GA 438 | The Importance of Understanding People with Brent Weichers

The interesting thing with these metrics is it will drive us to start looking more deeply at why are they leaving. Okay, our attrition rate is 8%. Our goal is to get it down to 5% this year. Besides locking the door and not letting people leave, we need to dive into why they're leaving. They came in the door, so it's not pay, it's something else.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Brent Weickers back to the show. Now, I've known Brent for many, many years, and he's one of smartest lean thinkers that I've ever known. Also awesome Six Sigma guy, and we've talked about a variety of pretty super technical things over the years, but today we sort of pivoted a little bit in our conversation and we talked about how Brent at his new company, he explains who they are and what they do, how they're really investing in trying to understand people better and even coming up with metrics on how to improve the lives of their employees. You know, obviously a lot of people are struggling with things like turnover and finding good folks, keeping good folks. And so they're. They're also not immune from these issues. And so they've really tried to understand, you know, why is it that people would. Would want to leave and then how do we counter that? And so they got some really interesting strategies for how they're going about that. And so that's the majority of the. The episode towards the end. Brent's going to be doing a workshop there at AME in Octo here in Dallas. So if you're not signed up for that conference yet, you should be. We're going to be there. It's October 17th through the 20th, so just go to ame.org gemba15 will save you 15%. We'll put that in the show notes. But anyhow, Brent's going to be talking about the topic of heat maps and how that can be used in a Lean and Six Sigma environment to improve. He goes through a pretty cool case study of how they use heat maps in a previous employer to reduce the amount of transportation in motion that some material handlers were making in a warehouse. So really, really interesting stuff. So, again, Brent's a fantastic guy, really humble, but so, so smart. So I think you're going to like this one. Show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 438. Again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 438. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Brent, welcome back to the show. How are you, my man?

I doing just great, thank you.

All right, man. Well, hey, let's see. Where are you living at these days? You've moved, haven't you?

I moved. I recently moved in April. I moved from Seattle area to just north of Phoenix, Arizona.

Okay. Seattle, Lorraine to Phoenix to the heat.

Yes. And it's, let's see, what is it? It's 11:42am and it's 97 degrees.

Okay. Yeah. Well, we've had a burner here in Texas, too, this year. It's been, it's been hot. Yeah. It's a dry heat, though, right, as they say.

That's what they say. I go to check the mail and it catches on fire when I take it out.

Exactly. Yeah. I'm like, yes, stick your head in your oven at home. That's dry heat, too.

That's what the swimming pool's for, Right?

Exactly.

All right.

Well, hey, man, I'm excited to have you back on the, on the show. You know the drill. We like to get things rolling with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one?

Sure, absolutely. Like I said, my wife and I were just recently exploring the, you know, the local coffee shops and the restaurants and stuff in the, in the area because I'm kind of in the outskirts up in the, up in the hills, basically. Okay. And we found a neat little neighborhood shop and we met, met a gentleman that was a fighter pilot during the Korean War and just started chatting with him. And at the end of the conversation, we were all saying goodbye and have a nice day, and he looked at my wife and, and he said, you know what? He goes, don't take life too seriously because you're not going to get out of it alive anyways. And that was his. The just what he said to us as we were parting ways. And I just, it's just. That's been like a month or two and it's just been stuck in my head. And, you know, and he's right.

So, like, let's, like, it's actually a pretty straightforward statement, but it's also pretty, pretty profound and pretty deep if you think about it. Like, what do you. What are you taking away from it? Why even. Why have you been thinking about it for so long?

I guess for, for me, it's like there is a time to be serious, you know, work and, you know, family matters and whatnot. But then there's also a time to kind of let things go and, you know, you can worry and you can, you Know, you know, have. Just have all kinds of thoughts about is this going to work out? Is that going to work out? And sometimes you just have to learn to let it go and let things just do what they're gonna do. Yeah. And so I just kind of hit me. I just thought it was interesting that here's a guy in his 90s who still flies jet aircraft.

Yeah.

And, you know, and that was. That was his parting piece of wisdom that he. That he shared. So. But I just thought it was. It was kind of interesting, and it's just kind of stuck with me. Yeah.

I saw somebody posted this little meme or whatever the other day and something the effect of, if you're ever getting advice from an old, old, old man peeling an apple with his pocket knife and eating it off the knife, you probably should listen. It reminds me of that older gentleman. He's probably. Probably done that before, you know?

You know, and it's like that generation. A guy that's seemed relatively healthy for his age, and he has to be to be able to maintain a pilot's license at that age, especially for a jet aircraft. Yeah. And I thought, you know, if that was important to him and that was something that he lived by, I thought, I'm gonna listen to this guy.

Yeah.

I'm gonna take his advice.

I love it. I love it. All right, well, hey, Brent, you've been on the show before, but in case folks have haven't listened to any of those episodes, tell us a little bit about your. About yourself, your. And.

Yeah.

What you're up to these days.

Sure. I started out way back when. Boy, when was that? Mid-80s, late-80s. I started out in lean manufacturing. Started my journey with Toyota. Whereas I was sent for training. I didn't work officially, worked for Toyota, but I worked for Viking, Electrolux. Worked with them for a number of years. Worked for Danaher for about 13 years, which, for those that aren't familiar at that time was Fluke Instruments, Craftsman Tools, which they've also. They've sold those divisions off now. They're no longer part of Danaher.

But were you one of the original Danaher? I'm sorry. It's an inside joke.

Yeah, we have. Yeah. I worked with Said Said folks who actually lives just north of me now, which is kind of funny. And. But I work with some of those very original people, and a guy that was my manager at the time when I started with Danaher came from the original location. So. And I worked with. With him and many other of those gentlemen for a number of Years. Yeah. So. Which was very, very fortunate. Yeah. And. And since then, in the last few years, I focused mostly on the medical getting back into the medical industry, not in the hospital setting, but in medical manufacturing. So I spent a couple years with a ventilator manufacturer right in the middle of COVID And now I'm working for a company called ICU Medical, which is. We manufacture pumps, all those machines that you see hanging in the hospital room next to you. So basically, anything that pokes or prods or pumps something into you, including hypodermic needles and syringes and those sorts of things, we manufacture all of that all across the world.

Nice, Nice. So I know that you guys have been working on some pretty cool stuff as we were sort of brainstorming what to talk about today.

Yes.

And you brought up something that really intrigued me, because it's not something that, you know, I mean, I would consider you, like, one of the top, top lean thinkers in the world kind of thing and implement any kind of metric and system and all the rest of it, but you guys are kind of taking a slightly different approach with some metrics and some measurements. What's that all about?

Yeah. What we were looking at how it originally started the company, when I got hired, I hired onto Smith's Medical. We were purchased very shortly after, a couple months after, by ICU Medical. And it was one of those things where you thought, well, we should have merged a long time ago because everything we make eventually plugs into each other before we plug it into a patient.

Okay.

So it just kind of made sense. So we started looking at, like everyone else is, why can't we keep people? Why can't we hire people? You know, we get people in the door, 30 days later, they're back out the door because somebody else offered them, you know, 30 cents more an hour. Yeah. And we started looking at all of that and analyzing that, and we started looking at, well, let's look at the companies even within our own circle or within ourselves, who has the lowest attrition rates. So we started finding that our. One of our premier locations, which happens to be in Costa rica, has a 1.5% turnover rate, and everyone else was in the double digits. Wow. So we thought, well, okay, let's go find out why. Yeah. And we started looking into it, and what they were doing while they were pursuing a Shingo prize, what they were developing and have developed over the years is different ways to measure how well they're taking care of their. Their people, how well they take care of their employees. And not just around the financial aspect of it that, you know, like, we all have to. We have to remain competitive as far as pay and benefits. But it was things. Instead of just saying, you know, hey, we take good care of our people, we. They asked the question, how? Prove it and prove it with metrics. So they started doing all sorts of things for their employees that in. Especially in the United States, would be considered way above and beyond what any other company out there was doing.

Like what?

And so the one example, what I asked, I said. Well, I said the metric where it says we promote the health and safety of our employees. And I thought, well, there's the standard metrics. You know, somebody got a cut finger, somebody's got a wrist sprain. But the rest of the metrics were they were doing things like young employees. Like, a young man graduates school, he gets a job there, and he gets a credit card. That's like the most dangerous, you know, thing out there as a young person with a. All of a sudden, they got, you know, $20,000 credit. So they were teaching these young employees how to manage their credit. So they formed a classroom, and it's mandatory. And they go into. With a classroom, and they learn how to manage a bank account, how to manage credit cards. When it comes time to get a mortgage, they can go back to the finance department and say, teach me about mortgages, you know, teach me about a car loan. You know, how does that work? And they set them down and train them and teach them about how to manage their finances. Wow. You know, they started having issues with COVID where people were saying, hey, you know, we're locked down. We can't go anywhere. People are getting a little cabin fever and family arguments and family issues. So they brought a counselor in, and they had a counselor available, I think, like, three days a week. And they would be able to talk to the employees and kind of work with them and say instead of missing time from work, they were able to come to work, but help them walk through how to manage some of these, you know, family issues that were coming up. So it was just lots of things like that when they. They started looking at opportunities and saying, well, you know, hey, our employees are missing time, or they're calling in late. Well, why is that? Doctor appointments. Well, can we bring. Can we have a nurse practitioner on staff to handle the minor stuff, you know, the sprains and the. And the cut fingers and those things, so they don't miss any time. So it was just slowly developed into that to the point where the Employees felt like, it's like, wow, they really care about me. I'm not even going to look for another job regardless of pay because I'm, you know, I feel like I'm really part of the family or the company.

So, like, in Costa Rica, like, they were implementing all these amazing perks, for lack of a better word. But you mentioned metrics. Like, so are they. Are they measuring whether or not these things are effective? Or did they start by implementing countermeasures and then figuring out, you know.

Yeah, they started looking at it like, okay, we've got people taking or time loss. You know, people are leaving half a day here, half a day there. Why? Well, they were going to a doctor appointment. They were going to their therapist. They were childcare issues. So they have a. They have child care in the building. And then they started seeing all of those metrics improve because all of the reasons employees are having to leave work early or to do things was being assisted by, you know, these programs.

Right.

And sometimes it was completely free because it was done voluntarily by other employees. And in some cases, they actually, you know, cost money. But the time saving of not having, you know, the loss of production. Right. You know, wouldn't. Would cover those costs.

Right, right. So then how are you. How did you guys at your location then implement some of those things that you learned? Like, how did you roll it out? Or are you in the process of still rolling it out, or.

Yeah, we're in the process of rolling that out now. And what was interesting is so many of the locations were very siloed. So some of the locations had. Have somebody like me who oversees multiple sites, and I work with the people who are on site and we coordinate and share information with each other. And some of the sites were very siloed, and some of them didn't realize just how good they were because they weren't talking to anyone else. So as we started visiting those sites and we all got to Costa Rica and we were, I mean, to me, I was even shocked at how good they were. And they were all timid and saying, well, here's how we do this. We hope it's good enough. And we're, you know, we're sitting there like, why, why don't you have a Shingo price already? You guys are that good. Yeah. So we just kind of decided, it's like, well, we need to take the. The best of all of the locations. And we had representation from all the locations. We had to. We had to spend a week in Costa Rica. You know, poor guys Such torture. Yeah. Poor guys. And you know, drinking, drinking coffee, Costa Rican coffee for a week. I'm surprised I slept at all. Yeah. And. But we took the best of what everybody was doing and kind of put a marketing piece together to say, okay everybody, this is us going forward. No more old company, no more new company. Everything's a clean slate and we're going to do it this way. And there's three pillars. And one pillar is strategic, one pillar is the day to day operations, and one pillar is just the people. How do we take care of them? And so we developed those metrics of, for instance, the pillar of how do we take care of people? And develop the individual metrics for that and then also developed a, a metric or an assessment. So we will go to the sites and say, well, based on this new metric or these new metrics of how we take care of things, here's where you're at. You're either are you able to 10.

Are you able to share like what any of them are in and if so like, or if you, even if you're not curious, like how is it like a 5s audit you're going in?

You know, it's real similar when you think about it. It's very similar to that. But think of it just in a, in a larger scale. So when we say one of the metrics will be do it right, you know, is it done right the first time? You know, first pass yield kind of a thing. So if you're not doing anything at all to focus on it, you're a zero. If you're out, you're a one to a three. If you have some, some basic programs in place to say, hey, I'm recording every time something goes wrong and some engineers are over here looking at it from time to time and then it just continues to graduate to where if you're at a 10, it means, you know, you're at a problem happens, there's a line, stop. The people on the line are performing a kata to, you know, fix the problem. They're doing a, you know, plan, do check, act. So it's more, the teams are autonomously fixing problems. And so there's just kind of a grading system who grades all of these metrics and that would be graded by this, our continuous improvement team. So I would show up at a facility with say the local CI and with the leadership and we have it broken down to where I can give you, I can give them a score. But it's not based so much on what I think it's based on objective evidence.

Got it.

So it's all. If you think about it, it's a lot like almost. Right, Exactly.

Yeah.

It's like I can sit there and argue with the ISO auditor, which is not a good idea, let me tell you.

You've got experience there. Brett, we got another story.

Yeah. Never argue with an I say and tell them that, you know, you' this is how it is not a good idea. But to be able to say, show me the objective evidence. Yeah. It's like, okay, I've been doing. We do this right the first time thing. Okay. What's the frequency? How long have you been doing it? What's the intensity? Meaning is it done by upper level engineers or is it done by the people on the shop floor? Yeah. So that combination of that evidence says yes, you're, your score is a seven.

Okay.

And. And then we total up the whole score and they end up with, you know, this aggregate score. But we're, we're looking at wanting to roll this out. It's been rolled out to the vice presidents and now they have to look at what resources are needed at each of the sites to be able to roll all of this out. But the exciting piece of it is, is it's not all that. Everything is pretty much the same as far as, you know. Right. First time. And we do strategic planning and, you know, we do all of these things. But very few sites are measuring how well they're focusing on people. You know, every time somebody leaves instead of going, oh, well, Bob left. We just need to get another. Bob is they really analyze. Why did they go to another company if they did? Why, you know, what was it about our company that made them feel the need to go? You know, how often are we promoting from within? And if we're not promoting from within because we don't have somebody trained at that level, why not?

Right.

You know, we should have a pool of people ready for. If that supervisor job becomes available. I've got a pool of people trained and ready to go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what do you think?

And measured.

So like a year from now, what would winning look like with this, with this new initiative?

I think winning to me would look like all of the sites are fully embracing whatever their low scores are and actively, like I said, we're going to score them and say out of the three pillars and the 27 different things that we're measuring you on, your lowest scores were these two. And you're focused on those two. And they're constantly requesting help to. How do I get my, I want to be from a three to a seven this year on that in that area. Can I get somebody that is a seven in that area to come help us?

Yeah.

And that's what I'm hoping to see is more that cross pollination back and forth across the different sites.

Yeah.

And so far management's been very supportive of anytime somebody in Salt Lake says, you know, the, the site in Poland is requesting that I go there and help them with setup of one piece flow and it's like, okay, break out your English to Polish book and get a ticket and off you go.

Yeah.

You know.

Yeah, yeah. I got to imagine then from like a, like your company leadership, your CEO, coo, that type of thing, if you could positively impact just employee turnover, that in and of itself that's an incredible benefit to the company. Because thinking about losing an employee, this is devastating, you know, as far as all the, you know, talents that they had, you know, are gone. All the time that you invested in them, you know, is gone. And you've got to start over. Right.

And so the interesting thing with these metrics is it drives, it will drive us to, to start looking more deeply at why are they leaving. Yeah, it's like the first when, when it's okay, our attrition rate is 8%. Our goal is to get it down to 5% this year.

Right.

Besides locking the door and not letting people leave, you know, we need to dive into why they're leaving. Yeah. It's not pay because we got them in the door.

Right.

They came in the door. So it's not pay, it's something else. Right. You know, what is it? Right.

Well, yeah, you know, it always comes back to that intrinsic motivation. Right. If they don't, they're not intrinsically motivated to want to be there. They're going to look for an excuse if, and perhaps it will be an extrinsic carrot out there. Like you said, 30 cents more. Okay. I'm just looking for a reason to go because I don't like being here.

Right, exactly. And how do you find that out? How, you know, how do you make somebody feel comfortable enough to say, well, here's why I'm leaving. I've been here X number of years and I had one review with my manager and I don't see any jobs come. Every time a job for a management position comes open, no one even spoke to me about it. You know, and those are some of the things that I'm, I heard from ex employees.

Right.

And I said, yeah, after A number of years. I saw my boss get replaced twice, and nobody, you know, my name never popped up.

Right.

So I left.

Right.

And, you know, so it's like. Yeah. So that. That system that we're looking at would be saying, okay, manager of the engineers, who in your group are you developing? And that was something Danaher was very, very good at. And they may still be. But while I was with Danaher, every. Most of us were in a. What does your next five years look like in five years from now? Where do you want to be? Well, I want to be here. Okay. What are you doing about it?

Or here's how you get there.

You know, here's how you get there. And it's like, what do you need? And if I. If I said, oh, I'd like to be like, a director of operations for one of the sites. Oh, well, you need experience in purchasing. You need experience with this and that. And let's give you a purchasing department for a year.

Mm.

And work. And work the purchasing group. Yeah. So I did that for a year or so. So they were very, very good about always having a pool of people to be able to promote from within.

Right.

And that was something I was always very appreciative of. And a very low attrition rate.

Right, right.

Because of that.

Right. Hey, are you going to AME this year?

Oh, yeah. I've certainly plan to. All right. It's in. It's in Dallas.

It's in Dallas. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, we need to. We need to meet up for. For dinner and.

And absolutely.

Be a coffee or some other beverage or whatever, you know, that.

Yeah, absolutely.

That you desire. Are you speaking?

I am. They're asking me to. This year. They're asking me to present about heat mapping, which is something I've kind of knew about. And I knew it was just a, you know, or also known as a spatial analysis for those six Sigma. Yeah. Geeks like me out there. But. But how is it used in. In. In work, in business or in lean.

Right.

And. And we hadn't. We. We still continue to have issues at some of our distribution centers with, you know, hey, you know, a good problem to have. I can't pick orders fast enough.

Right.

And I got so many orders, I just can't get them out the. Fast enough. Right. So we were, you know, doing the usual time studies and. And how long does it take Bob to get on the forklift and go pick this, pick that? And I literally just got up in a cherry picker that was in the building and just sat up there for a couple hours and watched somebody pick an order. And I noticed he was like most of us, we go to a grocery store and we start out in that one aisle and we just kind of zigzag our. Our way. And then we pop out the other end and go to the register. And I was watching the people picking, just randomly going all over the place. And I couldn't figure. I just couldn't figure out a rhythm or a pattern to what they were doing. And as we dove into it a little bit more, we found out it was. And like usual, the software was putting. Was putting our. Our product wherever the open spot on the shelf was. So the most popular item we pull would be on the lowest level of row three. And two days from now, it could be up on the top rack at row 19. So we started using. Well, we did an ABC analysis and said, what is our highest volume pieces of our business? And we come to find out 80. 80% of what came and went out of that. That particular distribution center was only 4% of our part numbers. Was 80% of what came and went.

Wow.

So we were able to take that 80%, which was 120 some odd part numbers, and put them all on one rack on the bottom on the floor. So a picker would come and pick 80% of what came and went in one path, just in one swipe. Wow. It's like just going through the produce section and get 80% of what you need for, you know, for dinner that night. Yeah. And then they would hand it off to somebody else to get the 20%. So we more than doubled our picking spray.

Wow.

By doing that. But to make it visual is we developed a heat map. So we were able. I built a. Basically an Excel with conditional formatting to where if the square was red, it had a lot of volume. If the square was green, it kind of had low volume. And we could look at the entire warehouse visually and see these red spots scattered all over the warehouse instead of all the red being in one area.

You need to start like a YouTube channel where you give all your Excel tricks, because, man, you're like one. I know over the years, you've come up with some crazy Excel templates and standard worksheets and all kinds of cool stuff.

Yeah. I've got an Excel template that's a drum machine. So anybody that's into creating their own rap music, you can. You can use this drum machine. It's kind of fun. But it was really interesting to. We Kept trying to describe, here's your problem, here's what you need to do, or here's what's going on. But once it's made visual, right. Like, just like you see on the weather every night when they say, hey, here's the temperatures in this part of the country and the temperatures here, and you see that red blob and the yellow blobs and whatever. That's basically a spadial map showing you the variation.

Very cool.

So.

So that'll be like a breakout session at AME or.

I think it's good. Yeah, it's gonna be a breakout, very cool session because I'm also, I was handing out the template. Nice to say. Well, here's, here's the, the basic template that you can go and load. Nice. And it will. It will. And I have it laid out in Excel in such a way that it's like a representation of the rack in the warehouse. And then I started looking into it. There's some free software out there that's cloud based that will actually allow you to put your goggles on and walk through your virtual warehouse and look around and see where your hot items are. Wow.

Very cool.

So it's some super cool stuff.

Nice.

You know, to be able to, you know, get super advanced, but nice. I mean, really, if you just want to see, you know, where's all my hot picked items at and you know, where are they located? In my warehouse. They should all be in the same.

Right.

At least in the same rack or two. Or at least in one area. And you know, and you know, because grocery stores use the exact same science in the opposite way. Yeah.

Put the milk in the back and.

Yeah, there's a reason the milk is in the back. There's a reason there's a bag of bananas sitting over there in the milk area.

Yeah.

Because you're gonna grab cereal and you're gonna think about bananas on the way out. Right. And you know, that was Mr. Mr. Walton. That was, you know, Mr. Walmart. Yeah, that was the guy who invented that.

Science is a lean thinker.

Yeah, Very, very much so. Yeah. And so that's where that came from. So, like, it's interesting that that retail uses that science, but in the opposite.

Yeah.

Way is to get you to bypass a bunch of. To walk through the makeup counter at the department store before you get to everything else.

Well, Amazon does the same thing on their websites, right? I mean.

Oh, exactly. So, yeah, here's all this other stuff that you're. You're not, you're not Looking at.

Right.

And now I have a. Well, I will very soon have a. My daughter in law who is an Amazon, she has her own show on Amazon prime which is about shopping and organizing. So she's my. My little 5s queen. Nice. And she turned it into a very, very lucrative career. And now she's on Amazon prime with her show teaching you how to organize your. It's called Everything Envy Everything and envy. Like you're envious of how organized they are. Okay. And they organize the pantry, in the garage, in the bathroom, and. And they show all the items that you should purchase to organize your area.

Get her on the podcast, man. You know.

Yeah, she's. I was just, I was literally just chatting with her here on the phone. Her and my younger son are getting married in October in Cancun. And. And so we were planning, you know, like who's wearing what. And they asked me to do the service. So they're getting married in the States, of course, and then the ceremony will be in Mexico on the beach. Awesome. And she made the mistake of asking me to speak in front of friends and family, so.

You're pretty shy guy, you know, you don't know what to say.

I. I hope, I hope she realizes what she's getting herself into. But it turned out her and her, her mother started out, let's go to people's houses and organize. And then it turned into, well, let's teach people how to teach other people to organize. And then they did a, like a screen test down in Hollywood and now they have a show on Amazon Prime. I think it's twice a week where they come out for 15 or 20 minutes and they say, hey, here's all this cool stuff. And you can click on it and it. While you're watching the video and it puts it in your shopping basket. And of course they get up their commission.

Right.

So very cool. It just works out various. But they're all based on 5s. Yeah, I love it. Organizing your stuff.

I love it.

Which is really cool.

Nice.

But the, the whole heat mapping thing came about again when. With Ame, when they said, you know, well, would you again this year and just let us know what subject matter you'd like to. And I presented that to them and somebody called me from Ame. Ame. And nobody knows. What the heck. Can you give us more detail? Because nobody knows what this is? And I thought, okay. And. And then they said, well, instead of speaking about it, can you do it as a breakout session where you actually teach step by step how to do it versus just throwing some slides up on the screen. Yeah. So I thought, yeah, yeah, I want to.

I want to come to it. I want to check it out. I think it sounds fun, man.

So I've been kind of playing around with the. I want to have a format available to where some. If somebody presents some data, I want to be able to just throw the data in while I'm standing there and they can watch the heat map develop.

Yeah.

You know, live. While we're standing there. Yeah. You know, kind of a pivot table style.

Right.

So, yeah, it'll be real interesting. But I've been. Even this company with ICU Medical has been super supportive about, you know, when myself or some of my counterparts who were mostly in either Mexico or in London, we get a crazy thought or idea and we go, wow, we'd really like to think about this and develop this thing. And they said. They say, go. How much time do you need? Yeah, you know, just let us know if it takes. You need a week, then go work. Go work on that for a week. You know, let us know how it's going or tell us if you need anything. Yeah. So they've been really good about letting us giving us that little bit of freedom and time to come up with something. Sometimes they don't work out, and sometimes they develop into some things that are, you know. You know, actually pretty impressive.

Yeah, very good. Well, I look forward to seeing you, man, in Dallas. So, folks, if you haven't signed up, the conference is October 17th through the 20th in Dallas. So, yeah, we'll. We'll put. There's A coupon code GEMBA15, saves you 15 if you haven't signed up yet.

So.

Yeah, I can't wait. It's going to be fun to finally be back and, you know, seeing people back in person.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. I mean, I'm all for virtual, obviously, you know, videos and podcasts and all that, but there's something awesome about just shaking people's hand and saying hello, you know, and.

And just seeing the booths and all the. All the different technologies out there and. And everything. It's. It's a great. It's a very, very good matter of.

Fact, we're going to have our podcast booth set up like we've done before and.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And so let me interview you at the conference, and we'll talk about heat mapping. How's about that? We'll just dive in.

Yeah. So. Because I remember that was the first. The first time I laid eyes on you was at one of the AMEs, and you were, you were. I think you were interviewing somebody at the ame. Yeah, and I kept hovering. I kept hovering around like a. A creepy fan and waiting to see if you're gonna have, like, time to say hi. Security.

Security. There's a strange man over there.

Some guy hovering around. He's been there for like two hours and. Yeah, but. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that. I'm gonna be. I think I fly back from the wedding and then go straight.

Oh, there you go. Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, hey, if folks want to connect with you, Brent, what's the best way?

Best way? I'm LinkedIn. I'm. I stay pretty, pretty constant on LinkedIn, so you can look me up on there.

Spell your last name.

And of course, my last name is W, E, I, C, H, E, R, S. And my Gmail is my last name with my first initial at Gmail. So that's an easy way to get me as well.

Got it, Got it. Awesome, man. All right, well, thanks again for coming on. We'll see you in October and keep up the great work and try to stay cool out there in Arizona.

I'm trying. All right, thank you very much, Ryan.

All right, take care. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years, or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 lean and 6 Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.