GA 634 | Doubling Profits in 90 Days with Ben Hansen

But if you've been trying to repair and fix a supplier relationship for 10 years that is still terrible, what makes you think that the next 2 years it's going to get so much better? So I tend to try to help people appreciate that if you've really been struggling to fix something for years and it's still not fixed, it might be time to move on.

Today I'm excited to welcome Ben Hansen to the show. Now, Ben goes by kind of the name, the Profit Doctor. He's got a website, profitdoctor.com. and we had a really fun conversation. So this is not maybe the traditional sort of Lean and Six Sigma type episode, but the things that we talked about are very aligned with all of the things that we're talking about within our continuous improvement world. And so in fact, so Ben's kind of specialty, if you will, as you'll hear, he's got a really strong sort of corporate background and did a lot of, worked at a lot of really big companies and that sort of thing, and he's off on his own now. Helping companies sort of improve their profit margins, really. So, uh, um, and, uh, so he goes about it— it's got a really interesting term that he calls profititis. And, uh, so we really dig into like, what is profititis? And then how can companies, um, double their profit in like as short as 90 days? Um, and we really get into different things like what we call the profit leaks and some different, uh, some different areas that we can be thinking about as, as business businesses. So a lot of fun. I think you're going to enjoy this one. I know I did. So show notes can be found over at gembapodcast.com. This is episode 634. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 634. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Ben, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Oh, so good. So good. Thanks for having me, Ron.

Yeah, where are you calling in from?

I'm calling in from Austin, Texas, so just a couple hundred miles south of you.

All right, all right, good stuff. Um, I'm excited for, uh, for today's episode. Um, and, uh, as you know, we, uh, we got a fun word that we're going to explore— prophetitus. So I can't wait to dig into that. But before then, as you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with our, our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Nice. Well, as one is wont to do, I scoped out your LinkedIn before the podcast, and your recent post was referencing Michelangelo. And it actually reminded me of one of my favorite quotes. And it was, he looked at this big block of marble, and he saw the David, and he carved away everything that was not the David. And the backstory to that is for 50 years, nobody would touch this 16-foot block of marble. Because it had a big crack in it. And finally, he took on this commission from the Vatican. And afterwards, this magnificent statue emerged. Nobody could believe it. And they were like, "How did you manage to work around this incredible flaw, if you will, in this marble, this big crack?" And again, he said, "I looked at it and I saw the David and I just carved away everything that was not the David." And the reason I both love that quote and it was so top of mind is because I often talk about it or reference it when I'm working with business owners to suggest that in many cases within their business, which may appear flawed, there is an amazing business trying to get out. And if we just carve away some of the, in this case, dead marble, or I often refer to it as ballast or dead weight, you can really free up a highly profitable business.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Fantastic. All right, Ben, well, um, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your, your background and, um, and then maybe just sort of, uh, how that, how that lined up for what you're doing today.

Yeah, you know, um, I kind of always grew up with a little bit of a money focus. It sounds kind of weird. I was, uh, you know, the treasurer of my grade school fundraiser. There's even a story I tell where me and my buddy were gonna get into the poisonous snake catching business as teenagers, and my mother, who freaked out about that, you know, we— I talked her into paying me snake allowance for not catching snakes. And I kind of polished up that story a little bit because I also share that with some of my business clients with the idea that often you can make more money by either not catching, if you will, poisonous things or toxic things to add to your company, or releasing the toxic things that you already have in your business. Yeah. And then just extend a little bit upon that. You know, after business school, I got into a number of tech startups— Dell, Microsoft— and then I started my own company Grew that to about 100 employees and $13 million in revenue. So, fairly sizable. And really, you know, really got into the mix of other business owners. And I came to find out how many of them, maybe a third to two-thirds, are not really wired around profitability first. And so, then when I exited my old company, I was thinking, what could I do that would really make a big contribution to the world and would be highly valued. And I realized that so many of my colleagues as founders and entrepreneurs, they were so focused on helping customers and doing right by their teams that sometimes they were not laser-focused on fixing profitability, addressing profitability, the cost efficiency, almost quality side of the business, which I think those things sort of ride together. And ultimately, that's what got me into starting this company, which is called Profit Doctor.

And how long have you been with this company then?

Yeah, I've been doing this about 5 years full time. And there's just— to me, it feels like a huge contribution. And it warms my heart when I help a business owner go from, you know, losing money, breakeven, or low single digits up to really healthy profitability, where not only are they doing right by their customers and their team, but also right by themselves and their families in terms of their, their own financial outcomes.

So in preparing for the episode, we were kind of brainstorming some ideas of what to talk about. And really, to kind of kick things off, you, you have this approach that you've mentioned that in 90 days, you can, you can help a company literally double their profit. So, maybe just want to explore that. First of all, did I get that right? And then, tell me about that.

You did. And you know, like any consultant, of course, I've got some caveats there. But typically, the kind of customers we— first, I would just say, we kind of divide the market into 3 buckets: way above average, average, and below average. Generally speaking, we don't work that much with those customers, with those companies that are way above average in terms of profitability. They essentially have already cracked the code or figured most of these things out. So, we don't offer to help them double their profitability. However, in that group that is way below average, we often find that, you know, if they are negative, breakeven, or low single digits, it's often incredibly common that we can help them double their profitability. In 90, sometimes 180 days. Or maybe said differently, our core value prop, if you will, that we offer, or our brand promise is to help companies increase their bottom line profitability by 5 percentage points. And let me unpack that because 5 percentage points to most people doesn't sound that impressive. But when you think that the worldwide average profitability for almost all companies is about 6%, 7%, sometimes even 10%, depending on how you you want to calculate that. If we can help a company with $5 million of revenue add another $250,000 a year of net profitability, that can be incredibly, uh, significant for them. Or, you know, $50 million, again, that's $2.5 million in, uh, incremental profitability. So that is our core promise, if you will, to increase net profit percentage by 5 percentage points. So, let's say from 3% net profit to 8% or 5% net profit to 10%. And that would essentially be a doubling of net profit. If you'd like to dig in a little deeper to how we can kind of guarantee to do it so quickly, I'd love to go there too.

Yeah. Well, you know, so as you know, many people listening are generally speaking, in what we would call the continuous improvement world, or many folks are focused on lean and many on this discipline called Six Sigma. So, we're all about sort of modeled after Toyota and how Toyota sort of built their company. And so, really looking at removing— Japanese word is waste, muda is the Japanese word, like really targeting waste and removing non-value-added activities, if you will. From a process, you know, so then we maximize the value that's being added in the business for the customer and so forth. Now, I would, in fairness, I mean, for sure, within the lean world, we're worried about profitability. But it wouldn't be our, it wouldn't be what we're trying to, how do I say it? People are like, of course, we're trying to improve our profitability, Ron. We are, but it's sort of a, an effect, if you will, of the things that we're doing, of the activities that we're doing. So, maybe you could then talk about your approach and perhaps it's very similar. And I know you talk about something called profit leaks. Yeah, right. So, like profits leaking from a company. So, what are some of these most common profit leaks that you're attempting to plug, for lack of a better word.

Exactly. Yeah. Stitch up, if you will, as the Profit Doctor.

Yes, stitch up. There you go.

So, the first thing I would say is I was so excited to be on your podcast. Because to me, I actually think the world of profitability or the concepts that I talk about and the kind of the thrust or the direction of the most important essence of it is actually so closely allied with quality, Lean, Six Sigma, if you will. And what I mean by that is if the world of non-quality is so focused on, you know, throughput and production and like getting more out of the factory, if you will, and then the quality team, if you will, is, "No, no, no, we don't want to just get more out. We want to get a better ratio," if you will, of good stuff versus bad stuff or to eliminate poor quality, waste, inefficiency. You know, that is very, very closely analogous to the equivalent of, you know, revenue, revenue, revenue versus also thinking about the cost side of the equation, which really is what bridges revenue all the way over to profitability. So I actually think that, you know, your listeners are kindred spirits, if you will, to the message that I offer. But we're not just thinking, for example, about a manufacturing context. But you asked me how we fix the leaks, and you also kind of mentioned, you know, maybe Lean and quality and Six Sigma isn't exactly focused on profit. But let's use a little bit of an example. Okay. So let's say a company offers 100 products. Of those products, it would be highly likely if we were going to do a control chart or a standard distribution, that the top 20% of those products from a profitability perspective are most likely responsible for something like 80% of the net profitability of that company. So right out of the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule. What I like to do is I extend that because the most obvious thinking when we talk about 80/20 is like, well, how can I get some more of that good 20%? My first philosophy is, well, how about we cut some of the bad 20%? Because if the best 20% of your product line is responsible for 80% of your revenue, 80% of your profitability, what do you think is going on with the worst 20%? It's probably responsible for most of the quality failures, the customer returns, the customer dissatisfaction. The problems, the extra meetings of leadership and on the plant floor, you know, fishboning the quality right out of that stuff because it sucks. You're not well suited for it or just not a good fit for what you do. And so, in part, how we can add so much value so quickly is that by cutting things that are dragging you down, number one, it's mostly in your control. Because like adding a top 20 performer is fairly speculative and risky and takes a lot of investment. But cutting a low 20% performer, in this case like a bad product, is really simple, if you will, and 100% in your control. So I use that as an example of a profit leak that could be cut quickly. I also use that by extension as sort of a as an example or a metaphor of how we can guarantee that big lift in profitability so quickly.

So say I have a company, I have 100 employees. And I have a number of products that we produce. And I identify the, how do you say it? The least effective of the top 20% revenue drivers, and I decide to sort of stop selling them, stop marketing them, pull them out of our portfolio. So now what do I do with my 100 people? Or am I keeping my 100 people? Now those 100 people are now focused on, on less products too, so they could more energy, if you will, into the, into what's left. Or is that, is that generally your approach? Or are you going to say that, sorry, the 10 people that were working with the part that we just cut, you're gone as well to help our bottom line right out of the gate. Like, how do you navigate that?

Well, certainly, it gets case by case. I'm not here to say that every company should immediately chop off X% of their workforce. That's not my intention here. We start with a leak detection tool. And we'll reference it at the end of the podcast where people can download. And not every company has the same set of leaks. Right? But let's pretend in this example, your company of 100 people has a standard distribution in its product line, where the top 20% of products are really truthfully responsible for 80% of revenue and 80% of profitability. And typically, in a situation like that, we would see that the bottom 20% of products are perhaps responsible for half a percent to a percent of revenue. And then typically those bottom revenue producers are actually profit negative. So, by getting rid of them, you might—

Oh, see, I misunderstood you then. I apologize. And I think I even stated it wrong. I thought you were saying, so, the 80/20, the 20 good, if you will, air quote good, that you were getting rid of some of them. But what you're saying is, no, no, no, at the bottom end of the tail, right? We're going to cut some of that. Okay. Yeah.

So, we're like the, the longer-term view of what we do, we call this the Double Double, where we help you double your profitability as a percentage. And then we help you double your revenue as a dollar, you know, pool or absolute number. So the first part is often by cutting from the bottom part of that tail, right? So not the, the, the bottom of the top 20, but, you know, from the 80, you know, percentile 80 down to 100, right? The worst of the worst. And then, your question might be, well, what would we do with the resources that had been involved in creating and delivering that worst 20%? Well, what I would suggest is to reinvest some of that in the top 20%. So, if you got 3 guys, quote, "in the plant" that are madly working on your worst products, trying to fix them, tune them, make them unbroken. Well, why fix that? Why try to keep fixing the stuff that for the last 5 years has been a disaster when you could reapply some of those resources to getting more, better, faster quality, etc., out of your winners, right? So why keep investing more and more in the losers when you could redirect some of that attention, resource bandwidth, human capital, etc.? Into your winners. Just so much more leverage up top on the top end of the stack.

Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, even just thinking about from like a, you know, inventory carrying costs and different things like that, right? Like all of the inventory that you had to carry for those, those laggards, if you will, you know, are eventually gone.

And, you know, there's a classic example in the airline industry. Southwest Airlines, you know, standardized on one type of aircraft. Because they didn't want to have that long tail of those weird parts or that one mechanic who was the only guy who could do the— we'll just make it up— Embraer Embraer or whatever. I think it's Embraer. I don't know. But they're like, hey, we're just going to do 737s. We're just going to stock that stuff. And we can kind of get rid of the long tail where we needed a tiny plane to do this weird route. In fact, Southwest Airlines said, hey, if you need a tiny plane to do this route, We're just not even going to do that route. You know, so to some extent, they followed the profit prescription very early, which, which we teach, which is to focus on your best customers, your best product and service offerings. And, you know, they have their own pricing model. And in their case, they were probably very dialed in to focusing on their best people. And so that's kind of our approach. How do we do better by eliminating from the bottom across these various key elements of the company. And then, take that recouped resource, if you will, and either keep some of it and/or reinvest some of it in the top end of the curve. And I'm happy to share some examples from some of the clients that we've worked with if you're interested.

Yeah, no, for sure I am. So, I mean, so just want to make sure that we're completing— just did you say what you wanted to say on the various types of profit leaks that there are? I mean, you've mentioned, you know, to some. Do you have anything more to say? Because I definitely want to get— I would love to hear what you just presented. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I'll go back and I'll explain the one about customers a little bit more and maybe reapply that in the context of a manufacturing facility. So, let's say you're really good at producing you know, Product A, but the buyers of Product A are just not a great fit for your company for pick a million reasons. Your sales and marketing channels or distribution or whatever doesn't reach them that effectively. Or the way that you price everything else, let's say you're a premium provider, doesn't match that product, which is really like a lower-end, you know, bang for the buck value product. So what I'm suggesting is that when you look across what you deliver, whether it's, you know, services or products or product families, when you look to who you deliver it, whether it's individual customers or customers by maybe market segment, when you look at where you're located, you know, locations, geography, etc., when you— and then you did mention your labor pool. When you look at your labor pool, who works for you, how you pay them, where they're from, all those kinds of things. Those are some of the biggest areas of profit leakage. Certainly, in construction or manufacturing, suppliers and subcontractors is huge. I mean, right out of, you know, Toyota, you know, back in the day, one of the ways that they got so much bang for the buck is they really honed in on who their suppliers were. How they worked with them, you know, longer-term arrangements with fewer subcontractors, just-in-time inventory. You know, they went back through the supply chain to optimize, and they got a lot out of that. But if we were to just simplify it for everybody, let's just say of your 20, you know, 20 major vendors and 20 major subcontractors, it would just stand to reason that it's highly likely unless you're Toyota world-class at working through that space, that of those 20, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 world-class arrangements adding tremendous value. Let's call it 5 to 10 somewhere in the middle. And let's say 2 to 5 kind of real low performers for whatever reason that is. And so, I might suggest you could plug a leak by eliminating, replacing, et cetera, those real low performers. Now, you might say, "Well, they've been with us for all this time. I can't cut them. We've got a great history." Well, maybe. But if you've been trying to repair and fix a supplier relationship for 10 years that is still terrible, what makes you think that the next 2 years it's going to get so much better? So I tend to try to help people appreciate that if you've really been struggling to fix something, for years and it's still not fixed, it might be time to move on.

Yeah. Okay. Next topic, profititis. What is it?

First of all.

Yes.

Yes. Well, our business is called The Profit Doctor. So, we thought it'd be fun to have a little allegorical name. So, it's profititis, like tendinitis, prostatitis, appendicitis, right? So, profit with an -itis at the end. And the idea that we see so common is where businesses are growing revenue, top line, employees, customer base, but profitability is flat, weak, or declining. So, an increasing spread between revenue and profit is what we call profititis. And where we see that happen so much is often businesses start and they're incredibly lean and profitable and focused and deliberate in what they're doing. But as they're starting to grow organically, they're being opportunistic, adding to their product and service portfolio, adding to their customers and market portfolio, you know, taking on more, more, more, expanding, expanding, but maybe not taking a pause to be like, OK, now we've tripled in size over the last 4 years.

Revenue.

But revenue. But how much of that is at the same level of leverage or profitability or high quality or really narrowed niches where we're so great at? How much of that organic growth, whether it be in, you know, products and services, customers and markets, locations, etc., maybe we got a little over our skis or are outside outside our target niche. And as a result of that, you know, we were 50% margins here. And now, we're at 17% margin here. Is the juice really worth the squeeze? And is being over here actually dragging down our efficacy, our efficiency, our often even, you know, quality and ability to deliver with excellence? And then, ultimately, profitability, both on an absolute dollar view and a percentage view. Because what we see so often is entrepreneurs and fast-growth-oriented executives see that even though this thing isn't great, it's revenue positive. But there's a big difference between being revenue positive and being profit positive. Or when you look at it, revenue doesn't pay the bills. It certainly doesn't. It certainly doesn't.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, all right, so what do you do about it? So let's say that, that my company has grown, you know, over the last 10 years, and, you know, our, our, our revenue is tripled but our profit hasn't followed. So like, I guess, are you getting back to what we talked about earlier as far as like finding out the, those inefficiencies and the what we would call the waste, if you will, in your system and removing it. Is that your approach?

Exactly. You know, we have kind of a 3-phase approach to this right here. And I'll just start with context that Profit Doctor is primarily working with mid-sized businesses. And the way we look at that is think, you know, 10 or 20 to 200 employees, something like that. The toolkit and the things I'm about to share will certainly scale all the way up. To my, you know, former context of Dell and Microsoft. You know, Microsoft used to be Fortune 1 at a certain time. And the same concepts would apply there. It just, you might need to tweak a little bit in terms of like timescale and what it would take. Oftentimes, with those much larger companies, it's harder to act or the mandate to take drastic action is often harder to come by, unless you're really in drastic deep water, and then it becomes like a bankruptcy turnaround situation. Often, that is the only time people are willing to act incredibly quickly to divest from certain areas. But the 3 steps I'm about to share would apply all the way down from $1 million in revenue to, back in my old days, $100 billion in revenue. So, the first thing is that strategic shift in your mind. To focus from only revenue to profitability. It sounds obvious, like, isn't everybody focusing on profitability? But I'm here to tell you that it's just not true. So much of so many people's attention is focused on top line. And we can have a whole podcast about the psychology of that. But that's step 1. Step 2 is we go through a triage process, which again, I'm referencing for those of you who stayed to the end. We'll share the the free giveaway, the Profit Leakage Detector, which is essentially a triage tool to help you identify which of these various areas of profit leakage might be the most important first places for you to look. And we kind of already identified some of those, you know, product and service, customer market, folks on your team, suppliers and subcontractors, etc. And then the, the third part is what we call the 50/20 rule, and I'll, and I'll describe it and then unpack it a little bit. The description is to cut half of the worst 20% of your worst area within 30 days. So I'll just say that again: cut half of the worst 20% within 30 days focusing on your worst areas. For those of you who are Anchorman aficionados, you know, 60% of the time it works all the time. This is cutting half of your worst 20%. Why not all 20% of the worst 20%? And that's just because in many cases, in that, in those bottom tier of performers, let's say for products in this manufacturing example that we've been kind of following through during this podcast. Well, some of those are tricky. Maybe that item is kind of a low performer, but it's the special, you know, special attachment products that go with your best product. And you, of course, can't cut that even though we know we're losing money on that. So let's just imagine that there are some half of that bottom 20%, let's say, of your product portfolio that is a little tricky to exit from quickly. That's why we say, well, cut the other half. Because of that bottom 20%, while there might be some tricky ones, there's probably plenty that you could literally step away from tomorrow. You could send an email to every customer in a manufacturing setting and just say, put in your final order in 30 days because we're exiting this product. And you might get some orders. Yay! We finally moved some of that stuff off the shelf before we close it down. And for all I know, that one person who's been waiting to buy a billion dollars worth of that might come out of the woodwork. But chances are you wouldn't. That's why it's been a loser, if you will, for the last 5 years. And so then you could just stop making it, right? So those were the 3 steps: focusing on profitability, That's kind of the psychology mindset shift, paradigm shift. Number 2 is the triage process of identifying which parts of your business have the biggest leaks, if you will. I look at that like the worst performers are arguably the best opportunity, kind of like the yin-yang, you know, crisis versus opportunity there. And then, once you've identified those opportunity areas, to cut from the bottom as quickly as possible the easy ones because that will bring back, put a little confidence, a little pep in your step because like, "Hey, we got rid of some of these losers here and it wasn't that hard." You'll see how much like time goes back in your day and how much money can be recouped from like, we're just going to that one line here in our, you know, multi-line factory. That really is doing so little, we're going to get rid of that and have a breath of fresh air because we won't have to deal with those problems anymore. Got it.

Got it. So I know that you have some ideas on accounting and perhaps in how it can, I don't know, maybe mask things from time to time. Talk a little bit about your thoughts on accounting. And the role that it plays in all the things that we've been discussing.

Yeah. Just to draw a parallel to quality, you know, if you don't have clear metrics on, you know, deficiencies, poor quality, waste, etc., you know, product by product, factory by factory, you know, production line by production line, etc., or in a services business, you know, team by team, location by location, market segment by market segment, How are you going to have the information as a senior-level manager or even a mid-level manager to drive improvement? And the answer is it's, it's very challenging. What we see so often with these mid-sized companies is many of the owners and leadership in those companies, they're really skilled and have years, if not decades, of experience and skill in the product or service they deliver to customers. But that doesn't make them, you know, GE-trained business managers or, you know, Wharton MBAs in finance. So often, you know, financial review is not really a strength for them. And it wouldn't shock me that many people in manufacturing, many people in quality don't have a financial background. And so it would be only natural in that case that looking at P&Ls, cash flow statements, balance sheet, etc., might not be first nature, might be kind of intimidating, and might be challenging, right? The flip side is in many, many instances, the world of bookkeeping and accounting is wired just like if business people are often wired towards revenue instead of profit. Many, many people in bookkeeping and accounting are wired towards, "I need to make financial statements that would pass an audit, will help us produce our tax statements, won't be criticized as being wrong, and are complete." But I'll tell you, as a CEO and as a guide to other CEOs, Nothing that I just described there actually makes it easier for a CEO to make the business more successful. And often what we do is we help the accounting and bookkeeping and finance team produce reports, documents, information that is much more insightful, simplified, easy to understand, while we're also sort of training up the leadership team to look into that information and see something that is more useful. We want reports that we call our— following our EASY Insights methodology. A good example might be if your accounting team is producing a 7-page long P&L, it's pretty clear that your $50 million size company, if that's what you have, that that 7-page P&L is going to be too much for your initial look at what's right and what's wrong. How about a one-page simplified P&L where you could start with looking at on a monthly basis to see the highlights, you know, the forest for the trees, see the big trends, how, you know, this product family is doing this, this product family is doing that. And then if you needed to drill into more detail, you could get a more detailed report. So, what we see so often is CEOs being inundated with like too many numbers on the page. If you like that movie Amadeus, too many notes and not enough information.

Yeah, you can't separate the signal from the noise, perhaps.

Absolutely. And when you say you can't separate signal from the noise, that's actually— I should have talked about that as one of my favorite quotations as well. You know, because So, so often, if you either have too many, too much information, you can't separate out the signal. Or if the, you know, if the magnifying glass that you're looking at is too wide, you know, you can't figure it out. Like some of my CEOs, they're not even conducting, for example, an effective monthly financial review. They might be looking at this data quarterly or annually. In that case, you're not able to look at numbers with the precision needed because there's too much noise to see that signal. If you're trying to improve every month by half a percent and you're looking at data that is off by plus or minus 5%, how are you going to have the precision to improve by half a percent a month? And clearly, I think that would just jump right off the page to anybody with a Six Sigma background. Like a crappy control chart with that kind of plus and minus is not going to help you like, you don't get 0.5% better every month, for example.

Ah, good stuff. Man, this has been a lot of fun, Ben. We've covered a lot of ground. So I wondered if you had any sort of, I don't know, final words of wisdom or some parting thoughts that you wanted to leave with the listeners?

Yeah. What I would probably say is we call this tool Money Mondays. It is maybe the most simplistic but powerful tool to get your head right and to translate this, you know, shift of paradigm from just 100% revenue, revenue, revenue to also giving profitability kind of enough attention is to set aside a block of time every week. How about 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to allocate 20% of your work week as an executive team or CEO to improving profitability. Doesn't seem crazy, does it? So, how about, you know, 2 to 4 hours a week or even 8 to focus on profitability? Get it on your calendar. Maybe an hour or two for you and then an hour or two for you with your senior management team. To discuss that. We call that Money Mondays. It's a great, very simple rule of time— rule of thumb to kind of be a translation layer between, yeah, maybe we ought to be worrying about profit and actually doing something about it. My guess is anybody with a quality bent would be like, let's get senior management to allocate 2 hours a week to addressing quality specifically, you know, over a period of months. Seems like we could, you know, make a dent in the problem, right? Yeah. The other thing I'll say, I hope it's not too bad of a shameless plug, you know, but if you're in the million to $100 million size company and you want some help, reach out to me. Not that these tools don't work for some larger companies. And a great first step would be to come to our website, www.profitdoctor.com. And then, if you want to look at our leak detector tool. It's ProfitDoctor.com/leaks, L-E-A-K-S. It's a free download. And if nothing else, it'll help point you in the right direction of where you might get the biggest bang for the buck in terms of profitability by essentially, again, using that 50/20 concept to cut half of the worst 20%. 100% in that area quickly.

Got it.

Awesome.

All right, well, hey Ben, thanks a lot for coming on. This has been a lot of fun.

Ron, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. Uh, hope, uh, hope we'll have a sequel one of these days.

Yeah, let's do it. All right, take care. Thanks for joining us today. We know the path to continuous improvement can be challenging to walk alone. That's why Gemba Academy SIX SIGMA 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 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.