GA 252 | Standard Work in the Office with Steve Ansuini

And I think there's a lot of psychologists and therapists that are making big dollars on telling people to be grateful about their life and help others. And it just seems interesting that these were penned by the original Toyota family member back in 1935.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Steve and Sweeney to the show. Steve was the 43rd employee hired at Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, plant, which afforded some incredible learning opportunities. Steve and I talk about his early days at Toyota, including how he was trained. We then transition into a discussion on how Steve worked to implement various types of standard work and job instruction breakdowns into Toyota's front offices. Show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 252. You can also get a full access trial to Gemba Academy at over@gembacademy.com. okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Steve, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Well, thank you for having me, Ron. I appreciate it.

Yeah. So our mutual friend Karen Ross introduced us. So, Karen, thank you for introducing Steve to me. And I know she's out there listening and smiling right now, because Karen's always smiling.

Yes, she is.

So, Steve, you're really excited to talk about standard work for the office here at Toyota and just really, really picking your brain from all of your experience over the past years. But before we kind of get into the meat of the episode, Steve, I'd like to begin with our guest sharing a quote of something that possibly inspires him. So do you have one?

Well, yeah, I do. And of course, we all have the favorite ones, but, like, Ono has so many of them that are rich and things. But my favorite quote is something John Maxwell said. He said that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think that a successful lean journey is so driven by culture and relationships. That's really a powerful quote. Yeah.

I love it. I love it. Very good. All right, Steve, tell us about your background. Tell us about how you first got exposed to continuous improvement, and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Sure. Well, I spent some time in the Marine Corps, and then about 10 years at Mack Trucks, and I worked briefly with 3M Company, and then I went to join the Toyota team. Georgetown, Kentucky, in the 80s. I was the 43rd employee hired, and I can still remember vividly that I came on board on a Friday, and, well, I had been in Chicago two days before that getting my visa, and I was in the office on Friday, and I left for Japan on Saturday. So I held the record for the quickest turnaround. And so I was just kind of whisked off to Japan very quickly. And I was there for six weeks.

Wow.

And I had a wife and three kids, so it was one of those things where being absent, it was difficult, but it was fun. Also, I had spent a year in Japan before that when I was in the Marines. So I was familiar with the culture, and I always embraced their cultural standings. I found several things that really fit my personality well when I went to Toyot. And I guess the continuous drive or the drive for continuous improvement was really, in my mind very quickly embraced. And I believe, I guess, that many people do not know that there's actually five precepts of lean, but I'd like to share one. And it's precept number four. And it's always strive to build a homelike atmosphere at work that is warm and friendly. And I can remember my days with other organizations where oftentimes it was seen as adversarial relationship between leaders and the workers. I always struggled with that. And quite honestly, most people thought I was in the Navy, not the Marines, because of my personality type. But it speaks again to how important relationships are and how important the culture is when you're trying to do anything. Not just a lean journey, but any initiative, I think.

Yeah. Well, you mentioned there was five precepts. If you don't mind, why don't you share what those are? I'm sure folks would be interested in hearing those.

Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to. They really didn't come to light for even the folks at Toyota until we started the Toyota 2000 effort. And that was when we started to talk about Toyota business practices. Tbp. But the first precept is always be faithful to your duties, thereby contributing to the company and to the overall good. And two is always be studious and creative, striving to stay ahead of the times. Three is always be practical and avoid frivolousness. Today's culture, that's difficult. Many times.

What does that really mean? What do you think that means?

Well, you know, I think that I had many examples of that when I was with Toyota, and frequently when we had quality circles, and many times we would have quality circles come to us with a proposal for an improvement, but it would require a large investment. It was not to cause them to be disheartened, but many times if it was a large capital expenditure, we would say, no, we would like you to Spend more time studying that issue. I can remember one time in particular that a group from the paint department came to us and said they could fix this problem they had for 150,000 doll. And really that's not a lot of money when you consider it was an $800 million investment in Georgetown initially and then doubled when they added plant two. But as leaders, we said, we need you to go back and look at it a little bit deeper. And so they came back in probably about a month and a half or so, and they said we can do it for $50,000. We found an easier way, less expensive way. And I'm kind of a softy, so I'm almost ready to say yes. But I got coaching from some of the best Japanese coordinators and they said, study some more. They went back and studied it and lo and behold, less than a month later, they came back to us and they said, we have a better solution and it is zero cost. And so that just blew me away. And I think the focus for us is that we live in budgets. All companies are driven by budgets and budget reductions and things. And sometimes you need to make those expenditures. But we shouldn't do it frivolously. We really should be getting a good grasp of the situation and going through the PDCA properly. I think that really helps us to avoid that frivolousness.

I guess this is all similar to the old use your wits over your wallet kind of thing, right? Yes.

Yeah, yeah. And the last precept is always have respect for God and remember to be grateful. And I think there's a lot of psychologists and therapists that are making big dollars on telling people to be grateful about their life and help others. And it just seems interesting that these were penned by the original Toyota family member. And it was back in 1935, if I'm not mistaken, it was October of 35. So these are long standing precepts and these were things that they used when they, and I mean they meaning Toyota and Ono. The two Toyotas and Ono, when they put the Toyota production system together because they were their tenants that they needed to work within.

Yeah, yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. All right, so I, I, I sorry for kind of cutting, interrupting you. There you are in the middle of telling us, I mean, so, so Toyota. And then, and then what? Well, maybe finish out your journey.

Yeah, well, I, I, well, the journey.

Continues, I guess so.

But, you know, yeah, I was with Toyota a little over 20 years. Okay. And it was a very, very powerful learning environment. And I had looked at Lean prior To that when I was with Mack Trucks, and I even got a copy of the cassette videotape that the engineer from General Motors made to present to the GM board. He spent three years in Japan studying the Toyota production system. And I got a copy of that tape and it just was fascinating to me. And at the time I was at Mack Trucks, I never even dreamt that I was ever going to get on at Toyota. But an opportunity came in and as I said, very quickly whisked off to Japan. But three years that I was at the Georgetown facility, I had an opportunity to work with Fujio Cho. He is probably the highest ranking non Toyota family member, the Toyota Corporation. I would work with him every month and for extended periods, one day every quarter. And he always had very great insight. And he would ask me questions. And I think that's one of the things that if we want to be a good sensei, we shouldn't be giving too many answers. We should be asking the right questions. And so I can recall him sharing one of his dreams with me. And he said that, I imagine that we picked a color for every item that was kaizen in the factory, and when we would make an improvement on it, we would paint it that color. And he says, I can remember years going by, and all of a sudden I woke up and came into the office and everything was painted the same color. And then we change the color. And I think that speaks to another issue where continuous improvement, that the only thing that's constant is change. And those of the listeners may be familiar with the Dorami doll, which is a customary Japanese celebration doll. It would have two white eyes and you would paint one eye in when you established a target or goal for your group department, company, whatever it would be. And then when you accomplish that, you would have a gathering and a big celebration and you would color in the other eye, and those two eyes would stay colored in for maybe a day.

Yeah.

Then they would white them out again. And you would set a new target and have a new kickoff ceremony. So it is continuous. And I think it's, you know, really says a lot for Toyota and how they have approached all the cultures around the world. They really blend in very well with us, and we have a lot to learn from them, but they have a lot to learn from us as well.

Sure, sure.

So last three years I was with Toyota, I actually moved to North American headquarters and I had responsibility for the Quality Circle program and the visual manual, which was a training system that Toyota put together because they noticed that there was a Small decrease in quality and I mean just fractions of a percent. They noticed and they put this visual manual together in about three years and we had to provide the infrastructure for North America. And so that was one of my last major projects along with the Quality Circle program. And it was really showing the commitment that they put into how important it is to train people and keep developing people.

Got it. What are you up to these days, Steve?

Well, I actually started my business about four days before I retired. Okay. And I've been doing this for about 11 years now and working with companies to help them to reduce waste and improve their bottom line. One of my largest customers worked with them for a couple years and they had some significant benefit from it. Most recently, I have a small client and this also speaks to the issue. It doesn't have to just be big companies with huge dollar volume. I'm working with a small company that's about 5 million a year net. And in two years working with him just scratching the surface of Lean, he was able to increase his net profits by 300%.

Wow.

And so it doesn't matter where you are in that continuum of earnings, you can benefit from Lean.

Yeah. Fantastic. All right, well, good stuff. So, Steve, I think we brainstorming some ideas of what to chat about. I think we'll need to do some follow up podcasts as well because I think you got a lot of other great things to share with the community. But today we wanted to focus in on standard work for the office. Everybody probably thought I was going to say just standard work for the factory or whatever, and that's great too. But today we're going to focus in on the office. So I guess tell me a little bit about the background and history of standard work for the office as you see it.

Okay. Yeah. This was something that that came about as a result of inquiries to my coordinator. Typically when we would have a need for training, I can remember going to them and say we need problem solving training. And so we would get a module in English within a month or so and it would be most of the materials we needed. And all we had to do was put together some handouts for the students and things like that. Well, one day I had approached my coordinator and said that I would really like to get some information on standard work for the office. And I say this with the utmost respect. Anyone who has worked with the Japanese will recognize this. And that is he kind of looked at me and tilted his head a little bit and sucked air in through his teeth and said, no, have and so I took that moment and decided that that was a challenge for me to do something about that, because how powerful I felt TPS was, I knew that it would work just as well in any environment. And so I started working on putting together some fundamental components. I have a background in engineering and a background in computer programming, so they really melded well. When I started looking at things, I put together some documents that would be the fundamental starting tools. Just like TPS has evolved. I mean, if you looked at TPS 20 years ago and you looked at it now, you would say, well, it's fundamentally the same, but there are some differences. And that's the way a lean journey should be. There should be differences. So I introduced some documents and got permission to do a couple pilot classes. And we were able to help folks make the connection between the production system and what they were doing. The response we got early on when we tried to do some TPS training for office individuals as well. We're not production production. You know, TPS is great for production, but we don't do production in the office. So there was some resistance there. And maybe a future podcast we can talk about TPS for maintenance. But we had a similar pushback for maintenance. Say every job I get called out on, it's different. I can't do it standard, you know. And so it's amazing. When we started looking at the difficulties we were experiencing in the office, and because we were the very first Toyota plant in the North America, we were charged with putting together documentation that would help subsequent plants start up. We had a huge array of 3 inch or 4 inch ring binders with all the information on how we did different things as we enter different phases of the assembly. And I was like I said employee 43. I can still remember that they didn't even finish the ground prep work completely before I got there. And so I got to see a lot of action before we actually were building vehicles. And looking back now, it's hard to believe that we had, oh goodness, we had almost 1500 employees and we still weren't producing vehicles. And we had 2,000 employees and we still weren't producing vehicles, but we were preparing and getting them trained and developing them and how important that was to the overall success of the organization. But we had about 100 coordinators that worked with us, engineers and support coaches in the office spaces. And it was really helpful to have that guidance there that every day if I had a question or a problem that I was not clear on. So they really helped you think the way Toyota wanted people to think, and it's not saying you can't be individualistic with it, but there are certain tenets, just like the precepts. Well, there's the Toyota production system principles, and so it guided us and it really gave us a very solid roadmap to be successful.

Got it, Got it. So let's talk a little bit about the mechanics of, like, what did you do, you know, in those early days? Okay, so this standard work for the office doesn't exist. Like, what was your plan? What did you try?

Well, it was an amazing opportunity to put TPS into the office space. And quite honestly, we did three pilot classes. And during the pilot classes, you always tune your materials. And so we did some tuning on our materials and everything. But the fundamental tools that I had put together and the information that I shared is case studies and exercises and things remained intact except for some minor changes, you know, because of different office spaces having different needs. So it surprised me. We did something that resembled a block diagram, but that was what we used to indicate the flow of a process in the office.

Okay.

And we would have all of the individual groups and departments that were impacting this process listed on the far left hand column. And then across the top we would put a time frame. And then we showed how the different groups interacted with that process. And today, many people do process mapping. So that's basically what we were doing. And I think anytime you make something big visual, it becomes very powerful because people would do a process map. And it doesn't have to be a very complicated one, just a simple one. And then have everyone that touches the process come in and look at it. Most of the time you're going to have half the people say, I can't believe we do that because it's visual now they can see it.

Sounds like you're kind of what we would call swim lanes today, right?

Yeah, that's what they call them, swim lanes. Exactly. And so we wanted to continue with developing a way in which we can present the sequence of work similar to the job instruction. Breakdown is when we do JI training.

Yeah.

So we developed a portrait style with two columns. And the left column was major steps, and the right hand column, much wider, included everything from the key points and reasons to maybe a screenshot of the icon that you need to double click on to do something on the computer or the server that you need to address that type of thing. We had a lot of success with that, to be honest with you. There's actually a company out there that now has standardized that format. And if you have an outline in Word, you can import that into their software and it puts it into that portrait style standard work automatically. I don't know the company's name or anything, but when I worked with Wells Fargo in their office space, they had that software. And a lot of times we would just do the outlines and it was kind of nice. And for the block diagram and the flowcharts, we started doing this before Visio was available. So we were doing it in Excel and I tried doing it in Word, but both were very awkward because you have to create objects and then if you change something, you got to change different things. I think Visio came on the scenes in the 90s, and we made a very quick change over to Visio for the block diagram tool. And it's a great tool to use for that. So that was one of the hurdles that we had, was making the work visual by doing the process map. And then after we decided the proper. The future state, almost. I know it's not a vsm, but process map, current process map and future state. Process map is what you're working with, just like you do with VSMs. And it would give you a good visual and then you can design your standard work, proof your standard work. And that is in itself another standard process. You really need to create it with all the subject matter experts and everybody that touches it. But it shouldn't be published until you give it to a stranger who has no clue and let them walk through it. Inevitably they're going to have a question for you where it was very clear to you, because you're the subject matter expert.

Yeah.

So then you can improve your standard work breakdown that way.

Yeah. Let me ask you this. Back up just a quick second. So we've talked a lot about some of the things that you've done, but why were you doing this? Like, what problem were you trying to solve by bringing standard work into the office? What was the issue?

Okay. Many of the listeners will appreciate this. And I was in hr and most people point the finger at HR when there's a problem. And so we were struggling with some of the processes within the HR space that were not meeting the expectations of the team members and sometimes leadership. And so the only way we were going to reduce cycle times was to do this analysis. Typically, what I encourage folks to do is pick a problem that. Not solving world hunger, but pick a problem that's real, but it's manageable and learn the process and then you can tackle the more complicated things after you learn the process.

Okay, so you were kind of classic productivity type improvements, it sounds like.

Yeah. Again, because they were office driven, it was very difficult for people to put any real hard facts to it. Like, they'll say, well, we don't have any facts about this. Well, then we would develop a sheet that would gather the data that we would need to show the facts. On average, it takes us two and a half weeks to process this expense report. It should only take us a week, you know, and so we would. We would help them with the tools to do some statistical information when applicable. Yeah, but in the office space, it's not always practical.

I got you. I got you. All right, so. Well, what were your. So you. I guess you kind of created some ideas of some things that you wanted to teach folks and. But talk about deploying this now across the office, like, what were your goals? What were your targets? What did you want to accomplish?

Well, I had some aggressive goals on my own, but we were asked to pilot it, get feedback from three pilot classes, and determination would be made whether or not it was accomplishing what we wanted it too. So we were trying to get a very broad cross section. So we selected three different areas in the plant because every office is going to have different types of problems. We spent a week in class. The lecture time was probably less than two and a half days, but the application was the rest of the time. Then on the last day, the individuals would do a report out to management. We were there as coaches, and I was the only one at that point. Actually, a funny antidote to this. Before we actually started doing some of our own course development, we. Whenever we were required to take a class, we would have to show completion in our data system that showed. I took that class. When I developed this class, I obviously never took the class.

Oh, yeah.

And years later, they came back to me and said, you never had standard work for the office.

That's awesome.

So it was a process that was missing. So all future classes, whoever developed the class were shown as participants in the first class.

I love it.

So it was. Yeah, it was interesting. So as we did the pilots, we came up with some hard data on what their struggles were in each area and how we approached the problems. And again, they did the presentation, which is very common in a Toyota environment and a lean environment in general, where the people that do the work every day are the ones that are making the presentation. And management was pleased with it. And we started getting folks from office areas wanting the class scheduled in their area because they heard about the success we were having with the pilot classes, and we hadn't even finished the pilot classes yet. It was really a pull from the plant and the office support areas and things to get this. And of course, each functional shop in the plant had an administrative component to it, and some were more in numbers than others. I mean, the stamping department only had about 100 employees, but you look at the assembly department, they had 2,000 employees. So it was relative. And of course, the administrative support for those areas would be different relative to the manpower. But in all cases, we had some great successes. And when they started to pull the training, that was what was exciting to me.

Hey, I do have one technical question. So you mentioned earlier you were using kind of a job instruction approach with some job instruction breakdown sheets and, and perhaps modifying them a little bit, you know, to make them work better for the office environment. So talk about the relationship of how you use those jibs with, you know, obviously I'm assuming either you use those for, for trading. Right. You know, typical job instruction approach. But then did you have some more detailed standard work instructions then for, for, for these same processes or, you know, what was the relationship between the jib and any other documentation?

Well, I work very closely with TWI Institute out of Liverpool, New York. So they, they, they always give me a hard time with my job breakdowns because I have a tendency to be a lot more wordy than they are.

Yeah. And well, you're from Toyota, you worked at Toyota, so you get a pass, man.

So what, what we did. And another side note, which was humorous and, and I don't think anyone would take offense to this, but we used to say that the, the job breakdowns that we did in the office space were manager proof. And so what we meant by that was anyone could pick that book up and look up through the index what they wanted to do and turn to those instructions. And if they did it before, all they had to do was read the major steps. But if they never did it in their life, if they just went through it step by step, they could accomplish that goal. What was powerful for many people on this is many of the office folks would have a binder on their desk with the business critical processes that they supported. So if they were on vacation, they didn't have to worry about getting a call from their boss, hey, I need this report, or, you know, we need to do this and you're not here. How do I do it? So there was motivation from the individuals to make sure this documentation was adequate to allow someone to do it if they just went through the document line by line.

Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. Hey, so another kind of TWI related question. You were in hr, so not that JR is only for hr, it's for anybody, but obviously job relations is a very human centered way of working or way of thinking. So did you experiment and use job relations at your time there at Toyota?

Yes, I did. Actually. I got certification to be a trainer in JI and Junior.

But not jm. Right. GM is like this. Toyota is kind of anti jm, Right.

Not jm. It's just like value stream maps. You don't get a lot of training on value stream maps.

Well, they didn't even call it value stream maps. Right. From what I understood, material and information flow or something like that. Right, yeah.

And most of the mapping that was done by the 80 to 90% of the people was actually the process mapping which was so critical.

Interesting.

Yeah. But the JR was a fun class and I really felt that it was a very powerful class and over time. Now, to be honest with you, I haven't checked back with them recently, but they discontinued the use of JR when I retired. It was not in use at that time and so I don't know if they use it now or not, but to me it's one of the best ways to help someone be effective as a. Oh yeah.

I mean, the way I put it, someone asked me about TWI and kind of if they're approaching it, where should they start? I would I say JR because I'm like, you can be, you can be the best JI practitioner there is in creating the best breakdowns, but when people want to punch you in the face when they see you, it doesn't really matter. Right. You know, you're not going to put the learner at ease because they hate your guts. Okay. So I don't know, I'm a big JR believer.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think we are going to see a resurgence of Junior.

I just think of the angst in our country, you know, I mean, there's just so much angst, you know, it's like if everyone just got the facts. How about that, you know? You know, quit making assumptions. You know, I think the world would be a better place. Maybe JR should be required for every.

You know, we might need to drive it to the school levels too.

It's not a joke, man. You know, I mean, it really is. So anyhow, I don't get off on a sidetrack here, so I just enjoy talking to former Toyota guys about, you know, we read and all about it, but it's good to hear exactly what was going on. So.

Yeah, yeah. And it was. I got my training from Kato San, who many Toyota alumni would recognize as name. It was a very, very difficult course for me to learn as a trainer. Not because of the content, but when we got our initial training, in order to be certified, it was choreographed. You had to stand up at this point, you had to write on the board in this color. At this time, you had to do this. And I'm a little bit more of a free flowing facilitator. So for me to do that lockstep. Oh, it was tough. It was really tough. But graduation day, Kato Sansei, now you are a trainer. Make it fit your culture. And I was like, I'm all right now.

Yeah, that's awesome. So how are those initial pilots received?

I'll tell you, I was very surprised at how quickly we started getting calls from other areas of the plant wanting to find out when they could get an office standard work class scheduled. And we wouldn't schedule more than two a month because of manpower and other requirements. It's like we had our top three to five projects that we reported on regularly, but you had a dozen more that you were working on, so nothing was ever complete. You're always wearing many hats, but the individuals who took the classes, they really found the power of it and they actually started to coach some of the folks in their area before they had some classes scheduled where the other folks could get into it, which I liked, because when they came to a standard work class for the office, they were even coming in at a faster pace as we progressed with the subsequent classes.

Yeah, so I got a few other just kind of Toyota related questions, if you don't mind. Just things that always kind of rattling around in my brain and I never have the answers to. So what would you say are some misconceptions of the way Toyota goes about continuous improvement that we like to call traditional lean thinkers who didn't work at Toyota that we get wrong? Can you think of anything?

I think one of the things that many people see is that standard work is restrictive, but when you're in the Toyota environment, it's not restrictive. It's actually freeing because if you have something you want to change, as long as you follow the proper chain of command and the process, then you can make that change in the standard work. When we were doing the visual manual, this is a great example of it. Toyota developed this training system over a period of three years before they started to launch it. They launched first in North America and Georgetown, Kentucky was the regional training center for North America, and England was the regional training center for Europe. And then in Taiwan, there was a regional training center for the Pacific Rim. And when they first deployed the training manual to us in North America, they gave it to us. And obviously we spent a great deal of time going over it and virtually line by line, because we had a need to make sure that it was right before we released it. And six months after we started up uk, started up United Kingdom. So we found out at that moment in time that the people in the US would not accept the King's English and UK folks would not accept the American English. So that was a radical change. And there's many organizations that says, tough, you got it. This is what you got. You got to work with it. But Toyota said, and again, we had to go through the approval process to get it done, but they went with three regional manuals so that we could get the North American manual a little bit different than England and Taiwan to fit our culture better. Sometimes the wording was confusing if you were using the wording from one of the other regions. And so Toyota was very quick to embrace that change. And so I think that just speaks volumes for the Toyota thinking. And that continuous improvement is real at Toyota.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Very good, very good. All right, Steve, well, boy, we should, we should have you back on and talk about some other topics. I've really enjoyed this, but to wrap things up, why don't you tell folks how they can best connect with you?

Okay, well, I am on LinkedIn and I'll be more than happy to accept invites and communicate with folks. I've set up meetings, phone calls, and even face to face over coffee a couple times when the vicinity was right. Yeah. But I'm on LinkedIn and you can find me under Steven S, T, E, P, H, E, N. And my last name is A, N, S, U, I, N, I. And that's a. That's an unusual name.

And Sweeney. Right, I learned how to say that. Yeah.

And Sweeney. And my email address is Steve. S, T, E, V, E, C. The number four, the letter E, the letter D. U.S. got it.

And we'll put this all in the show notes as well. This is going to be episode 252, so folks can go to GembaPodcast.com look for episode 252 and we're going to link to everything that Steve and I have talked about. So, yes, Steve, thanks again for coming on and Sharing a little insight into the standard work at. In the office at Toyota was great.

Yeah. Thank you for having me and I look forward to future podcasts.

Yeah. So are you going to get out to any conferences or anything this year?

Oh, absolutely. AME conference for sure. Just came back from San Diego not too long ago.

Yeah, fantastic.

That was great. I saw you out there. Chance to connect too well, but I saw you out there.

Okay, well next year.

Yeah. I'm also facilitating the Indianapolis consortia for ame.

Oh, good, good.

Because I have an office in Anderson, Indiana, which is about 35 miles north of Indianapolis.

Yeah, boy, I just put on. I did caught it in the classroom at workshop with Katie Anderson out at San Francisco consortium out there. 200 folks from Kaiser Permanente and some other companies came out there and yeah, that was. Boy, that was sure fun.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The lean training system that we have, we do JI skill point training for trainers.

Yeah.

And also do Toyota Kata training for continuous improvement coaches. So TK coaching.

Beautiful.

And it's a, it's a safe environment to make changes. Yeah, we've had some instances where we would do them in companies. Actually I had one where Jeff Leiker was leading it and Mike Rother came in on Thursday of that week. It was a three day class and we had a couple the groups only able to run two or three experiments. So it was really a struggle for them because things they wanted to change, they couldn't. And so in our training environment, you can you get eight or nine iterations of the coaching model and that's what the repetition is powerful in doing. And then when you go back to your area, you can be more effective with that.

Got it, Got it. Very good. All right, well, thanks again, Steve. Keep up the great work and look to forward. Forward to catching up with you again soon.

Great. Thank you. And you have a good evening.

You too. Bye. Bye.

Bye.

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