock is ticking, if you will, the machine has stopped. So that those would be what we would call internal activities, right? Well, we find that we can move a lot. The accountant, there's a lot of things they can be doing as the month is, is progressing, which would be external tasks. So they're doing these things ahead of time. And, and so then when the month does close, they can close their books faster. Right. And so, so I was just curious if, you know, if there's anything in the mortgage world that could benefit from internal external analysis. I was just curious.

Well, and you say that, and I don't know if we've ever called it that, but one of the other items we've looked at with our whole mortgage process is all the different checklists and checks that need to be done. That's another 2,500 items that we found of checks. And one of the things we have to check with certain mortgages is to make sure nobody who's involved with the mortgage, whether it's our internal people to the buyer, to the realtor, is on certain government list. And we had built that into our process, that when the loans going through our processing department, they go out to the website, they would check all these different individuals and make sure they didn't show up on these lists. We kind of looked at that and said, all right, our internal staff doesn't change. Let's do that once a month so that it doesn't have to be done in the process.

Yeah, well, that's an example. That's an example right there. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, we probably haven't called it that, but I think there's some pieces maybe that we've inadvertently maybe done like that.

We've looked to move some processes a little bit more parallel. So there were some that were waiting on another one to get completed before starting, but you didn't really need to wait that long. Yep. So you can do those things right around the same time. Yeah, we've started making a push towards that as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you guys should dig into it a little bit. There might be even more that you guys can benefit from. So let's talk about results. You know, so you've touched on it a little bit already, but, like, what's been. What are some of the benefits you've realized from all this visual management huddles and whatnot?

Well, I think and Daniel kind of hit on it earlier. The most important result, I think, has been getting the team together every day, and the team spending that 15 minutes together is probably the most important thing. It opens the lines of communication. It gets everyone kind of rolling in the same direction. So that's probably been one of the most important results that we can't really measure per se. So we've also, of course, measured making sure that this new process hasn't added time to our mortgage, and it certainly hasn't. We've seen from 2017 to 2018 alone, since we started the new visual process, we've seen about a 20% improvement in turn time this year, which is real good in our books. Last year, when we started the project, 2017, we saw about a 10% reduction. So we're continuing to get better and better as we learn more, we try new things, we kind of open our minds to change. But all in all, we've seen, if we look at averages, about a 30% reduction in our turn time. So we're happy with those results but not settling for them. We want to continue to get better, continue to move forward, continue to try new things as we learn.

Yeah. Do you think it's possible to cut it in half from where you're at.

I think it is.

I mean, where we were.

If we continue down the road, we continue to chisel away, I think anything's possible. You're looking at an area in which, I mean, when we came into this, there's a lot of new regulations coming out. There's a lot of things put into place that forced the hand of a lot of areas to start moving towards automation. You're seeing more and more automation, more and more tools that are being created to make it easier to push these loans through and to get them through not only faster, but more compliant, which is critical. And one of the bigger costs associated with a mortgage is keeping ourselves compliant, keeping the loan compliant. So I definitely think it's. It's an opportunity and a possibility.

Yeah, there you go. Well, Toyota Kata. There's your challenge, man. 12 months, you know, Go get it. That's awesome. Hey. So, I mean, I know there's some bigger banks out there. Chase, bank of America, some of these. I know, I know folks that work there, and I know many of them are practicing forms of continuous improvement in, whether it be Six Sigma, Lean, whatever it might be. But what about, like, other banks, you know, is this something that's kind of, I don't know, catching on, or is it still super, super early?

I have one contact, Kyle Kumpf. He is, I think he may have been on your podcast a couple weeks ago and how I got connected with you, but we hooked up through him knowing someone who here worked at the bank and he works at bank of Omaha, and me and him now talk monthly just about different applications of Lean and banking, different, different ways to apply it. When we go to our training, you know, whether it's conference or an actual training session, banks are probably still in the minority there, but generally I can find one or two individuals from a bank to connect with and kind of talk about here locally. I haven't heard or seen too many other banks doing it, but I certainly think the overall application of it can work at any bank and really work in any industry. It's how we apply it, how we make it work for your company. Not afraid to fall down and learn. We've certainly learned a ton in our journey and even this mortgage journey. I mean, the board today looks nothing like it did when we started it just three months ago.

Now, what about other areas of your bank? Are they practicing lean as well? Or is it mortgage division?

No, we. So we. We're enterprise wide with our lean journey with the bank. We've done 5s across our entire bank. That was one of the first tools or the first kind of applications we had of Lean. We probably got the biggest lift from that in our banking centers. We have 80 banking centers. So we're able to go around to all those banking centers, make sure when our customers walk in there, you know, they're not seeing files of paperwork, they're not seeing, you know, items misplaced so that we can present that professional, that business image that we still want to present. And then we do. Daniel mentioned he's part of our Lean daily management program. So we train managers how to lead with Lean. So how to kind of run their own value stream maps within their department, how to do a three problem solving within their department. We encourage them to use visual management, go to the Gemba. So we certainly try to apply it in as many areas of the bank as we can. And that's probably one of our struggles. A lot is dependent on the manager. If we have a manager like Daniel who takes it and runs with it, you know, there's no stopping them. We have some managers who are maybe a little less hesitant to use it, who we work with a little more closely. So it definitely can work across all applications of the bank.

Yeah. Love it, Love it. Good stuff. All right, well, guys, let's go ahead and transition into the reflection question. I got a few questions I definitely want to run past you guys. So this first one is. It's really a two part question. We'll start with the tough one and then the softball. But the same question just asked differently. So tell us about a time where you struggled to get someone to buy in to this whole idea of Lean. You don't have to use their name or just obviously, you know, that sort of thing. But maybe this is the situation more so than the person. And then on the flip side, I want you to tell a success story of how you try to get someone bought in and how you were successful and it might be the same person, maybe, you know, event didn't give up and eventually turned them.

I'll start with the. I guess the struggle is when we teach that Lean dealing management class I talked about, one of the biggest struggles we have is getting our managers to go to the Gemba. And when we're talking about going to Gemba in our departments, we want our managers to pull up a seat side by side with their employee and work with them, ask questions. And we really struggled with that at first because a lot of our managers would see it. All right, you're Taking this from a manufacturing industry where you can watch a widget being built or a car being built or whatever it is, a lot of the work we do is on the computer. It's maybe, you know, people making decisions in their head. So people really struggled to see the value with that, and they struggled to pull up that seat next to their employee at their. In their office, in their cubicle, wherever it may be. So we had to look for some early wins there. And one way we were able to do that is just to share those wins. When we see something as little as saving, you know, whether it's a minute a day or five minutes a day, we can really add those up over time. So that was probably one of our biggest struggles early on when we were talking about going to the Gemba. And one of the places I think we saw a positive with that, it was a little too late in this example, but we had a manager who had an employee who put in their notice, they put in their two weeks, and they spent that two weeks. Then before that employee left at the Gemba with them for that whole two weeks. And they weren't a manager who was going to the Gemba regularly as we trained. And after they spent that two weeks at the Gemba with the employee who was leaving, the light bulb went off, saying, this is something I should have been doing all along. There was so much opportunity for improving their process, asking them why they're doing certain tasks, challenging them to problem solve. In that case, for that employee, it was too little, too late, but the light bulb went off for the manager, and now it's something they regularly participate in with their employees on a weekly monthly basis.

Love it, love it, love it. Well, I think you answered both of them really there at the same time, so good stuff. If you had that famous time machine, you could go back and you could spend a day shadowing any continuous improvement guru, teacher, or whatever you want to call them from the past. Who would you choose and what would you want to accomplish?

Who would I choose? That's tough. And that's a tough historical question. And I don't. And forgive me, because I'm fairly new to it. I'm not going to go back very far, but I had an opportunity to walk through the factory floor of ATC with Steve Brennaman. Yeah. And that was. That was fascinating.

Yeah.

And to be able to make the connections between the manufacturing side and the. And the mortgage side was. Was great. But what I really kind of wish that I could go back and this wasn't that long ago, but I'd like to do it again is to go back. And I walked into the wrong plant when I was heading there for my meeting, and I walked into the office area and it was. It didn't look like any other office I'd ever been in. There was. It was very set up with a Kanban system. There was clipboards that were very clearly marked. There was clearly a system and a flow that was going on there. And because I was trying to figure out where I needed to go, I wasn't able to take a look at it. But that is something I would really like to see. A lot of times when I look up videos or when I watch stuff, there's so much of it that is showing the shop floor and all that kind of stuff. And the mortgage industry I look at as a mashup between the two. And I even call it the floor, because that's kind of what I feel that it is. It is. When we're out there with them, we're on the floor. I mean, they're producing products, but it's a mashup of an actual shop floor. And in an office, they're doing things in a professional setting. But we don't see a lot of that. So I would love to go back and see that office and see how they. How they let things flow through there.

Yeah. Steve is an amazing guy. We actually did a Gemba Academy live episode on our. It's up on our website at ATC trailers a few years ago. What a fascinating place, man. Like horse and buggies outside the factory, man. That's, like, insane. So cool. So cool. Some of the.

Some of the.

The folks there that. That, you know, we couldn't. We couldn't record their faces, you know, for religious reasons. And. And so I'm interviewing these guys and just normal folks, you know, and. But the camera. Our camera guy was like, standing from behind, so you see my face in the back of their head. And that's how we interviewed them. But, yeah, what a cool company, man. Super cool. Hey, so what does respect for people mean to you? Either one of you can answer it.

As a manager, I think it just means that you respect that each individual person comes to work wanting to do a good job.

Yeah.

And, you know, we as managers can set up our processes and we can put things in place that we think are a good idea, but they just might not be. And I think that's, you know, respecting people is understanding that. That you need to give them and empower them to be Able to own their own process, to be able to work with you to make their jobs and improve their working processes that they deal with on an everyday basis. My team wades through waste every day and the only way we're going to get through the biggest hit, we're going to get through all of that is if I can get them to learn more about problem solving, to own it a little bit more and to jump in and change things for the better. And I'm only going to get there through them if they're along with the ride. And it's not just me trying to do it myself. So I think respecting people really to me just means trusting them, empowering them to make their jobs and their daily processes better because they're the ones that have to live in it, they're the ones that have to exist in it. And I'm only helping them out if I can give them those skills that are going to help them to improve their processes now and someday when I hope all of my team are managers somewhere someday, that they're using the same things.

Amen. Hey, last question. Someone's listening to this right now and they work in the banking industry or perhaps they're just more of a service related business. And again, they don't. You don't have that easy job of making a car or anything like that. But seriously, they're listening and they're wondering, you know, gosh, what should I do? I want to try this, but they haven't even begun. What advice do you have for that person? Speak to that person right now.

I would tell that person, just try something. Start by either picking up a book and reading a book, going to a class and try to do something and realize that you're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna screw up, it's not gonna be perfect and not expect that perfect outcome. The first try is if you're too afraid to try something new and you're too afraid to, you know, get your feet dirty, you're not going to succeed. So you got to go in it with a mindset of, hey, we're doing this as an experiment. We're going to learn as we go, but we're going to start kicking the ball forward down the field. And as long as we're moving in that direction, it's a positive. But don't try to get it perfect out of the gate because you know, we're as a bank seven years in on this journey and we're far from perfect. And the only way we've gotten to where we are today is by trying stuff, learning as we go, admitting, you know, where we can do better and trying to get better. So get better every day and don't be afraid to try new things.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. All right, guys, well, thanks a lot for, for coming on. It's been, been a really fun episode chatting with you banking folks. So I, maybe we could come out there one day with our video cameras and you can, you can feature your, your story on a gambling Academy live episode. That, that'd be really fun.

That'd be great. Yeah.

Yeah, I'd love to. Yep.

Hey, so why don't you wrap things up with maybe one of you share some final words of wisdom and then be sure to tell how folks can connect with both of you and also your bank if they need a mortgage or anything like that, you know.

Well, obviously. Yep. We're with First Source bank, so if you need a mortgage, that's the place to go if you're in Indiana or Michigan, so definitely reach out to us there. We also do Illinois and Arizona and Florida. Okay, so I'll just put the plug out there.

Yeah.

Shameless. But I guess word of wisdom for me is, you know, Danny kind of touched on it. You guys can, you can certainly start small. You know, we talked about the board as a large item. If you're, if you're a manager or supervisor, you've got a small team, you can certainly do something board related, a daily huddle on a very, very small scale. It doesn't have to be a large one to start. So you can certainly start building that in.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you want to reach out to me, I am on LinkedIn and that's Daniel. Last name is Lichty L I C.

H T Y and I'm Daniel Conroy, officially on LinkedIn. But we didn't want to mess with you too much, Ron, and have you call us both Daniel. So it's C O N R o y on LinkedIn.

Oh, so it's not really Danny and Daniel. You guys are just messing with me, man.

No, I actually, actually go by Daniel but you know, trying to be professional.

Okay, yeah, I gotcha. I mean your mom's going to listen to this man, so you got to stop professional man, you know. So hey, do you guys ever get out to any conferences?

The only stuff I've been out to are some trainings out in, in Colorado. Have not made it out to a conference yet, but I am hoping to do so in the near future.

Well, I'm going To put a bug in your ear, you guys need to be in San Diego on October 29th through November 1st. You got to go to Ame. It's the biggest. It's the biggest leading conference in the world, and it's. Well, I hate using the word best, but it's the biggest, you know, I mean, there's a lot of great, great conferences out there. The Lean Frontiers guys do a great job as well for the smaller crowd. But the San Diego one, I think you guys would learn a lot, and there's tons of. Tons of networking that you can do out there, so. Yeah, And Gemba Academy save you 10%, so.

Yeah, well, San Diego sounds a lot better. October 29th.

Right.

South Bend, Indiana, where we'll probably have some snow by that time.

Yeah, listen, we did the. The Gambit Academy live at ATC Trailers. Oh, gosh. I think it was like, in January or something like that. And, you know, we landed in. I think it was Indianapolis or whatever, and then we had to drive out there to. What was it? Napanee? Is that what it.

Napanee?

We were in this little rental car, this, like, little.

I don't even know what it was. Greg's over here.

Probably remember, it's.

Oh.

As this tiny little car. It was so cold that we had the heat cranked all the way up and we could not get warm. Oh, my God.

We exist in it. We figured it out.

Yeah.

I grew up in Ohio, you know, so I've just. I've been in Texas too long. My blood's thin. Hey, guys, it's been fun. Thanks for coming on. Keep up the great work. And maybe we could check back in in a year or so and hear about that how you didn't get 50. You got like, 65% reduction or something like that, you know?

Sounds great.

That's exactly right. All right, take care, guys. Thanks again.

Thanks so much, Ron.

Thanks, Ron.

Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now we invite you to take a no strings attached, fully functional Test drive of Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than a thousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge at Gembaacademy.com.