GA 429 | Driving Excellence and Creating Value with Michael Lamach

The trust and respect of people is so important. And if you want to make change, you have to have engaged people, which fundamentally mean they trust in you and they trust in what the vision is. And there's respect for people, you know, through that.

Today I'm excited to welcome Mike Lamaque to the show. Now Mike is going to be a keynote presenter at the upcoming AME International Conference which is going going to be in Dallas, Texas, October 17th through the 20th. And we are excited to say that Gemba Academy will be there once again as an exhibitor and want everybody listening to this to go sign up for the conference if that's something that you, that you think would add value to you. And I can tell you it would because it's. Well, I think it's the biggest lean conference in the world. And the networking is incredible. If you want to use discount code GEMBA15, that'll save you 15% on the, on the registration. We don't make any money or anything like that. We just want to pass it on to our listeners. So yeah, so just go to ame.org and use Gemba15 for a 15% discount. Now, Mike, as you'll hear, is a retired executive chair and CEO at Trane Technologies. Now he's also throughout his career worked at Ingersoll, Rand and a few other companies. But really interesting story Mike has and he opens up a little bit on his background and how he got into even coffee, which wasn't even something that he was planning to do. So really interesting story. During the interview we really just dove into some of the key levers, if you will, that Mike and his team were pulling throughout their tenure there at Trane, in particular operational and growth excellence strategies and how they use things like value stream management, horizontal value streams to do cycle time compression and GOTA Gemba and all this kind of good stuff. So we really, we talk about some more, you know, business oriented things, but then we really do get tactical. So I think there's something for everyone in this interview. Show notes, which are going to include links to everything that we talk about, including links to the AME conference, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 4, 29 again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 429. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Mike, welcome to the show. How are you?

Hey, Ryan, Great to be with you.

All right, well, I'm excited, as I was telling you before we hit the record button, that you're the first of Our AME keynote presenters that we're having on. So I really appreciate you coming on, and I know you're super busy and taking the time to chat with us.

So the bar is low. I love it first, right?

Yeah, man. Yeah. I tell you, we were experimenting with you, man. We'll see what we learn, and then, you know, by the end, we'll have it dialed in, Right? No, it's all good. So we do like to get things going, Mike, with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have a favorite one?

You know, it's funny because I. I'm not much of a quote guy, but there are things that have stuck with me over the years. But one of my favorite relates to lean extras, too. But the first one is you don't have to be bad to get better. I thought that was really cool because I had been involved in businesses that were really poorly performing and businesses that were really performing at a high level. But the reality is the conversation around getting better is the same. So that. That. That was certainly one and then one. My. My mom and my grandma used to say a lot, which is, say what you mean. Mean what you say, but don't say it mean. And I'm not sure who. I'm not sure who got that. But, you know, there's just a way of, you know, being clear and doing it in a way where it's constructive.

Yeah.

And trying to influence by just being upfront and straight, but you don't have to say anything in a mean way. It's respectful, you know, be saved in a respectful way. Yeah. That was a sort of a lesson for my mom.

I love it.

If I could throw a third one at you, too. There's one that I heard the other day, which I loved, which is you manage things and you lead people. I thought that was really, you know, quite a profound impact. You know, sort of all the things that you manage daily basis, but really, people are what you lead. You don't manage people. You lead people.

Oh, I like that. You manage things, lead people. That's a good one. That's a good one. Well, hey, Mike, tell us a little bit about your background, you know, before train and all the rest of it. I know I've. As I told you, I was searching you up a little bit, and I listened to a little bit of an interview that you did with a young man at Michigan State and some of your early story, and I'm wondering, you share as much or as little as you'd like, but just tell us about your background. And then how you kind of got to where you were there at Trane and what you're up to these days.

Yeah, so it's interesting. I grew up in Detroit, a child of the 60s. My dad passed away when I was just a little kid. I was 6 years old and my mom raised a 4, 6 and 8 year old. I have two sisters on both sides of me. And it was really amazing to, you know, grow up in a family. We were all sort of immigrants coming from Poland. Our, you know, our grandparents were. And no real education. My mom was just an incredible person still. I mean, she's still an incredible person. She'd seven but work ethic that wouldn't stop great to people. She always was working two or three jobs. And I think my first W2 was when I was 11 or 12. I was a pretty big kid, so I could pull it off. And she really taught us not only to work hard, but how to say please and thank you. And boy, what a long way that all goes. I wasn't really planning on going to college. Only 19 of my class of 240 went to college, at least out of high school, which is just amazing, you know, to back in that time. But through some, you know, coaches and people that took an interest in me, they wanted me to apply to Michigan State. So I did. And I think it was the only school I applied to. Thank goodness I got in and I wanted to be a doctor. And I had worked really through probably three years of school, I could only afford four. So I had to get in and out of there. And then realized after I did some volunteer work with children that were incredibly sick, terminally ill, I couldn't be a doctor. So, you know, what do you do with all this math and science? And I became an engineer, you know, and sort of the history on that from there is met my wife, We've been married 38 years at Michigan State and went to go work for a company, Johnson Controls. At that time it was really an H Vac company, not an automotive company and spent almost 20 years there, the last six. Those were so interesting because I had moved over to the automotive business there and it was really the first North American jet provider to Toyota. Built the first Tier 1 supply plant into Toyota. In my. My first job was leading the sort of our Asian P and L. So I had, you know, Toyota, Honda, I had all the Chinese OEMs, the Korean OEMs and later also had the European OEMs along with that. But the introduction really to manufacturing in the lane, you know, was really through my experience living in Japan, working in Japan and working closely in that jet environment, primarily with Toyota. And, you know, you learn to be humble. Well, first of all, you have to be humble, but then you learn to be even more humble because just the wealth of what people know and, you know, coming in without really any manufacturing experience into running an automotive p and l was a shocker. I couldn't. I couldn't really believe that the first large manufacturing job that I had inside a company was running 90 jet plants. The first job that I stepped into, I didn't come through the traditional, you know, running materials in a plant and running a plant, so on and so forth. I came in really over the top of 90 plants. And you gotta learn from other people. You just gotta be a sponge. I always believe that the people closest to the work know what's going on and know how to do it best. Anyways, that was relatively easy for me, but I would say for the first year or so, I did nothing but listen and learn to people that really knew what they were doing and they were gracious with their time, you know, spent with me to really take. Take the time to explain it all to me. And I really became a disciple, an evangelist, you know, when I came over to ingersoll rand in 2004, because we didn't have an operating system and, you know, the culture was, you know, really not one of operational excellence. And so it was something that we had to build over time. And that experience they had, you know, working in the automotive space, you know, with our customers, was extraordinarily helpful to me.

Yeah. Yeah. And so how then. And then, obviously you were the CEO at Trane. How long were you with. With Trane? Because, I mean, it's all part of the same family, I guess. Right?

So, yeah. So I. So I came to ingersoll around in 2004 and I ran a business which. Which I later spun off when I was CEO, called Allegiant. And then we acquired Trane in 2008. And my job there was to integrate Trane into Ingersoll Rand and run the commercial business of Trane. And we caught the downdraft of the Great Recession. You know, we did that deal in June of 2008. You know, of course, everything went to hell pretty quick after that, and the company was in a pretty desperate time. We had a big bridge loan that we couldn't refinance. Revenues, like every company really plummeted, didn't have a lot of cash, and we needed to invest quite A bit of cash. And so about six or eight months into that role, there was the opportunity that the CEO and the board presented to become the COO of the company. And the mission was really simple. It was to generate a lot of productivity, turn it into cash and pay down debt. And the crises really helped, I think, get past the acrimony of a big acquisition. People all knew that we had a mission and something that had to be done quite urgently. I did that for about a year and then a year later became the CEO. And through that operating experience, as the coo, realized that we had to put in this operating system across the whole company. We had done that in the business that I was running at Ingersoll Ran. But at the time it was run in a fairly siloed way. You know, the segments really didn't really communicate much with each other. There wasn't any sort of shared center resource. There wasn't a language to even discuss how we were. There wasn't a cadence for sort of operating plans and operating rhythm inside the company, which made it really hard to move people across the company, because it was like you were going to work for a different company every time you move jobs inside Ingersoll rand and in 2009, 2010, we really began to put in the operating system into the company. First two or three years were very difficult. You have everything from the ardent believers, people that can be developed and trained, to the people that just don't want to do it, don't get it, and are cynical or worse. And I saw all of that, really, in the first couple of years. We probably had to turn over something like 50 to 60% of the top 300 people in the company in the first two or three years, which was. I didn't set out to do that. I didn't plan to do that. But it was just something that happened over a couple of years, three years, let's say. And as the company then began to form around its operating system, great things started to happen. And really lean was a huge part of that. I wasn't looking to bring the Toyota system per se in. Gason Rand and I wasn't learning. I wasn't trying to teach our employees how to speak Japanese, which is oftentimes it's form over function, which you see a lot. I was really interested in the function. So we made it our own. We made it as simple as we could for people. And it changed the culture of the company. It was one of the things that changed the culture of the company in a pretty dramatic Way.

I know long term operational and growth excellence, operational from more operations and growth from a sales perspective is a passion of yours. So I'm wondering if you could maybe just hone in on both of those, perhaps individually on maybe just a few tactical things that you, on your approach and how you drove operational and growth excellence.

Yeah, maybe even stepping back just in terms of leading people or thinking about how value gets created. And there are a couple of principles that have really always been with me and the feeling is that a leader goes into an organization and that leader wants to make change for the better. Whether it's transformational change or incremental change, there's always an element to change. And what I found it was particularly working in Japan, is that the trust and respect of people is so important. And if you want to make change, you have to have engaged people, which fundamentally mean they trust in you and they trust in what the vision is and there's respect for people through that. So in my mind, it was always around people first. It was around engagement, the ability to attract and retain and develop people. And that that would drive better customer outcomes measured in higher market share, more growth, and then that would lead to better investor outcomes in a share price, cash flow, so on and so forth.

Can I ask just a quick touch on engagement? I'm wondering before we get into the growth and whatnot, because I agree, like engaging people obviously is the name of the game here. Without people, we are nothing. How did you go about, you know, you mentioned that there was some turnover and obviously not everybody was on board. Not everybody's, you know, believing in this whole concept of continuous improvement. Like how do you, how do you approach engagement with someone who is currently disengaged?

Yeah, I mean, look, I think that every good leader, if they're going to be guilty of one thing, it's taking too long to make tough personnel decisions when it's not going to work. And I think that, you know, I certainly was guilty of that, but I would be guilty every time. Time. I mean, the belief is do everything you can, you know, to bring people along, to have them, you know, learn, develop, be part of what you're trying to get done. But when it becomes disruptive, either people choose to opt out or you've got to make that decision. So that's why it took really three years before I would say fundamentally we had all the, you know, the right people on the bus. And you know, by that I mean, you know, starting with an individual or two. And by the time we had, you know, 15 or 20 leaders that could, you know, actually, you know, implement an operating system, you know, with respect and engagement with people. It probably took us a few years to get that through the top 2, 300 of the organization. And, you know, here it was sort of general managers, plant managers, service managers, you know, all of them had to have that value stream mentality that was really all about the customer. And, you know, in the simplest way for me, you know, Lean is always about the customer and serving the customer, and it's about leaders who are servants. It's an inverted leadership model. And if people grow up the wrong way, you know, in a hierarchical system and all they wanted to have was a title and, you know, sort of a little bit of a power trip, you know, it can become difficult to turn it back on its head and have people authentically lead as a servant, you know, in the model. Yeah, and that's part of building trust, you know, and respect for people. But this flywheel of, you know, people to customers, to shareholders is something, you know, that once you get that flywheel turning, it's dramatic and it was profound. We retained 96% of our top talent every year for 12 years. And we think our competitors might have been somewhere in the mid-80s. You think about just the ability to talk to people that know the system and you're almost in shorthand with them, being able to communicate speak where there's an accountability and there's a sense of accountability to each other, that you've got somebody's back, you're not going to let somebody down. Such a difficult thing to. It's a simple thing to say. It's a difficult thing to create. It's hard to replicate competitively, too. And we always felt that the culture through people was an advantage that we had. It showed up in engagement scores where we would use a third party and we would blindly survey the whole population and we'd have 90 plus percent of our people respond. It was confidential and it was done in a blind way where it was not attributable to any one individual. And they would tell us what we needed to know and we would have to work on those things. We would choose the things to work on during the year. But our engagement became sort of top decile every year, and that was directly correlated to retention and eventually the ability to attract people into the company when we had openings. But interesting too, Ron, because we always had the sense too, that we just didn't want to attract people into the company. We wanted to create a culture of development and promotion so we went from initially About 2/3, 3/4 of the people were coming into the company to the last, say, five, six years that I was a CEO, I would say 80% of what we were doing, maybe more than that, were people coming up through the organization. And that made us feel more fulfilled about, you know, the ability to develop and, you know, change people's lives fundamentally by giving them opportunities. We even did that at the team leader level, training thousands of first time hourly team members around frontline supervision and some of those people advancing on to higher levels of operational and plant management. And people would say, hey, you've changed my life. You've made me a better mother, father, husband, wife through what we did from an overall training perspective, helping people. So a little maybe off track from where you're going there, but this notion of the swap was important. But then as we sort of played the business where it lied, you know, to use golf parlance, we had to get things working at an operational level that if we took an order from a customer, we delivered it, you know, on time when they wanted it, with great quality. I'd say that took two or three years. The growth we got in the early years was just doing things on time, compressing the cycle time to do things, delivering it with high quality. And we saw growth through operational excellence. It wasn't until maybe three years into that journey where we began to apply that same concept to a broader concept called product growth teams. And we took lean really into the commercial organization and the project management, sales management. That was one of the most remarkable transitions and just sort of a step change function in terms of market share and growth that we had seen. And we began to put people into one set of goals which was really fundamentally around market share and margin expansion. So the, you know, the engineering manager wasn't working on a certain set of priorities that was different than the operations manager, which was different than the product manager or the salesforce might be working on. We took these people, put them onto the same exact goals and objectives. I remember plant manager saying, well, how can I be responsible for market share as an example? But we did that and we created these value streams that we would look for in the next 12 to 18 months. The one or maybe two biggest ideas we had to improve the customer experience. It could be, it could be a pure operational play, it could have been a new product introduction, it could have been something that we all agreed to. But we focused the organization in these product growth teams and it was growth of two to three times our competitors for four or five years going through that process and people had fun, you know, doing that.

How did you introduce the whole concept of lean to say, a vice president of sales? You know, like, how does that look?

Yeah, you can relate everything to. We all have a customer, you know, inside the company or outside the company. And it didn't matter if it was somebody in accounts payable or if it was the vice president sales, it was, we all agree there's a customer. And believe me, if the vice president of sales wasn't passionate about customers, he'd be the wrong or she the wrong vice president of sales. Right. That wouldn't be something that's going to last. So, you know, when you speak to the passion around customer, customer experience, growing market share, you know, what are they frustrated with? They're frustrated with chasing down orders, chasing down quality, chasing down or maybe something special needed, needed to be done or built that was going to be funnel the operations team. There were opportunities to really center around the customer and by the way, help that vice president sales understand from a sales perspective what they could do to make the operations team also more productive as well. But I never had anybody push back when it was around the customer. It wasn't around taking costs out. We never looked at it that way. You know, we looked at it. It's really growing the business. We never did a Kaizen event and measure the number of people that we took out of the organization. Never did that. We always said that we were going to grow into the productivity that we would create, and we did. These product growth teams created so much growth that we never had to really do any sort of downsizing in the organization through any of that. And people again began to trust that they knew that that wasn't going to be a remotus operandi for doing a Kaizen event.

You talked a little bit, you touched on cycle time compression. I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about that, specifically on how you used it as a competitive weapon.

Yeah. And really what we tried to communicate with folks is number one, there was a competitive opportunity to grow because cycle times in the industry were so long. But secondly, when we thought about cutting cycle times in half, we would say half the bad, twice the good, cut the cycle by half, create twice the good. What we always found was you had to completely reinvent what you thought the value stream was was and how you would orient the workflow through the value stream, you know, find where things weren't working in terms of handoffs that were failing or, you know, production components that weren't really, you know, able to work at the tack required at the cycles that we were looking to achieve. And so we started to look at always cutting cycle times in half through these events that we would do. And it was an innovative, creative opportunity for people to do that. What you always found was you were taking waste out and you were creating a better customer experience through that. And productivity just fell out of that. Right. So the notion was rather than focusing on productivity, it was focusing on what mattered to the customer. In this case, it was the time between sort of when I placed an order to sort of, you know, when I'm actually getting beneficial use of what it was that I bought. It's working the way that I intended it to work. When we looked at that entire end to end value stream, that's where the opportunity really began to just fall out and productivity began to fall out. And again, this is where we reinvested that back into growth. And so our head of operations, the senior vice president of operations, the time was really the first hire that I made coming in to help implement an operating system in a company, implement lean in the company. We used to just absolutely always lead with operational excellence is a growth strategy. This is what we're trying to do. And the productivity was a byproduct and cycle time was a good way for people to get their heads around a pain point. You have to define what all these things mean meant, right? We just, we just didn't talk about cycle time unless people thought, you know, they all knew what we meant. We would use it in terms of, look, how long does it take, you know, before you, you configure and, or book an order, you know, to the time the customer wants? Is the customer happy with that time? Are they happy with the system or the product they receive when they receive it? You know, the answer is no. We can get a whole lot better. Then when we got better, it was like, well, listen, there's a segment of the market that would really have an opportunity for us to grow because their demand horizons are much shorter than our competitors can fulfill. And if a competitor is doing something that takes six weeks and we're down to two weeks and you're picking up all that incremental demand that was unplanned, which happens, right? It's, you know, customers have chaotic, you know, lives themselves. They may have forgot they need something, something broke, they need to get, you know, replacement immediately. We were able to fulfill that in a way our competitors couldn't fulfill that. And I'll just give you A really quick commercial example of this when we started the product growth teams and people really weren't being intellectually honest with the data and we were absolutely making sure that we were collecting data and training people to be intellectually fact based about the data. We were competing in a segment of the business. It was around H vac systems that are sort of packaged and unitary and they would go on the top of the retail shopping center or a fast food chain. And our people wanted to invent a new product which would be a higher efficiency version of what we were doing. And we got into the data and we found is that when a McDonald's restaurant in August in North Carolina fails, what they want is a quote quickly and they want the product installed back on the roof in two days or less had nothing to do with putting a more energy efficient system. The systems were efficient enough. We weren't going to get paid to be more efficient. We were going to pay to make McDonald's cool in August.

Right.

So we set up a whole lean capability inside the offices of being able to track a customer phone call to a quote within 15 minutes and our tac time to do that and our success rate at achieving TAC on the quote. But rather than putting $50 million into new product development, we put $50 million of inventory out into the field in a place that we can get it to a customer within a day. What we found was 98% of the customers that called us that we could quote in 15 minutes and fulfill within two days would, would order the product. Yes, but we did. And our shares grew dramatically. Now eventually we came back around and filled the product line with the higher efficiency product. But that wasn't what the product growth team needed for market share and margin expansion. They needed quick quote field availability, the right inventory in the field as opposed to a new shiny product. And that was we followed the facts, follow the data and use the value stream through that process to create come up with the right answer.

Wow, really good. I'm wondering, Mike, if, you know, I'm always curious to hear folks, because you're retired now, correct?

Yeah, end of the year. Yeah, last year.

So as you look back on your, your, your career and I'm sure you're, you're still dabbling and as busy as ever, but when you look back on your professional career, you know, is there anything that you're particularly proud of?

Well, like any picture in my mind of anything I'm proud of, it would be like a large group of people, you know, every experience and I'LL share a few in a minute with you would be an enormous group of people overcoming, you know, either an enormous challenge or taking advantage of a significant opportunity. It's always, frankly, what you miss when you do retire is you don't miss necessarily the stress. You don't miss, you know, some of the airplane time and flights and international travel. What you miss is the people and you miss building businesses through people. And those are the best experiences. So, you know, I can tell you the example of, you know, we acquired Trane 2008. We have this enormous downdraft with the recession. The feeling of integrating the company together, coming together, figuring out how to survive that and put the operating system in place. There was a very large group of people there that I think look back on that and say that's something they'll always remember as being a highlight of our careers. Right. As a situation that was just thought to have been maybe a bankruptcy event for the company, you know, perhaps, you know, the company was going to come out weaker if it survived. Those would have been the odds on favorites from anybody that would have been outside looking and betting on it. That was remarkable, you know, remarkable time for us. When we acquired Trane as well, there was a huge conversion of refrigerants and, you know, Trane's revenue might have been $8 billion at the time we acquired it. And about 2 or 3 billion of their portfolio was not going to be sellable in the market because the refrigerants had changed and trained through lack of cash. And the fact that it was going through the sale process had not really begun that process. And this was one that, when we found out about it in an 18 month period, something that might have taken three, four, five years to do, was another one where people really came together. It was those experiences, probably more of coming through adversity, I think, are the experiences that we remember and cherish the most. So, you know, the opportunity is one thing, but when you're behind the eight ball, you've got adversity and you, you power your way through that as a team and you build something better. On the other side of that are always going to be the things that I look back on and remember and we'll miss.

Yeah, yeah. So there's someone listening right now, Mike, who is a leader of a company and they're just getting started or they're perhaps are entertaining the idea of really diving into operational excellence. What advice do you have for that person?

Well, first of all, they're on the right path because fundamentally it's the core of anything and everything. You know, I can't imagine, you know, any industrial or manufacturing or service company that wouldn't have that strong operational foundation. You know, knowing that you can put a dollar of sales at the top of the funnel and knowing what's going to come out of the bottom of that is the lifeblood of any business. To be able to finance the business, grow the business, you know, satisfy customers. Operational excellence is the foundational piece to get right. And when you come down to that, sort of what does it take to get right? Think about this flywheel effect of people to customer outcomes, to shareholder or investor outcomes. That's sort of the process. It starts with people, it starts with trust and respect. It's the best way to retain and grow a committed workforce that really is there for the customer. And to do that, sometimes you have to go slow on the culture. After I became the CEO and right after became a CEO, we had an activist come into our company. One because of the acquisition was poorly timed and because it created this situation where the share price in the company just went so low and, and they're attracting activists that came into the company now. That turned out to be a wonderful experience for the activists, for the company, for shareholders, for everybody. Everybody won through that. But one of the things about that as the activists came in, was more of a sense of doing things incredibly quick and sometimes for the quarter or the month, and almost short sighted. And for me it was a real balancing act or threading a needle to be able to do all the right long term things around the culture, yet deliver results in a reasonable period of time. And I'm lucky as a leader, frankly to survive that, because I know a lot of colleagues that don't in that dynamic. And some of this is certainly luck and timing, but so much of this is the people around you and the people around me weren't going to allow me and them and the company to fail. And so there was this remarkable accountability, this remarkable sense of I owe it to the people I work with that we're going to be successful through this process. And so, you know, there are times where we absolutely didn't do the short term thing, got punished on the quarterly earnings for that. But no, it was absolutely the right thing to do. And it became absolutely clear that was the right thing to do two or three years later. When we saw the benefits of not cutting that program or taking a shortcut to something that we were doing with the project that we were looking at, it really became important. And then that credibility built where there was a sense that the culture was there, the operational excellence platform was there. And the sense of balance between long and short term is always going to be something to manage, but it wasn't something on everybody's mind every day. I think that most people in the company always knew we were going to take the long term approach. I'll give you one really important example of that. We had just split the company, Trane Technologies and ingersoll rand around March 4th or 5th of 2020, right when Covid was starting to come into the country and we were kind of paying attention to what was going on, we saw some things begin to spike up in our plants. I want to say March 23rd. And what's important about this is the biggest month that we have of any month of the year is March in our business. And so we shut down every single one of our plants and operations. A lot of our competitors weren't doing that and a lot of them were shutting them down for the next year. What we did over that sort of week or two that we were down is we reconfigured every single operation of the company for space and distance. We made sure all the PPE was in place. We changed the way that people would clock in and rotate so they wouldn't be necessarily stacked up and being too close from a proximity perspective to each other. As we were trying to socially distance and all these things. We configured every job and every operator workstation and every desk in the company and every office in the company that we could come back to work as an essential provider, giving people as much space as we could. After that, we never shut down an entire plant ever again. Throughout Covid and our competitors. You know, we didn't do this almost once a week. Once a month, we're shutting down and you know, having a difficult time starting. So we did the right thing to keep our people safe, to do the right long operational move. But we absolutely got crushed and punished in that first week, the first quarter as a public company, as a new train technology under a new TT stock symbol first quarter. Here we are really with results that were absolutely, you know, way below anybody's expectations. Yeah, because we shut our factories down.

Gotta go slow some or backwards sometimes before you go forward. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's really always do the right long term thing. And I. Well, first of all, we never would have not done that but had somebody, you know, not treated people with respect, not, not thought about the safety, not stood down for that couple week period of time, to get it all right. It would have completely undermined anything we tried to do around the values of the company, around purpose of the company, around the respect for people. And it would have undone all these years of culture that were built around this differentiated respect for people and the way we operate. So I'm proud of that and I'm proud that my successor, I know, would make decisions always in the best interest of the people that we work with and then in the best interest of our customers.

Well, I can clearly tell you, I mean, we have the great fortune and opportunity to work with some trained folks present day. In fact, I spoke to some earlier this week and they're getting after it, man, let me tell you, they are going hard and strong with everything that you laid out. So your legacy is definitely continues, man, let me tell you.

So thank you.

Yeah. Well, hey Mike, if folks wanted to connect with you, is there, is there an opportunity to social media or anything like that?

Yeah, it's funny, I've never, I've never ever been social media other than email. So people can always connect with me at Mike. MLA M A C H.com mikemlammach.com okay, just email.

Got it.

It. That's the best way.

I figured you would like be like on Snapchat and different things like that, you know. Tick tock. Yeah, there you go. Now that would be viral if you went and made a tick tock, you know. Oh, so funny. All right, well, hey, I really appreciate you coming on. I look forward to meeting you in person here at, at the, at the conference, the AME conference here. It's going to be here before we know it. And you. Yeah, I'm excited to hear your keynote there as well.

Thanks Ryan. All the best. Appreciate it. It's fun.

All right, take care.

Thank you.

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