GA 628 | A Factory on Fire: How Lean Saves Lives with Brian Meyers

When a crisis happens in your business, you know, it could be you have an employee that passes away, you know, on a Sunday night and you come back to Monday morning to find out that this coworker is gone or whatever it is, like rally your team. Don't waste it. You know what I mean? Like you're building a culture around continuous improvement and respect for people. They're ready to fight right alongside you.

Today, I am very excited to welcome Brian Myers to the show. Now we've been doing, what's this, episode 623 or something like that. We've been at this for a while and man, I got to tell you, it's— you should never kind of like pick your favorite kid or anything like that. But man, this might be one of the best podcasts that we've ever released. This one is good. I mean, it just moved me. It touched me. And Brian, as you're going to hear, is a fantastic sort of storyteller. And boy, does he have a story to tell. Basically, I'll just give you a little hint. His— he has a company, his own company, and his building caught on fire, and they survived it. So we're gonna sort of walk through that, that journey. And, uh, I don't want to say much more than that, just to have you listen. And, uh, yeah, please listen to this one all the way through. And do me a favor, I don't know if you do this or not, but share this one, would you? Send this out to, uh, 5 people that you think might benefit from it. And, uh, and it doesn't even have to be into Lean, it just— this is a couple stories. It's a humanity story. And yeah, it's just a fantastic episode. I really, really enjoyed this one. So show notes can be found over at gembapodcast.com. This is actually— this is episode 628. So gembapodcast.com, look for episode 628. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Ryan, welcome to the show.

How's it going? Very good. Thank you so much for having me on.

Yeah, man, where are you calling in from?

Simon, Kalamazoo, Michigan. I'm a huge fan. I started doing Lean about 18 months ago, and I've listened to pretty much every one of your podcasts all the way back till the end of time.

Oh my gosh.

It's definitely shaped who I've become as a leader and how I've implemented Lean.

Oh my gosh. Well, wow. Thank you. So how long have you been— have you been listening like from the very beginning or did you kind of catch up?

And initially when I started into Lean, you know, about 18 months ago, I was looking for any information I could to try to learn what I was what I was trying to interact with. And through all these conversations that you have with guests, they're sharing all the solutions to problems that we have. And so to actually be able to listen and hear them, you know, so I would spend a lot of time sitting in the pot, in the hot tub at home, listening to the show, running, working out at the gym. I mean, it was just like constant. So to go back and consume as many podcasts as you have, you've created, it took a lot of time, but I—

We've had a few. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One and a half speed or two speed and just rip through them.

Wow. I'm honored, man. I don't know if I've ever heard anybody say that before. So thank you, man. It makes me feel good. And I know our team will feel honored that you did that. So, well, fantastic, man. Kalamazoo, man. I've been there many times. Prior to Gemba Academy, I worked at Flowserve. Oh, okay. And there's a— well, I think there still is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Used to be there.

And I've been there many times, man. So— Um, good, good, good.

It's a great state in the summer and it's a terrible state right now in the winter. Yeah.

Well, I grew up in Ohio. I live in Texas now, but I grew up in Ohio and man, I was just back, you know, not that long ago and woo. Yeah, man, you forget, man. I mean, it gets cold in Texas too, but not like y'all get, man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My, my dad actually lived in Keller. I know you guys are from Keller.

Yeah.

That's where I grew up. My dad lived in Keller from like '89 to '94 and then moved to Ponder, Texas. Lived in Ponder out by Justin for a decade or so. Now they live down by Houston, but okay, so I'm very familiar with the area.

It's nice.

It was a monster though before. It was, you know, just—

yeah, man. Yeah, exactly.

It's really— it was Grapevine, you know. Grapevine's enormous.

Yeah, everybody from the north is invading, you know. So yeah, so yeah, good stuff, man. All right, well, hey Brian, I know— well, obviously you've listened to the show, so you know we like to get things started with, uh, with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you got?

So the quote that I picked today is, if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. And this is Richard Bach from his book Illusions.

What's that mean to you?

So as a lean practitioner who has gone on this business flipping journey, I have come across a lot of people who love to fight for what they're— or where they're at in their life, or fight against the change. And one thing that's inevitable in life is change. Right? We stop mowing the grass, it grows forever. You know, like everything changes and everything will deteriorate if you don't manage it. So when you have somebody that comes along and really wants to invest in you and change you, to fight back is just silly. But I finally heard this quote and I thought, you know what? They, they want their limitations. They can keep them. You know, they're not mine to change. You know, I can only offer the vessel to do it. So I really think it's important to say like, When you're trying to be a changemaker, you know, like, why am I fighting for this to stay the same? Like, why am I not looking for ways to improve it? God has put us on this earth to solve problems. So why am I living in the same problem forever?

Mm-hmm. Oh, that's good, man. That's good. All right. Well, hey, Brian, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background and how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff and what you're up to these days.

So my name is Brian Myers. I'm from a company called Fat American Manufacturing, and we're in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I started a business out of my mom's garage. I started JCR Off-Road, which is right here. It's a Jeep company making Jeep bumpers, literally in college, building stuff out of my mom's garage with a welder, you know, like a 110 flux core welder, selling stuff on eBay. And, you know, through the history, you know, 20-something years, we've grown it. And it was probably about 18 months ago, I went to Japan with Mazak, the laser company, and it was a, you know, like Hey, you want to come to Japan and see our operations? Sure. And when I got there, what I saw was just amazing. I mean, it was just, you know, but you always say like, we can't do that here. You know, they have a culture where we don't have different. Yeah, yeah, we can't do that. My employees aren't going to do this. And fair enough. Yeah, they probably won't. But about a month later, I went with Mazak again to Europe and I started seeing it again. And then during this process, we're building a new facility and I don't want to take all this mess with me, you know, and I want to like make it new and fresh. And I was trying to figure out how I was going to make these improvements to the processes along the way, I was just going to dump them on the team. Here you go, here's a roller conveyor, here, here's this now. And when I saw it in Europe again, I was like, okay, they're doing it here. What is this? And I had never really dealt much with lean manufacturing, but when I came back home, I started to like, I had to like catch up on all of the spring cleaning and everything that I'd missed through all this travel. And so I was like, well, I probably should listen to something more beneficial than just like a, you know, music or an F1 podcast. And so I just started searching like business development podcasts and I came across Ryan Tierney, Lead Made Simple. And then it was like light bulbs, you know, it's like everything I saw and everything he was talking about was like clicking. So, you know, then I'm down the rabbit hole. He's got a cool accent too. Yeah, yeah.

I love that.

Down this rabbit hole, found your podcast, you know, I found Patrick Adams' podcast, you know, I've just been digging through all these podcasts. And it was just like, I had seen it and it was there in my mind, but it was like starting to click. So once I saw it, you know, I went running with it and I was like, I'm flipping this entire business over. So we went on like a full lean transformation. Morning meetings, we clean our own space, we clean our bathrooms, we clean our break rooms. You know, like we started to completely redo all of our processes. Everything used to be on pallets on the floor. Now we're all on carts. I've been really looking at, you know, burden and flow and removing burden. So, you know, classic Toyota calls it unreasonableness. And when you think about it as unreasonableness, it sounds wild, right? So how can I make my team work with T-Rex arms? That's what I tell everybody that comes through on tours. Try to get here. This is the ideal state. And then from there, it's like, what are all of the inefficiencies in flow? Because the flow creates all the waste, you know? So I'm waiting and defects and all that. It all comes from bad flow. So now I've been just absolutely hellbent on making this thing flow like ink on paper.

I love it. I love it. Well, hey, so before we hit record, we were just chatting a little bit. We had a plan for today's podcast and then we decided to quickly pivot to a different topic that is pretty wild. So what's the topic, Brian?

So in September, we built and moved into a brand new facility. And when I told you I found lean and I transformed this company, I've made a purpose-built lean facility. So gorgeous 56,000-square-foot facility, no offices, you know, no one's using forklifts, nobody's going up and down ladders, like everything is just well thought out. And the process connects to the next, connects, connects all the way through. However, we were here about 2 months and during one of our morning meetings we had a building fire.

Hmm.

So worst case scenario in a brand new facility is fire. Well, any, any real natural disaster would be terrible in that regard.

Wow. Okay, so let's walk through it, man. I mean, like, first of all, like, Do you know, like, what was the root cause of the fire, or—

So it— the fire began in one of our laser cutters. Um, they did all kinds of investigations, and they ended up saying it was thermite, uh, which is kind of a cop-out in my opinion, because thermite— thermite is caused when you have aluminum dust and then you're cutting steel, and the steel ignites the aluminum dust. But we use that— that machine for aluminum only. It was cutting aluminum when it caught on fire. So I feel like they kind of took the the easy way out, you know, and that is a third-party investigator and, you know, I'm sure they, they're just doing their job but trying to get it done. So they said it was thermite. I don't believe it was thermite. So, um, what do you think it was? Um, I think the fire originated somewhere near the transformer or in the transformer because that's kind of where the fire was when we, when we responded to it. Um, so we were in our morning meeting, which we do every day. It's a stand-up meeting. Our whole team is there. And, you know, it's not uncommon for, you know, an airline to break or something in the middle of the morning meeting and someone's got to go back and shut off a shutoff valve or something and That's kind of what we heard was, you know, this like popping noise and then like almost like a rushing of air, but it was louder than normal. And so Bryce, who overlooks our laser, he and our security cameras, you can watch him. He's like walking back away from our morning meeting back to where the laser is. And he gets about halfway there and he just starts screaming for everybody, you know, fire, fire. So one of the things is one of my friends, Sean Cale, he's from Lippert. He came through when I was building this facility and gave me some really good safety advice. And one was to paint my poles in my building from floor to ceiling red and then put the fire extinguishers on those red poles. So visual cues in the factory, you can quickly see where your fire extinguishers are. So within, you know, 30 seconds, we had 12 people with fire extinguishers running back and fighting this fire at this laser. And the dust collector was sucking, you know, it sucks. So it basically became like a turbine. So it was like a jet engine. It was the craziest thing I've ever heard.

Yeah.

And it is probably the one moment in my life where I really felt absolutely helpless. Like, there's nothing I can do to will and bend this. It's out of my control. And we called the fire department. We fought the fire for about 6 or 7 minutes before the entire building filled with smoke. One of the things we did was we actually shut off all the power to everything. We're like, because we're thinking, right? With Lean, you're not just reacting. You're having like real thoughts and you've trained yourself to think differently. So we were like, let's get everything turned off. So we started turning machines off, turning dust collectors off, turning off anything that could help, you know, create this fire to make it even bigger. And by doing that, we were able to reduce the damage to the building.

Do you have sprinklers or anything like that? Or—

Yeah, we do. And, you know, part of me is praying like, please don't go off, you know, like, because that's a mess in itself. And the sprinklers did not go off. So we were able to— once we got the dust collector shut off and we got the laser shut off that was on fire, shut off all the other equipment around it. And then it was pretty much just kind of a burning fire. It wasn't this like roaring mess anymore. But this laser is like in the middle of our facility, like 11 feet away from an office area, bathroom area, you know, training center. And by the grace of God, this entire laser went up in flames. But yet the building was unharmed. You know, it was like, how in the world do you build— you burn this thing down in the middle of the building, but no other casualties other than smoke. Um, we didn't understand what it all entailed until SERPRO got here, but for the next several weeks, I was like 4 or 5 weeks, they had almost 100 people here on scissor lifts wiping down the entire building, cleaning all of the carbon from the electrical fire because it just spreads everywhere and every surface has to be wiped down, every piece of equipment, the You know, every electronic has to be cleaned out, otherwise the carbon will actually short circuit the circuit boards. So it's been a very wild ride.

And how long did it shut you down for?

The fire happened Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and then we were back to work the following Wednesday in some capacity.

But wow, it wasn't pretty quick.

We were thinking like, all right, we'll just clean up and get back to work this afternoon. You know, we're like, all right, everyone can head home and we'll come back at 2 and start cleaning. We had no idea what we were up against, you know. And, um, it turned into a lot. And looking back at it, like, I have this picture of, um, a couple of my guys out front of the building, and you can see the smoke coming out of the back of the building. And one of the guys has his arm around the other guy, and one guy's like in tears because he's like, you know, what's gonna happen to my job? And it's like crazy to think that you can just be living life normal and this tragedy happens. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but at the same time, like, livelihoods are so affected, you know. And to think like, man, we've just spent all this time creating this awesome culture in this awesome place, and, you know, we have people visiting every week to see it, and is it over, you know? And, you know, in many cases, a building, you know, 56,000 square feet, if half the building goes down, you know, you're, you, you're pretty much out of business. I mean, your customers go somewhere else, you, your employees have to go work somewhere else. I mean, you can't just rebuild over the next gear and start where you, where you, you know, where you stopped. So that was, you know, those are all the things that kind of go through your head when you're looking at this, and you're like, I have no control. I'm just at the mercy of what's to come.

So, I mean, sounds like just— is it safe to say that your sort of lean philosophy and lean operating system saved your facility?

Oh, absolutely, 100%. Yeah, I mean, that's what I've said. Lean is— lean saved our factory in many ways. Well, you know, first we talk about the safety aspect of it, we had all of those poles painted red, so we were able to mitigate.

Where did you get that idea?

So that was from Sean from Lippert, and they do it on all their plants. I mean, it's just genius, right? Because yeah, you put equipment in your building and your equipment is, you know, 6, 7 feet tall and you can't see, you know, see where your fire extinguishers are. But go on a scavenger hunt today and look for your fire extinguishers, and you'll be surprised that you'll be like, I think we had 18, but I can only, you know, I've only found 16. So yeah, that was, that one was one. And then the other one Sean told me to do was to number all of my doors all the way around the building counterclockwise, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. So during the, during this, the fire department was actually using the radio to explain like, hey, I'm going in door number 2. Okay, we're on the south side, we're going in door 6. And then beyond that, like, you know, having, without overproducing a bunch of stuff, they were able to walk like straight in. There's nothing to trip over, there's no hazards, you know, clear lanes everywhere that are designated for walking or forklift traffic. So they were to get to the machine, drag their hoses in without issues. And then, you know, 3S-ing, right? So we have this machine and historically in a, you know, normal American style batch and queue business, you just have stuff everywhere. So we don't have all this stuff. We didn't have rags laying next to the laser. We didn't have cardboard boxes. We didn't have inventory, nothing near the laser. So nothing else could catch on fire other than the machine itself. And then, you know, one step further is, you know, we don't hold a lot of inventory. So in the loss, the insurance loss, there's not all this inventory that just gets thrown in the trash. You know, we didn't have that. So, you know, we had to re-box a handful of things, but overall our inventory was fine.

So as far as like impact to your customers, I mean, obviously there had to have been some, but like, yeah, how did that, how did that work? What did you do? Did you like call your customers up and say, hey, we had a fire, sorry, or what?

You know, we were heading into Black Friday and Black Friday's historically one of our best sale times of the year. And, you know, the last thing you want to do is alert your customers right before Thanksgiving and Black Friday that you're in trouble, right? So we didn't, we didn't, we weren't very public with it at first because we didn't want to turn away customers because we're going to need those sales to rebuild, you know, and we don't want to lose this, this momentum we had. So we just took sales like normal. And then being lean, we one-piece flow everything. And we had done a pretty good job of catching up at that point. So we didn't have a huge backlog. So we basically created the backlog while we were down. But I mean, we're so purpose-built, it's insane. So the team rallied around this like I've never seen. I mean, can you imagine, right? Like you think you have this great culture and then you solidify it with an event that's like a real disaster, you know? And they say, you know, never waste a crisis, you know? And my entire team just jumped in and we were, the insurance company said we can work overtime hours, just go ahead and work them, get caught up. So we were working crazy hours to get stuff done. People were really enjoying it. It was like a challenge that we hadn't seen. How many employees did you say you have again? So we have about 40. We usually hover between 38 and 41 or so. Okay, so quite a bit. I mean, it's a pretty big operation. And, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a lot. And but we, we managed to get caught up, but it took us, um, we just caught up about a week ago. Uh, no, actually 2 weeks ago. So it took us almost 90 days to get out of our backlog, to get back to where we were before the fire.

Talk about like your emotions like that day. Just sort of walk us through, like, you know, to when you laid your head on your pillow, maybe. Yeah, you went to sleep. I don't even know.

Yeah, this is kind of like the behind the curtain of what happened. You know, this, this situation happened, you know, within 20 minutes the fire department's here, they've got the fire out, and then, you know, my business partner Darryl and I are just kind of assessing like what's next, you know.

Were you calm? Were you freaking out?

Yeah, I'm pretty calm about stuff like this. I don't get too worked up. You know, it is what it is. There's nothing I can do. Yeah, I just gotta trust, you know, trust God. And you know, for me, the economy is sticky and it's sticky for a lot of places. And we make discretionary spending. We're making accessories for vehicles that are not needed. Imagine buying a brand new $60,000 4Runner and then telling your wife you're gonna buy a $2,000 bumper for it, right? It's not the best time to be playing that game. So we're already seeing a dip in the economy. So we're already fighting this and we've been fighting it for about a year. So now I'm looking at this thing and I'm just going, what is from this situation that's happened? What does God want me to learn here? Because that's it. Like, what is he doing? What is the motion? And, you know, I prayed for, you know, a year straight, give me sales, you know, fill this bucket up so I can keep everybody rolling. And instead, this laser burns to the ground and it gives me an opportunity to completely reshuffle my cards. You know, I'm freed of this capital expense. I got this huge cash influx to either replace it or not. And, and as a lean business, you know, we bought that years ago. So I have this opportunity to kind of reassess. That was kind of interesting. So I was really kind of paying attention to what am I supposed to learn from this? What are we going to, you know, how are we going to move forward from this? But really, like, it was like, when can we get back to work? And that was it. Like, when can we start back? And we've been, we've been through tragedies before, COVID was a big one, right? Where they were trying to send everybody home and then employees left because they could make more money sitting at home. I didn't play that game. I just kept everybody working and we didn't lose the majority of our team. So same thing. It was like, as soon as we can get back to work, let's get back to work. And in some capacity, it didn't matter what it was. We could work on improvements. We could do whatever. Let's just get back in the building, get back in our routine and kind of get back on the horse. But You know, we were grinding. I was doing like, you know, 4 AM mornings, 6, 7, 8 PM nights, you know, some, you know, 12, 14, 16-hour days and just grinding as hard as we could. Uh, we, we made a joke about this though. We got a ton done and it was like almost like this reverse sabbatical. Instead of going away, you just work harder. And, you know, right at the end of the year, people were, you know, they had their plans for the holidays set up already, but otherwise people are like, I'll take the extra money right now. Let's go. So it was very— I never really like sat back and was like, shit, this sucks. You know what I mean? Like, it was kind of like, okay, this is an opportunity. How do we, how do we capitalize and how do we move forward on it? So definitely different. But I'm a, I'm a pretty positive person in general, so I don't usually go down the, you know, negative rabbit hole of we're doomed.

Danger. Yeah. That it's, it's, it's interesting because like, yeah, I've, you know, I've seen situations where it's, it's so easy to, you know, fall into despair. Like in a situation like you, or even like a, you know, a personal, a health situation or something like that. You know, someone's not well or something like that. You know, it's, it's so easy to just almost give up. Whereas, you know, all the, like even scientific research shows like your mindset You know, if you can maintain some level of positivity, it matters, right? I mean, there's neurochemicals in your brain, you know, that are, that are at play. You know, it's either, you know, oxytocin or it's, you know, you're feeling good or it's, it's, it's stress hormones, you know, like that are going to give you a heart attack kind of thing.

Yeah. We were going to talk about unwavering commitment, you know, because that's like one of the things that people really like see in me. Like I have this like It's burn the ships, right? You weld the escape hatch closed. You don't let yourself go backwards. You know, you're so committed, you don't care what gets in your way. You're going to overcome it. And going into that same thing, it's just, it's no different. You know, it's like I had this full unwavering commitment to what we were building and, you know, who we were and what we were creating. And I wasn't ready to give up on it. And that in itself, it definitely, yeah, it can be hard. Like, I always say that, like, God gave me very broad shoulders for a reason, and that's to carry a lot of load. And to me, felt like another one of those times where, you know, I was gonna put the business on my back and find a way to carry it where we needed to go. And, but it was just a unique thought because previously, if we were the business that we were, you know, there would have been, um, you know, employees that maybe looked for other jobs at that point, or it would have, it would have been very different how we move forward.

Yeah.

If it was in our pre— if this fire happened in our previous building, the building would be a total loss. You know, we had low ceilings, and where the fire would have began was like pinned between the machine and a wall, so it wasn't like accessible even to try to fight it. So we would have had like a— I mean, it would have been a complete disaster in the other facility. So here it's like, man, there's just so many things. Um, one thing I was telling people recently though, you have this brand new facility, You move in, it's exciting, it's new, it's awesome. You know what I mean? It's just like, it's literally like a beacon of lean in Kalamazoo, Michigan. And in a way it's like defiled, like it's not this shiny new toy anymore. And it kind of changes your perspective on how you look at the building, you know, and that tarnish is there. And good or bad, it definitely changed my mindset. It made me feel like we aged many years here in a short amount of time.

That's interesting. Then again, I think I could challenge you and be like, it's like a battle wound that you survived, man, and you're stronger for it, right? Yeah.

I mean, I don't wish this on anybody. I don't. But I do want to encourage people, when a crisis happens in your business, it could be you have an employee that passes away on a Sunday night and you come back to Monday morning to find out that this coworker is gone or whatever it is. Rally your team. Don't waste it. You know what I mean? You're building a culture around continuous improvement and respect for people. They're ready to fight right alongside you. You know what I mean? And the military proves this, right? You get the right leader in front and everybody just piles in behind. And you don't want to sit back and show this isn't going to be good. It's okay to be vulnerable and it's okay to look at your team and hug them and cry and be sad. But at some point you got to, you know, as my wife would say, get your shit together and get going, you know?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I got a really bunch of close guy friends that I sort of do life with here and we're all in church community together and all that. And one of our sayings that we, that we do, we kind of our mantra is suffer well, you know, like that's really good. Suffering comes, you know, you have to suffer well because you know, you're not going to escape suffering, right? Like in any form.

Yeah.

It's coming for you one day.

It's here every day. It's our perspective to how you look at it. You know what I mean? We wake up every day and we're suffering, whether you have a headache or a toothache or a knee hurt, your knee hurts, your shoulder hurts, you know, physical ailments, mental ailments, right? You can, you can have a lot of frustrating things going on in your life at one time. And, you know, life is full of suffering, unfortunately. And yeah, you got to suffer well. That's a great way to look at it. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow, man. What an episode, Brian. This has been fantastic. I'm glad we, we audible. I mean, I want to have you back on and we'll do the, the other topic, show that you had in mind, and we'll do that one as well down the road. But, uh, hey man, this has been fantastic. Um, any final words of wisdom or final parting thoughts that you want to leave with everybody?

Um, I mean, if you— I'd like to just encourage anyone that wants to come visit us. We average about 2 tours a week in our new facility, so you're welcome to come.

How about Gemba Academy and our video cameras?

Yeah, absolutely. Come, we'll use, uh, those AI glasses, those Meta glasses.

I'm being serious. Like, we haven't done one for a while. We have— you've probably seen that, like, we have a Gemba Academy live series where we've gone to different companies, you know, Paul Acres, we've been there a million times and ASCAP and, um, um, yeah, man, maybe we could talk about it offline.

That would be great. Yeah. You know, my goal is that like I had so many people that poured into me leading up to this and, you know, God putting me in these spots to meet the right people and be in the right place to see the right things to create what we've created. And when people walk in and they see it and they feel the culture, they want it because there's nothing better than going to work with friends every day, solving problems with your friends every day, it just changes your entire life. You go home with a full cup, you know, you're able to interact with your family better. All these things matter. And, you know, it's hard to transform a business. Like, yeah, it's not easy, but the reward is beyond any of the struggle.

Fantastic. Oh man, what an episode, Brian. Thank you for coming on. If people want to connect with you, what's the best way?

So I have a website, leanbydoing.com. We make lean content there. We like to share, so I'm easy to get a hold of there. You can find me on LinkedIn too. I'm so easy to get a hold of. If you can get a hold of my phone number, it's even in my book, the Lean Leadership Action Guide book. Like, literally just message me. I heard recently somebody say that in life we get what we give, and that really resonated with me because like, I just want to be a giver. I just want to share everything everything that I've learned and that I've taken from your podcast and all the guests that you had and share it to the next generation or the next person that needs to hear it. And yeah, so anyone just feel free, just reach out to me if you have questions, concerns, help, whatever it is, I'm here. I'm easy to get along with.

Yeah, man. Fantastic. All right, man. Well, I appreciate you, Brian. Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me, Ron. I appreciate this. All right.

Thanks for joining us today. We know the path to continuous improvement can be challenging to walk alone. That's why Gemba Academy exists, not just to provide training, but to be your partner in problem solving. Whether you're just taking your first steps or leading a global transformation, our goal is to help you bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Beyond our library of Lean and Six Sigma resources, we're here to coach and guide you you through your journey, whether that's through personalized support or joining us for a live training to get that immersive hands-on experience. To learn more, go to gembaacademy.com.