GA 371 | Adopting a Learning-Based Approach to Lean with Scott Keenan

Don't be afraid to go out there and try stuff and don't be afraid to go out there and do things. And if it doesn't work, that's cool. You're gonna learn something. So that's all this is about. So really trying to focus in on the learning aspect of this versus on trying to go out and solve every problem with one magic bullet. Because that's not reality. That's just not how this works.

Today I'm excited to welcome Scott Keenan to the show. Scott works for a company called Alan Wire. They're based out of Missouri and they make Wire as the name impl. But as you're going to hear, Scott and Alan Wire, they've been on this continuous improvement journey for around seven years and they started sort of the traditional Kaizen event approach. And then as they've gone, they've, they've, they've matured and they continue to learn. And most recently they really have dove into the whole scientific thinking, Toyota Kata approach. And as you'll hear, they're a Gemba Academy customer. So we do talk a little bit about Gemba Academy more than normal in this episode. So I apologize for that. It wasn't meant to be a commercial or anything like that. But we, we really talk about how they are starting to really change the way they think and really reframing their whole approach based on learning and trying to learn faster and trying to identify, you know, those next steps and what they think is going to happen and really just iterating and learning and they're really having a lot of success. Now Scott, as you'll hear, is one of the senior leaders of the company. And it's pretty refreshing to hear that Scott and this entire leadership team is leading the way with all of these new initiatives. So they are literally all going through the training first and practicing it and learning it before they deploy it. So pretty pretty powerful stuff. Now show notes for everything Scott and I talk about can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 371. Also, we talk a lot about our Toyota content, Toyota Kata content that we have in on the Gemba Academy website, which is what Scott and his team is using for, for a lot of their training. And the course in particular that he references is called Toyot Kata Practice makes Progress. This is a, it's pretty big course, but it's meant to be sort of an experiential workshop course where you watch some videos and then you play this game and the game is these, these dominoes.

You.

You set up dominoes, and you gotta set up a certain amount of dominoes in a certain amount of time and knock them over. So it's really fun. And you're experimenting as. And practicing the improvement kata and the coaching kata as you work your way through the course. So. Yeah. So if you want to check that out, go to gembacademy.com youm'll find that in the school of lean and the Toyota Kata section. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Scott, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm good, Ron. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for coming on. It's always fun to. I know we've been working together a little bit over the last few months, so it's fun to kind of interact this way on the podcast. So, yeah, thanks for carving out some time.

No, absolutely. I appreciate you having me. And, yeah, it's been fun working together and continuing down our Lean Kata journey.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, Scott, I know you've listened to the show, and as you know, we do like to begin with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one?

Yeah, I do, actually. And my quote is, there is no such thing as a good idea. And that is from Mark Randolph, co founder of Netflix. And I picked up on that recently. And it just made so much sense in terms of what we've been going through. And I mean, that basically kind of is kata. And he elaborates on that some and says spending a lot of time trying to validate an idea, doing research, doing planning, is a waste of time. What you need to do is immediately collide your ideas with reality hundreds, if not thousands of times. And that just made so much sense to me of like, oh, yeah, that. Like, he doesn't call it kata and practicing that kind of routine, but that's what that is. That is getting out there in the real world and just trying new things. Experimentation. That is scientific thinking. Yeah.

Experiment your way forward. Right?

Yeah, exactly. It's the Thomas Edison concept that we talk about.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, very good. All right, well, hey, Scott, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background and, you know, how you got first involved in all this continuous improvement stuff. And then. And then maybe we'll just kind of jump right in and just tell us a little bit about what you guys are up to at your company.

Yeah, absolutely. So I work for a company called Alan Wire Company. It was started by my dad and grandfather back in 1974. So coming up on 47 years now and we are a copper and aluminum wiring cable manufacturing company. So it started off in a garage back in the early 70s. And flash forward today, and here we are. We operate in two manufacturing facilities in Sikeston, Missouri. Sykeston is two hours south of St. Louis. We're kind of halfway between St. Louis and Memphis. And started out of a garage and then grew into the current facilities that we occupy. And we run 24. 5 from a production standpoint. So we start up Sunday night and shut down Friday night with continuous production all the way through. So I've been here for a little over 11 years now. Officially, kind of always grew up in the business being owned by my father and grandfather, so always kind of knew about it and was around it some. But officially came on board here 11 years ago. And I started off working in the sales aspect of the business, regional sales manager. And then over the last year or so have been migrating more towards the operation side and supply chain and working with our production team.

Nice. So talk a little bit about your journey with continuous improvement then.

So we started a continuous improvement program about seven years ago, and it's a pretty what we would I guess describe as a straightforward CI program. Continuous improvement program. We have KPIs for production targets, things like that, to hit for our production associates. And if they hit certain targets, whether it be safety goals, scrap rates, whatever the case may be, they get a bonus added to their payouts. And the better they do towards their KPIs, the more they earn there. So we keep track of it, we update associates on how we're doing, and we've been doing that for about seven years now. Mm.

So when you guys first started seven years ago, I mean, was it lean, Six Sigma, just figure it out, or what was your approach in those early days?

It was a little bit of. A little bit of lean and six, seven. You know, we've done some Kaizen events over the years, but we never really had like a big strong push of, hey, we're going to make this journey towards a lean, lean company and a lean organization. And this is our culture of lean that we're building here. We've had this program in place, and we've done some things along the way to kind of help move the ball forward. And really now we're starting to put some good structure and framework around it and kind of take it to the next level, if you will, in terms of trying to just really define what we are and take it throughout the organization. So early on it was some Kaizen events, you Know, assess some production lines and look for ways to increase throughput and, you know, make the operation safer. Do some 5s ing, assessing the workplace, and how can we better organize, declutter some things and, you know, go through the red tagging process. So we've done in the lean toolkit, lean toolbox, if you will. We've done a few different. Utilize a few different tools in our facility.

Yeah, I want to. I'm very curious. I love hearing stories of, you know, kind of family. Family businesses and whatnot. I'm curious, if you think back as a young boy, do you have, like, what's your favorite memories of your dad and your granddad or whatever and you working, or is there anything that you remember as a young boy?

Yeah, absolutely. There was a few things that stick out, and I'll share one in particular. When I was how old I was, I was probably 12, maybe 13 or so. And it was a weekend as a Sunday. And I remember we were sitting around watching football like a normal Sunday in the fall. And all of a sudden there was a power outage in Memphis, in the Memphis area. For whatever reason, something happened in Memphis and had a big power blackout. And one of the products we make is bare copper that goes into the utility industry. So when there's natural disaster storms or anything like that, we supply wiring cable that goes to get power back up and running. And it was a Sunday afternoon, and all of a sudden my dad got a phone call of, hey, there was this power outage in Memphis and blackouts, and we had customers calling with emergency needs. And so we always try and respond to emergencies and pitch in as best we can and try and be flexible around that. And so on a Sunday midday, all of a sudden there was, hey, let's go down to the plant for a little bit. And a couple of our associates, who were generous enough to come in on call, so to speak, kind of like doctors in that regard, came in and ran a couple lines for a little bit and got some product going and moved down to Memphis to help restore power. And I was about, like I said, 12 or 13 when that happened. And it just kind of struck me as it stood out for a variety of reasons. One wasn't your typical Sunday, but two also just. He didn't really make a big deal about it. And even the guys that came in on Sunday, it just kind of was viewed as, yeah, that's just kind of what you do. Yeah. You know, when emergency happens, you dive in and pick up the pieces as best you can to help Those in need.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. Fantastic. So back, let's go back to your just your like maybe present day continuous improvement program there. What, what are, what are some challenges that you've, that you guys have had to overcome?

Well, so the program's been going on for, you know, like I said, about seven years now. So over that timeframe, you know, you want to try and keep it fresh. You don't want the program to go stale and everybody kind of lose interest in it. So making the goals and the targets achievable for everybody, but also out there for something that you have to reach and really drive information to everybody and update people want to know are we winning, are we losing on a daily basis or daily, weekly basis and just keep them updated and keeping people engaged. So really trying to drive information out there. So we're about to about 350 associates total, company wide, with the bulk of that probably 290, 300, that being manufacturing. And so trying to drive information to everybody but two different plants, different shifts, just keeping everybody engaged has been a big challenge and keeping every bought into the program over the course of the years and we've been able to do an alright job of that. But everything's always changing, everything's always evolving as new associates and team members come on board, getting them to buy into the program. You've got some folks that have been around for a long time that may be a little bit more resistant to change. So really just listening to the workforce out there and keeping everybody up to date on what we're trying to accomplish and how we want to accomplish it, most importantly.

So if somebody asked you, you know, you're one of the leaders of the company, Scott, so somebody asked you why are you doing continuous improvement? What would you say? Or one of your associates asked why are we doing this?

Yeah, and that's a great question and something that people certainly do ask. And for me I've always thought of it as whether it's lean 5s or anything like that, or we've recently started doing kata. To me it's all about making it a better workplace. And all these things are designed to make jobs easier and it make people's work life a better place to work and provide a better place to work. And by doing that and making this a better company, we're going to perform better and outperformance competition and that ultimately leads to job security. You know, one of the things that we have here internally we discuss is we kind of call it our circle of influence. If you will. And then we describe it as take, you know, if we take care of our customers and, or take care of our customers, we can take care of our associates that we work with and that will allow us to take care of our community here. Locally. Sykeston is a town of about 17,000 people. It's a pretty rural community. And so if we can take care of our stakeholders in that fashion, it's going to be a better place for everybody. And lean kata, Kaizen, Six Sigma, those are all tools that we can use to help make this a better place for everybody and make our community a better place as well.

So speaking of kata, you guys have recently started to practice and learn all about it. How's that gone?

It's been an interesting journey. So we started doing this a few months back in probably December time frame, and this was kind of our one way of our next evolution of our continuous improvement program. We've done some lean thinking and some lean principles previously. So we started doing this in December time frame, and it's gone pretty well. It's a new thing, but it's not really a new thing for us in that, you know, one of the big pushbacks or hesitancy from, from people that are new to it or getting into it would be, you know, it's the new flavor of the month and, you know, you know, we can fake our way through this for a little while and then in a month from now, management, ownership will forget about it and move on and, you know, we'll do something else in six months time. And for us, you know, that was obviously a big concern going in as it is, whether if it's a continuation, continuous improvement program you would implement or anything like that. You always want to be trying to be guarded against that. But for us, it really wasn't something that was brand new. We had been doing these things already and doing them for quite a while. We just didn't really call it kata or call it, you know, I didn't have kata boards or anything like that. Yeah, and a couple examples of that in that we, you know, we have several production lines where we're making wiring, cable, and we were making different products. And when you're setting up to make one product versus another, you've got changeovers and different colors and you've got color changes. And so in the last couple years, you know, we've been looking at certain production lines, timing some of our color changes, and working with the operators on saying, okay, your amount of time to do a changeover on this Product is X. Now we need to get to, you know, X minus 2 minutes and then let's get to X minus 5 minutes and X minus 10 minutes and so on and so forth. So we had already been. Been doing a lot of this stuff. We just didn't really recognize it. Yeah, you know that we didn't officially call it kata. So when you look at it from that perspective of, you know, hey guys, we've already been doing this. This isn't really something that's brand new. We're just going to formalize it and now we have some good resources and we've got our boards to use and our PDCA cycles that we can work through in our sheets to help document everything. It really just kind of helps formalize what we've been doing it and making it better.

So have you guys gone the traditional route with a big kata storyboard up on the wall somewhere and, and the learner and the coach are standing there kind of going through it or are you doing it different way?

We have. So we actually, we started off trying to do it electronics that we had. We actually had a little bit issues. I'm getting some larger boards printed out. And then we quickly did an experiment and you know, thought, okay, we'll try and do this on the, on Excel. And then quickly realized that nope, you need to do it on the board. And the level of accountability is so much better that way as, as Mark and the guys say in the videos. And that's worked out really well. And we have the coaching cards printed out and we have people reading the question cards verbatim and just going through everything. So yeah, what we've done from our process standpoint is we started with a group of upper level management and people that are responsible for production at both plants. Our warehouse, distribution center, quality cfo, upper level management, go through and you know, watch a lot of the Kato videos and you know, practice, do the dominoes experiment and things like that. And so we felt like we needed to get our group before we took this out to everybody else in the organization. We needed to have a good understanding on how this works and what it is and the terminology. You know, if we just before we took it out to everybody else, if we just walked out to the floor one day and just, you know, threw up paddle boards and started talking about current conditions and target conditions and obstac. We weren't sure how that if people really would, they'd have questions, we wouldn't have answers.

Yeah.

So we wanted to educate the top and then work Our way down. So we did a core group of about. About 10 of us in upper management first over the few weeks, about a month's worth, I guess, educating ourselves and going through doing some experimenting and learning new trial and error and experimentation. And now we've taken that down to another group of. Of leaders in the organization, and they are wrapping up. Actually, myself and a couple others are leading those classes. And so we're bringing others into the kata tent, if you will. And then our next step from there is to get down into all of our leads supervisors out on the plant floor, the folks that are actually doing the heavy lifting day in, day out and working with them. And they've already seen some exposure to this. We've got some boards and the plants and the different plants up and working on, you know, towards our challenges. And here's our current condition. And. And even just a little stuff now of what's been a big shift and a big help on this is just, you know, the language and the culture of this. Yeah. Of, you know, talking differently and, you know, people asking the questions just in course of normal conversation, of, you know, okay, well, what's our current condition? You know, eight months ago, no, I can guarantee you nobody here was using the term current condition. Yeah. But now we've. Now we've got people bought in and talking and speaking the kata language and, you know, it's contagious. And everybody else kind of notices that of, you know, gosh, he's talking about, you know, target conditions. You know, what are those? And so now we're kind of trying to. We're filtering out through the rest of the organization. And that's been kind of. That's been the fun part, you know, just kind of seeing where this goes and taking the experiments, you know, to the next step and to the next level and getting more involved, and you just learn so much that way. And it's been exciting to see the response from people that are new to all this.

You mentioned earlier that, you know, just with. And it's. With anything right now, it's kata that you're kind of. You're introducing. But, you know, there might be some pushback, you know, from an organic. From a team member. Again, it could be on any topic. You know, change is difficult for anyone. I'm curious on how do you go about getting folks to buy into a new concept? You know, whether it's kata or just. It could be anything, right?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, you have to be. You have to be persistent about it, but not too heavy. Handed, you know, they have to understand, you know, why we're doing this and kind of the start with why. Yes, if you will, and explain our why and our, you know, of why we're introducing this to the organization and if you can do that and break that down, of this is in our best interest as an organization for our longevity and for our position in the marketplace. And this is going to make this a better workplace. If you can do that. That's really disarming. I shouldn't necessarily say disarm, but it just makes it so much relatable and understandable of oh, okay. And we certainly had some, I don't necessarily want to say pushback, but always just people are resistant to it. Of just, you know, I don't know about this or I'm not sure. I don't necessarily understand it. And it's certainly a process. You know, you're not going to change everybody's mind overnight. But you know, be patient with people and they'll come around. But really, I think for what we saw, the best way to work with people and kind of get people to buy in is just explain, you know, why we're doing it and the long term implications that we think it can have and also be persistent with it too. You can't fake it. I mean, one thing people can do and are certainly good at is spotting a phony or someone that's baking it. It has to be genuine to be genuinely committed to this. And it has to be something that you will do long term and become part of what you do. I can't remember if it was in either one of the videos or somewhere talking about culture. And culture is what you do. It's not necessarily what you say. You can put a list of values on a board on a wall in your place of business, but that's not what your culture is. Your culture is what you do.

Yeah.

So if you start going, you know, putting up kata boards and start talking in these terms and walking, you know, going through this process, it just becomes part of your culture. And then once you've done that, it really just becomes infectious and contagious and spreads around there. So, you know, that's probably been our best way to try and combat some of that. And honestly too, there was less resistance than I think we would have thought because again, if you position it from a standpoint of, hey, this is all centered around making this a better place to work and a better work environment, which is going to give you a better life environment just in general, that's a pretty easy sell if you position it that way. Everybody was pretty bought into it. And human beings by nature, people want to win, want to succeed and want to do well and they want to know that they're doing well. And hey, you know, all this work that I'm doing here, you know, does it matter? Does it count for something in the big picture? And you know, if you tell them that and let them know that what they do has meaning and has impact, they're going to respond to that. So that's really kind of the best way that we've been able to bring people in. And like I said, most people have been pretty bought in right from the get go. You know, when we sent a group through to do the puzzle exercise.

Oh yeah. I was going to ask like the Caught in the classroom, you know. Yes, that facilitation was super fun to do and I could tell the you mentioned like the competitive vibe in the company and I got it. I mean, they were, they were getting after it in a good way, in a good natured way. But boy, you could tell there was some fire in their bellies there. But how did that, how did that help? I mean, it sounds self serving to ask that question because we were helping you with that. But I'm curious though, like caught in the classroom, like, was that helpful or just sort of middle ground or what do you think?

Yeah, it was helpful and you know, we will do that ourselves. You know, I think moving forward, we feel like our group that we've done that, has been through a little bit more of the training and potentially do that on our own, moving, moving forward, hopefully. Yep. But it was very, very helpful. And what we learned from that is that again, we had more people that were interested in that than what we would have imagined. So that group was 15, I believe we had three teams of five. And then we went around after that and asked everybody if, hey, would you, you know, this was kind of your first exposure to the kata process and the kata concept. What do you think? You know, what were your thoughts on it? And you know, just had honest, you know, open conversations with them and hey, there's no wrong answer here. If you didn't like it or if you thought it was a waste of time, please by all means tell us. We do not want to waste your time if you think it's a waste of time. And sort of surprisingly, 15 out of 15 were really liked it and said, no, hey, if there's opportunity to do more of this, I would like to. And so that's the group that we've been working through and going through the domino exercise and then going through the next layers of it and building our own boards and working through that process more in depth. But, yeah, to our surprise, everybody that went through that and, you know, was very receptive to it and thought, no, this is great. I like it. We had a few people that were. That weren't quite sure about it at first and thought, okay, you know, I think I understand it, but I'm not really sure how it applies to me. And then through a little bit more discussion about how, you know, because as we work through the puzzle exercise and the caught in the classroom exercise and then the dominoes to go further, you know, we try and emphasize that, you know, don't make this about the dominoes. We're gonna make it about the dominoes. Don't make. You know, it's also about how you translate out into the real world.

Right.

And, you know, focus on that aspect of it. And once we could kind of explain how it applies to the real world and how the folks that went through the puzzle exercise of like, oh, no, no, this is how you can apply it to your challenges throughout your day, and they get it, and they kind of have that light bulb moment of like, oh, okay, like, I understand now. Then it was like, oh, well, yeah, well, this is awesome. Like, yeah, I'd love to learn more about that. So we were very surprised that, yeah, everybody that went through that was very receptive and wanted to keep doing more of it.

Yeah. I mean, I know this sounds like a big Gemba Academy commercial here, and it's really not meant to be. And the check will be in the mail, Scott. But I am. Because I don't know the answer to this. I truly don't. I'm curious. You mentioned the dominoes. And so folks listening, so they understand. We have a workshop, you know, that we filmed of a caught a workshop that Mark Rosenthal, who's a really strong scientific thinking guru guy, and he ran this workshop. And the experiential side of the workshop is this. This game with dominoes. You got to set up a bunch of dominoes and, you know, they all got to topple over and, you know, a certain amount of time and that sort of thing. So did you, you know, it's a big course, man. It's a heavy course. Like, did you play videos and then do the dominoes or did you skip some videos? How did you do it? I mean, I'm genuinely curious because we've not talked about this.

Yeah. So we did a combination of kind of all the above there. So we watched videos and we went through. We almost kind of like build a curriculum. I actually, when I was in college, I wasn't really quite sure what I wanted to do, and I ended up taking like six hours of education classes. At one point, I wanted to be a teacher and high school coach. So get to dust off my six hours of education credit and go back to those days. And yeah, just we went through, having gone through and watched probably all, probably 90% of the videos in the kata section there selected some and kind of built modules of, okay, if we want to do two hours this day, what videos do we want to watch? And then we need to make sure we allocate time to dissect it. And people give feedback and what do they think? What were their takeaways? You know, think back to when we went through and watched it, what were our takeaways? And look back over our notes. Our group, what we did initially was our first group of eight that went through it. We would watch videos, take a few minutes, discuss what we learned, big takeaways from the videos, do some screen grabs on some of the graphics, you know, the improvement corridor, things of that nature, the other graphics on there, and then, okay, watch another one and then move forward that way we didn't watch all of them, but Probably, I'd say 90% with the second group that we were. That we're doing. Myself and a couple others are leading that classroom, as we call it. And so we're organizing sessions built around. We're going to watch a couple videos, discuss it and recap some things. And then as we move forward through the video progress, then we get into the domino exercise, but also taking time to make sure that we're not making it about the dominoes and make sure that we're making it about the real world in real life and really trying to focus on spending time discussing with, you know, our managers and leaders that are in there that, okay, so how can this apply to, you know, to your job and what you do here? And really spend some time digging into that. Yeah. And, you know, focusing in on, you know, so focusing in on just the pattern in the process of, you know, PDCA and going to the board and using the boards. And we say it several times in each session of this is not about the dominoes. This is about learning and really focusing on that. And I think the learning concept was kind of the biggest thing to focus on and emphasize with our team in there is that it's scientific thinking, but it's also. It's experimenting and grasping the concept of this is not pass, fail. You know, we talk about education some and going through the classroom, but this is not like we have a semester here, and then at the end of the semester, you either pass or you fail. This is ongoing. That by definition, continuous improvement is continuous, and, you know, it's ongoing and it's forever. And so really getting people to focus in on, you know, like I mentioned the Thomas Edison concept of, you know, I haven't failed 10,000 times, just found 10,000 ways now to make a light bulb. Yeah. It's the same thing. And if you can get people to wrap their head around that concept and really grasp, like, hey, don't be afraid to go out there and try stuff, and don't be afraid to go out there and do things, and if it doesn't work, that's cool. You're going to learn something. So that's all. And that's all this is about.

Yeah.

So really trying to focus in on the learning aspect of this versus on trying to go out and solve every problem with, you know, one magic bullet. Because that's not reality. That's just not how this works.

Yeah. I mean, the faster you're able to learn, the more the problems are going to go away, right?

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, so it's been a fun journey with everybody and really getting everybody to buy in or just seeing everybody kind of come alive and, you know, get the. We have two groups that are doing the domino exercise right now, and one of them actually solved it, thankfully. So they practice. Yeah.

Oh, man. Did you video it?

I think they got. No, you know, we did not video it. Shame on us. Come on, now. Oh, yeah, I know. Well, if it's. If it's actually repeatable, they should be able to do it again. Yeah.

Set it up, man. Say Ron wants to see it. You got to see it to believe it.

No, that's great. That's not an easy thing to crack, man.

Goodness.

I know. Yeah, they. But just seeing everybody work together and, you know, grasp that concept of just trying new things and trying different, different techniques and just seeing what. What works. Yeah. It's been fun.

Yeah. So good, Scott. Great job. Well, keep up the great work. So maybe as we wrap things up, Scott, I'm wondering if you. Maybe you just have some final words of wisdom, and then I definitely want you to tell folks how they can connect with you over social media, website, email, whatever it is.

Yeah, absolutely. As far as words of wisdom for us as sort of beginners, if you will, or kind of getting new into kata or lean concepts and becoming a lean organization. It's been really interesting. Journey along the way so far and really be patient, but stay committed to it. It's change and what you're talking about doing or what people may want to do from an organizational standpoint of introduce all these new concepts and new practices. I mean, that's heavy stuff. It's a very meaty, heavy thing to do and it's not going to happen overnight. So just be patient with the process, but you also have to be persistent and stay committed to it as well. But I think that's one thing that we saw was definitely that results won't happen right away. But that's part of it. That's part of the point. But you've got to stay committed to it. And if you stay committed and practice, really get into the, the practice aspect of it, it can't be something that you do once a week or once every couple weeks. You have to stay committed to it and make it part of your daily weekly process for sure. Definitely one of our big takeaways has been to be patient, but stay committed to it and have some fun with it too. It should be something that if it's ultimately going to make your workplace better, it should be fun and should be something that people can get excited by. So while there may be some frustrations or, you know, times where you kind of get stuck in quicksand, it feels like on trying to either explain a concept or, you know, work through an experiment and gosh, we've got this hard condition out there. We can't quite, you know, crack it or reach it. Just trust what you're doing and know that over the long haul, little by little, you're going to see some success and those successes will stack on top of each other and you'll get there eventually. It may just take a little bit, but trust the process, I guess, is probably the best way to put it.

Yeah, there you go. Trust the process. I love it. Very good. And what's the best way for folks to connect with you? Scott?

So, yeah, I don't do a ton of social. Social media. I am on.

Good for you.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, I don't know. I just don't really do much in the social media world. So, yeah, the best way to connect with me would be on LinkedIn. My email is Skenan S K E E N A N@AlanWire.com A L A N W I R E so feel free to shoot me an email if you want to discuss anything Lean or gimbal related and connect me on LinkedIn as well.

Beautiful. All right, well, hey, keep up the great work, Scott. You know, we, I couple recent episodes that have recorded you were talking about, in fact the last one that, that was just released, Rick Foreman was on and he's a longtime Lean thinker and just talking about how important it is for leadership to be bought in. And Alan Wire sure is lucky to have folks like you who bought in and really trying to spread this throughout the organizations because so many times it's the other way around that people doing the frontline work sometimes want to get better, but in spite of their leadership. But that's just not the case with you guys. So really, really congratulations on that. Keep up, keep up that great work because you know, that's what, that's what's all about leadership being bought in and helping other people get better. So great job.

No, I appreciate it, Ron. No, thank you so much. And they're very thankful to have a great team here that's been bought into this, you know, previously as well, and they've set a good foundation for it. I'm just excited and thrilled that I can help build upon it.

Very good. All right, Scott, well, thanks again for taking time to come on and keep up the great work and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.

All right, thanks Ron. Take care.

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