GA 240 | How to Leverage Lean Like Barry-Wehmiller with Brian Wellinghoff

Hey, everyone. Today's episode is the first recording I've made since being back from the AME conference last week out in San Diego. Now, the conference was fantastic, and I definitely want to thank everyone that stopped by the booth to say hello and definitely thank everyone that came to our cocktail party. It was another huge success. So thank you. We also did something new this year. We had a booth dedicated to the Gemba Academy podcast, which was super fun. And in this booth, we had a little makeshift studio set up, and Greg and Carlos did a fantastic job getting everything set up. We had these little headsets, and we could hear each other, me and the guest. And we just had a great time doing these interviews. And I actually interviewed seven different people over the course of the conference. And what we're going to do over the next few weeks is just release one of these episodes every week. And today we're going to start with Brian Willinghoff. Brian is a director of strategy, improvement and culture at Barry Wehmiller. Now, as many of you likely know, Barry Wehmiller is one of the strongest lean thinking organizations in the world. And man, was it fun chatting with Brian. As you'll hear, Brian has amazing passion for continuous improvement and really, life in general. And I'm very, very confident that you're going to benefit from his story. Show notes for this episode will be found over@gemba podc. Just look for episode 240 again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 2, 4, 0. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Brian, welcome to the show. How's it going, Ron?

Pleasure to be here. I'm excited to be here the first day of the conference.

Yeah.

And it's just great. The energy's wonderful having people all from across the country, really, around the world, come to talk about continuous improvement and the power and the impact it can have on people.

Amen. Yeah.

I love it.

I love it. Yeah. So we. Is this your first time to ame?

No, I've been here a number of times, but my first time in a couple of years because we had some overlapping situations and issues. But now I'm back. I'm here, and I'm excited about it.

Yeah. So good. So good. All right. Well, Brian, you know how we like to start with our guests maybe sharing a quote or reflection, something that means something to them. Do you have. Have something you want to share?

I do, definitely. Okay. All of us is always more powerful than one of us, and I think that's so true with continuous improvement. As much as I've learned and I try to impart on our organization, what's always about tapping the collective wisdom of all of us, it's not about being a genius or necessarily an expert. It's about drawing out the expertise in others.

Yeah. Awesome.

Awesome.

All right. What's your background, Brian? Tell us about your story, how you first came to learn about continuous improvement, and then definitely tell us what you're up to these days.

Well, some people would say that I had continuous improvement on my blood from a very young age, but really mechanical engineering background, but didn't learn about lean continuous improvement, Six Sigma, you know, whatever terms you want to put around that, until I got a couple years into my time at Barry Wayne Miller and met my lean guru, my sensei, whose name is Dick Ryan. Okay. And he was formerly part of the wire mold organization, consulting up and around the Midwest.

Yeah.

And he came and joined Barry Wehmiller in 2006, and that's when together he and I kind of tried to take these principles of continuous improvement, which have always been imbued with a people centric mindset, to really draw that out. And it's been a great journey over the last decade or so to bring that to the forefront.

So a lot of our listeners will have already known who the company. Barry Wehmiller. It's arguably one of the best kind of success stories out there. But tell us for the folks who aren't familiar with the company. Just tell us a little bit about the company before we get into the continuous improvement side. Just about the company and maybe your leader.

Yeah, a couple of key things is one, we're generally considered a producer of capital goods, machinery, so big industrial products sell from anywhere from $100,000 to $10 million and sometimes fill a room. But the interesting thing is we're the compilation of more than 105 different acqu this point. So a lot of people talk to us about culture and transformation, bringing improvement in that acquisition environment. Today we do work in insurance services. We do it in medical devices. We do it in a lot of different places. And really the way that we're able to do that is from the leadership of our CEO, Bob Chapman, and this people centric message that applies regardless of what industry you're in. Just like continuous improvement. And so Barry wehmiller started in 1885. We grew up with the Anheuser Busch Company out of St. Louis making bottle washers and pasteurizers. But we reinvented the company in about 1985 or so around a new Vision of growth, value, and liquidity and really driving a business that was strong and for the future. And continuous improvement has been a huge part of that as we move forward. So today, we're in the new, modern interpretation of Barry Waymore. 105 acquisitions later, touching more than 12,000 team members in 200 locations around the world.

Tell me your favorite Bob Chapman story.

Ooh, my favorite Bob Chapman story. I'll tell you the one. When I first was part of starting our Lean journey, we were focused on our guiding principles of leadership, which is our document for a vision of how we want our culture to be, how we want people to treat each other, and specifically how we want leaders to behave in our culture.

Okay.

And we had had a lot of great impact over the first two years implementing that document, but in a lot of places that touch the customer directly. Sales, customer service, field service. It wasn't hitting the bulk of our organization. Engineering, manufacturing, supply chain procurement, everybody that works in those roles. And we'd met some great people in the lean community who said, hey, lean is all about people. And I was in Bob's office in Clearwater, Florida, and he said, you know, we really need somebody to kind of lead this effort up. And I'll never forget, I actually raised my hand in the room. There's only three of us in the room. Raised my hand and said, you know, that's something I'd like to take on. And I went back to the hotel that night. I was like, what the heck did I just sign up for? But I'll never forget that Bob, you know, started with that sense of, all right, this is about how we live our culture. It's not about eliminating waste. So that's a piece of it. But it's about how we really make things better for people. I love it.

I love it. All right, so let's get into to the journey of continuous improvement at Barry Wehmiller. Tell us about maybe. Well, it's kind of maybe that was part of the origin story right there. But tell us about those early days.

Well, and that's a bit of the origin story. The other pieces I alluded to before is Bob met Dick Ryan on a golf course out in Oregon, where neither of them are from. They both met in a foursome with their wives and agreed to have dinner together that night.

Didn't know each other.

Didn't know each other, had never met before. We were just budding on this idea of embracing Lean principles and continuous improvement. And that night, Bob said to Dick, well, you know, why don't you stop messing around with this idea of consulting and do something serious and help us implement this and really set an example in the world for continuous improvement and for lean. And so that's another aspect of Bob is you never know what a dinner is going to turn.

Now, when was that again? What year was that?

That was in 2006.

Okay.

Okay, coming forward. And then the start of our journey was then to say, all right, how did we start to find places in the organization that were willing to dive in deep with us, that were passionate, that were on the leading edge of wanting to take on some things? And we did a President's Kaizen event. We started doing 7s events throughout our organization. 7s is our version of 5s. We had safety and satisfaction to that. Got it and just started seeing the snowball kind of roll down the hill. And another Bob Chapman moment was about three months in. We did a Kaizen event report out. Great. Brought the whole company together in this location and said, all right, you know what really stood out? And Bob asked back to him, well, how did it change your personal life? And nobody had ever asked that question in a Kai's Advent report up before. And so a guy raised his hand and said, well, if I had known this five years ago, I'd still be married. I wouldn't be divorced. And that just reinforced for us how not. Not just the principles and getting rid of waste, but really helping to be better each and every day. And doing it together is about human relationship. It's about everything we could do together.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard. Actually heard that story. Mr. Chapman talks about how he measured it was like it was something related.

To dropping the divorce rate is what he talks about sometimes. And, yeah. And so, I mean, we have statistics to back that up. But the number of people through our continuous improvement and also through a class that's gone on quite a bit, our Listen like a leader class. Yeah. That we partnered with AME on and have gotten out to a number of other companies. The number one reaction people give when we ask is, actually, it changed my life. It helped my relationships at home. And that's something. I'm the kind of lean, techy geek guy, and I call myself that personally because I'm constantly going home and saying, how can we do the laundry better? How can we make dishes go better? And I can't speak to anybody else. I got three young kids at home. Anything that makes the laundry and the dishes and bedtime go a little bit easier makes life a whole lot better.

You know, It's a funny story. I try to teach my kids as well and put the hamper. And it's still there actually, right by the, by the, outside of the bathroom. And my son was a few years ago, he's probably at that time, you know, I don't know, four or five years old. And he was getting ready to go take his, his bath or whatever it is. So he's kind of getting his clothes.

He's.

And he just takes his shirt and kind of swings it and chucks it across the ground, you know. And my sister comes up and says, what are you doing? And he's like, what do you mean? She goes, that's that point of use, you know. So here's my older, my daughter. That's a point of use, you know, talking about the, the hamper right there.

He does. Well, it's so key and so away from, from our kind of childhood and raising children. And it's about improvement, but it's also about growth of people.

Yeah.

And feeding my infant son, he's 16 months now, but he's just learning to eat and pick up food for himself. Any, any parent that's done this knows, what do you do? We feed him Cheerios and my wife put a whole bunch of Cheerios out on the tray in front of him. And so what does any six month old do at the time, however old he was, you know, just washes away with his hands. Cheerios all over the floor. Yeah. And so my analytical mind is saying, all right, 2% of Cheerios in the mouth, 98% of the floor. I on this. So I said, honey, I'll handle the next meal. And so I sat next to him and I one by one, Cheerios in the mouth, one piece flow, you know, quality control. It was great stuff until it. Thankfully it only took me two meals to figure out that's not sustainable. That's not how an organization being our family can work.

Yeah.

And so what did I do the next day? I put all the Cheerios back on there. He brushed them aside.

Yeah.

But this time it was 5% and 95%.

Okay.

And what I've taken about that into our organization as well is people need time to practice, they need time to learn. And we give that to children, to young people. We give it to my son playing soccer. I don't expect to be perfect the first day.

Yeah.

When we change things in our work environments, when we make an improvement, when we move a machine tool or change, you know, the form that you have to fill out, well, it Takes people sometimes a couple of tries.

Yeah.

To get that right. And in continuous improvement.

Yeah.

We need to press to always be the best we can be. And we need to be patient with people along the way as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So tell us a little bit. Give us a peek inside. Present day continuous improvement at your company. What's it looking like?

Well, some of the great things are, you know, we took this start that I talked about, and we've layered into that a lot of training experiences and experiences outside of the classroom. So we realized was within our first two years, hey, we're asking people to do so many new things. We'll ask them to have behaviors that they haven't done before. And, you know, the one big issue we found was listening is that to actually have an effective event, call it continuous improvement. Call it kaizen, called rapid improvement. Call whatever you want. You got to actually be able to listen to the people across the table and around the table. And so we created this class, listen like a leader, to really teach listening skills. And as I alluded to, it's been key. Well, we've built on that in a number of different places moving forward. And so it's funny, we talk about laundry and other things like that. We've actually got an exercise where we have people process math laundry for somebody in the classroom. And it really just drives it home. What these things can look like.

Give us a cliff notes version of listen like a leader. How do you listen like a leader?

Well, you know, some of the most critical things are, one, you got to have attending behavior. What that means is you give somebody your full attention. How do I break that rule? I got my office set up. So I'm looking at the computer. Somebody comes in, and what do I do? I keep typing and, you know, oh, I'm multitasking. Sorry, Brian.

I'm looking at my phone right now.

He is looking at his phone right now. I can tell you folks. But, you know, to actually square up, look at somebody and give them your full attention, that's huge. Number two is silence is a key part of conversation. Yeah. And it's awkward in a podcast. It's awkward in conversation. It seems that way. But silence is that gift of letting somebody think about what they're going to say back. Some continuous improvement facilitators. All right. Throw a question out. When somebody does an answer within one second. Oh, my gosh, you know, it didn't work. People got to think about what improvements we have to reflect. We have to have time for that. That but the critical thing is playing back to someone, not only the facts, but the feelings of the message they shared with you. And part of that, and this is challenging at work and at home, is I always want to put a judgment on what I send back. I always want to say, oh, I've got an idea already to send back. Sometimes my wife, my team member, my boss just needs to be heard about something. And I find that especially early in a continuous improvement journey, sometimes nearly half of the events that you have are mostly about giving space for people to be heard they didn't have before. Like, oh, you're gonna listen to me. Oh, you're gonna implement one of my suggestions. Holy cow, I can buy into this thing.

Yeah.

And that's just been a key part of our journey and it applies so much at work and at home. Yeah, it's so critical. We had one gentleman who took the class, he was a CFO in one of our businesses and he tried something at night. So we went home to a six year old son and he was washing the dishes. Imagine yourself, you know, looking out the window, washing the dishes, and his son comes up behind him, you kind of pulling on his trouser leg and says, daddy, I got something to share with you. And he said, all right, I'm gonna do something different. Usually he'd say, uh huh huh. Yeah, I'd hope that his son went away tonight. He turned around, turned off the water, got down on one knee, looked his son in the eye and said, son, what do you want to share with me? And his son immediately ran out of the room, frightened. And that just goes to show, you know, at home and at work too, it's usually not that demonstrative. But at work, ooh, we don't want to walk by that person's office. Ooh, I've never been asked for my feedback before. Giving people the space and the patience.

To come to that is so critical, you know. Do you know Jamie Parker? Have you ever Met Jamie Parker? FedEx office.

FedEx office.

Now she's actually. Jamie's going to do a podcast tomorrow with us.

Wonderful.

So she actually did a session with FedEx office, her old company, and she had just got back from some training with y'.

All. Yes.

And they did this exercise. I guess it was probably this similar thing where people, two people got up and they gave each other kind of feedback, something to also talk about, like what they were appreciated about that person, Something like that. I'm going to tell you what, man, there was a couple of times where there's people like bawling like tears, man. And I'm like sitting there like, stop it. This is like, I mean, it was intense.

I've led that activity at the end of a lot of the different sessions that we have and we talk about a recognition message. And research into human relationships will show that for every one negative or constructive feedback message you give, you got to give at least five positive reinforcement messages. And so what she's doing is our framework of FBI. In your recognition message, share the feelings, the behavior and the impact and what that meant to you. And when you do that doesn't cost money, doesn't take more than a few minutes to reflect and share that message. But when it's done genuinely and authentically, people really care.

Yeah.

And so much of what gets in the way of good recognition at Barry Wehmiller and in other organizations is, ooh, you know, what's somebody going to say? Is it going to be equal? Am I going to have the right words? It's a simple framework to have the right words. I believe we have it on our website. If not, I'm happy to send it to anybody who'd want to contact me. Feelings, behavior, and impact. We got some great examples how to pull that together. Yeah. FBI.

I love it. I love it. All right, well, hey, what about. I don't know. I know everything's not perfect, you know, at Barry Wimiller. And I'm sure you've, you've learned a lot along the way through some things that worked out and some things that didn't work out and always learning at the end of it. So it's all good. But can you share maybe some, some, some lessons learned from your journey?

Definitely. We are definitely imperfect. And the good news about that is we've got room to improve. We got room to be better tomorrow. We got room to create more value and touch more lives.

Right.

You know, a couple of the things that we've learned, you know, first is whenever you want to cut corners in terms of the amount of time you want to leave for an improvement event, check yourself right there. Always people go through an event for two days and say, ooh, we could have really used a third day. And then they'll come back to me the next time and say, well, let's make it a one day event this time. There really is something to setting time aside to get the full value out of it. And part of what links to that is there is no substitute for passionate leaders when it comes to continuous improvement. And passion doesn't just Mean tasks that support. It means actual engagement, interest, the willingness to benchmark other businesses. There's such great learning. And that's why this AME conference is so wonderful. You can't do continuous improvement alone. I mean, I would say that unequivocally, you can't do it alone.

Right.

And that also means getting out to the Gemba, and if you don't prefer Japanese words, the actual workplace where the work is actually done.

We like the word gemba.

I love it. We do, too. Internal conversations on that. Because the reason I love that term, gemba, is it encapsulates so much that's so critical. And actually, in our breakout session tomorrow, we're going to share. When we talk about Gemba, we talk about going with a goal that you should go get out of your office, go to the physical place where it is, observe. It's something about watching. There is something to continue from observing what happens. It's about listening, really listening to what people have to say to you there. And listen to what? Is it noisy? Is it busy? What's going on? And then go observe, listen and engage. And that's the final one, is we've got a range of tools to use to really engage with people that are there. And so that's our simple mindset. And Barry Wayne Moore, when you go to the Gemba. Yeah. Go observe, listen and engage. You go with your goal.

I love it, I love it, I love it. So someone's listening to this episode right now, Brian, and they're. Let's, let's answer it two ways to the person who's kind of brand new on the journey. And they, you know, they're. They've listened to a couple podcasts, and maybe they write a book, maybe they've gone to a conference, but they're still. They're brand new. What advice do you have for that, for that person, maybe that organization?

Yeah, I think the number one thing I would say is you don't have to do it alone. And so that's part of it, is there are tons of people, thousands of people that will be here this week, and those that couldn't be here, too, that love sharing their journey with other people, the amount of reciprocity and sharing in the global lean community is just tremendous. And also, well, you can't go it alone. No one person has all the answers or all the perspective. And so from that, read the books, benchmark other people, leverage great tools that places like Emma Academy have to learn and get in that network with others.

Yeah.

Not saying that you have to take something, cut and paste from another organization, but take it 80% or take it as your first, you know, draft.

Yeah.

And then customize it, tweak it, build it from there. Yeah. There's no reason that you have to start from scratch.

Yeah.

And kind of do it alone.

Yeah. No, I love it. You know, even like what Mike Rother would say, you know, kind of, you know, as it relates something of Toyota Cottage, like just follow, follow it as we ride it out. Just follow it exactly as we have it here for a few times, you know, and then make it your own. Right. So I think that's a beautiful thing when you benchmark other folks. You know, obviously we don't want them just copying artifacts of what they see, but you know, what are they doing? But at the end of the day you got to do something. So sometimes it is, okay, go copy someone's artifact and go put some tape down on the ground if it helps you learn and get started. Right.

And.

But really focusing on those behaviors is obviously where it's where it's all at.

So another one, especially for people early on the journey, but really anywhere is communicate the heck out of successes, especially at the beginning. One of my phrases again is if you've heard the phrase maybe that a tree falls in a wood and doesn't make a sound, the same thing is if an improvement opportunity happened and it didn't get communicated throughout the organization, did an improvement really happen?

So what's the best way to communicate?

Well, what we find is email has a lot of drawbacks. But whether it is email, visual boards in the organization are our favorite one. It takes a little bit of investment, but it's so powerful there. And so we have what we call headline news. Some slides are throughout Barry Wehmiller. Some are local to that site. But people love pictures. And so leveraging pictures, there's a great lean dynamic. I came out here with Mark Braun from Cambridge Engineering in St. Louis who's part of the two second lean movement with others, Paul Akers and others about, hey, capture some video. We have these tools around all the time, but video or still photos or whatever, get that out. And then the other key thing is quotes. People care that somebody else had this reflection, had this thing to share. And it doesn't mean that numbers aren't important. It doesn't mean that process maps aren't important. Certainly they are. But over communicate pictures and videos and quotes. That's what keeps us engaged outside of the workplace. Well, guess what? It's what keeps Us engaged in the workplace as well.

Yeah, well, there's neuroscience behind it as well because, you know, serotonin and all the rest of it, people are flooded and they feel good, man, when they're being recognized.

Well, we've done a lot of work with Simon Sinek and there, you know, if you want to read any of his work or reference it, I mean, there's these four major brain chemicals and if you can reinforce that serotonin, that positive brain chemical, there's, there's research, there's real physical stuff behind this. It's not just, you know, hocus pocus or magic somewhere. It's so critical. So that's a couple of things for people earlier on the journey.

Yeah.

And then what I say is we get deeper and deeper in the journey. If somebody's looking to really take it to the next level. What we call it is connect the dots. Can you, as a continuous improvement leader, connect the dots between how an improvement project, improvement activity, improvement initiative is linked to the bottom line of the business? What we find is there's a lot of people that can do improvement and we improve things. Yes, we save this much space or something. But how do you really link it back and understand some of the financial drivers of your business? In our business, well, certainly everybody understands revenue, but things like EBITDA and actually what goes into warranty or other things like that, we've got a full out push on warranty right now. And one of the biggest challenges is nobody understands exactly how money gets put into warranty, exactly what it means, where it comes from. And so we're actually doing improvement events on how we track warranty. But a key piece for leaders that are ready for that next step. Figure out how you're connecting the dots. Because the only way we can empower frontline associates, machinists, engineers, whomever to really go after and help improve warranty is to help them understand and connect the dots to what that is.

I love it. Hey, so how do people learn more about. I'm thinking about myself here.

Sure.

Selfishly, how do I come to a training class at Barry Windmiller?

Well, that's the neat part is, you know, whether it's the Barry Windmiller Leadership Institute or Gemba Academy or other things, you know, get to our website, reach out to us and I know, you know, Ron, just like you would, we're happy to get in contact with anybody. But we've recently remade our website. Bwli.com bwli.com Yep. BarryWaymiller Leadership Institute. And it has Great resources for our classes. The nice thing we've been able to build out recently is there are chances to come to St. Louis or sometimes regional experiences to some of the training and culture that we have. There's also chances to come in and benchmark some of our facilities and we have them spread across the country. So hopefully there's a facility near you. But also we're able to come on site to where other people are. And particularly we find a lot of interest from groups doing leadership retreats. And part of the value from that speaking to anybody at the conference or that wasn't able to be here. It's always great to come solo. It's even better to come in twos, threes or fours. But the biggest opportunity to really take a step change in your organization is to get the whole leadership team there, whatever leadership team that's a part of, if it's big corporation or small local site or even a team in your area to go through a common experience that allows you to all make that journey together.

Yeah. So what, what are some of the kind of workshops you talked about? The leadership?

Yep. So we have. I talked about that listening class we also have. Very closely linked to that is our Relate class, which is about relationship building. So much of listening is about that, but really diving into how to build strong relationships.

Okay.

We've got a great class called Inspire that's about how we inspire other people through our stories and through trust building and the recognition that we talked about before. Any leadership team that's gone through that, we have a 100% hit rate for people that come back. I want to experience more. And so, you know, a little plug, but just the value of the people are seeing and voting with their feet.

Yeah.

And then the third key thing that we have is called Connect, and that's a little bit more linked to emotional intelligence. And so if you want to go a little bit deeper, how is emotional intelligence a part of really connecting to people and helping them change their mindset? The final one that might be rudimentary for some of the listeners of this podcast, but always open to folks, is our Improve class. And that's what we used to have two days of the equivalent of green belt training. And that is great stuff, don't get me wrong, but we have a lot. What we found was we weren't able to get that far and wide enough in the organization, so it make a difference. Got it. So we got two days that focuses on beginner root cause analysis tools, but also what's the mindset behind continuous improvement, how does it focus on people? How does it engage the customer? And we've rolled this out, and we've had as many people inside Barry Wayne Miller take it in the last year as previously took our green belt training over the last eight years. And so really looking for that. Yes, it's not as long. It doesn't have all the facilitation pieces, but it's really powerful to get people changing their mindset.

Yeah.

And then what I find is, and don't get me wrong, training is great, but if you change someone's mindset, then they can learn so much by doing an improvement activity with their leader or with a local coach.

Well, then they're gonna want to learn.

Yeah.

And then they'll come back willingly. Right. And hungry. Right. For more.

Well, and that's what we had. We had somebody. Group of five or six people went through the class down in South Carolina, and they said, all right, we need some more help. We want to take this to the next level. And by the way, we love the A3 approach. A3 is a great way to house plan, do check, and adjust thinking. And so. All right. We brought two people from our team down and helped coach them for three straight days. On riding an A3, driving it to root cause, and seeing benefit, they found more than $100,000 in savings in just three days. But even more than that, they left. Loving it. They can't wait to do their next A3. Yeah.

Hey, Oscar. Doing a podcast, man. What's that? Oh, yeah, but that's okay. We're live on a podcast, man. Yeah, this is Oscar Roach, TWI Institute.

Oscar. Brian Wellinghoff, Fairway Miller Leadership Institute. Yeah, pleasure.

Okay, we'll catch up. Hey, baby. We're live at the conference, so things are gonna happen, right?

Well, it just shows the connections that people have, and that's what I love. Like I said, I haven't been here for a couple years, but I'm walking around and still seeing so many friendly faces that I know.

Yeah.

And, you know, I'm gonna present tomorrow on a couple of items that we actually, I'll say, stole from past AME conferences and presentations that we brought into our organization. We want to share it back with the tweet we. That. That we've made.

Well, don't worry. People steal plenty from Barry Wehmiller, so it's all good.

I mean, that would be my statement. Anybody that's hearing this is, please, you know, and if you've read the book, everybody matters, and you want a Chance to go a little bit deeper. We've even got a discussion guide, kind of a book study, free of charge, you know, anybody who'd like to reach out to us. And it just gives you some questions because we found it's not just reading it alone, but engaging in that with again, a leadership team, a group of people, people passionate, a guiding coalition that wants to go after some of this stuff.

So good. All right, so that was bwli.com now what if folks want to connect with you directly? What's the best way?

Ah, email is great. Now I got a long name. So Brian B r I a n.wellinghoff w e l L I N G H O F F at Barry B A R R Y Dash Waymiller W E H M I L L E R dot com. Yes. And if you get through all of that, you've more than earned yourself, you know. A response from me. Are you on link on LinkedIn as well? That's an easy way to find me. You'll see me there. Link to BWLI and really? Yeah, we're just trying to get the message out. And you'll also see a lot of my colleagues posting additional stories and content and things. We're working with The San Francisco 49ers and other sports teams. We're seeing a lot of engagement, working with a major airline right now and one of the largest food stores in the country. And so what I love about this message is that it applies across everything that we do. Work and home manufacturing, retail service industries. And the same is true for continuous improvement. And that's why the work that Gemba Academy is doing to sponsor these dialogues, these podcasts, these chances to connect people, it's really powerful. So if there's anybody that's listening or engaging today who feels alone in any way that's listening to Gemba Academy alone from any part of the country, know that there are hundreds and thousands of people, people who are with you and so reach out to any of us.

I love it. Shaking his hand. He can't see that because we're.

Yeah.

But hey, Nosa's been fantastic. Let's see. We got everything. I want to have you back on the show.

Would love to.

You know and I mean we can dig even deeper into like the day to day.

Yeah.

Maybe like you're just really, really dig in deep on a day in a life at Barry Wehmiller. So I think that would be cool. We even bring our video camera out one time. That'd be even better.

We would love to do that. I'll leave you with one thought.

Okay.

That is, if continuous improvement is about change, that means we, as leaders of it, have to change ourselves. And if that's one of the hardest things, I've got to be willing to keep changing and improving the way I do it. So that's why we love Ron engaging with you and Gemba Academy to say, every time somebody else looks at our facility, comes in, visits, we learn something about ourselves as well.

Yeah. Love it. Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Ron. Take care. All right, see ya. Bye.

Bye. 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.