The ROI Fallacy | E4 - Hard Refresh - An ISSA Podcast
15 Apr 2025 · 37 min
John Hill, former CFO and current CEO, argues that ROI calculations for capital and software purchases often miss the real picture by ignoring time value of money, risk, and strategy alignment. He recommends NPV and IRR instead, and stresses measuring both qualitative and quantitative benefits when evaluating data and AI investments.
Questions this episode answers
April 15, 2025
John Hill — former CFO of multiple companies; current CEO of a robotics company
CLX (virtual) — March 25th (registration link posted the day before)
Played rugby for ~30 years (first game in New Zealand; last game in Northern Ireland); served in the navy
Undergraduate degrees in accounting, information systems, and real estate; real estate broker's license; CPA; MBA; master's in information systems (counts presented as five degrees/licenses/certifications)
Chapters
Sam.
Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Hard Refresh. And today we are alongside an amazing guest. You know him. And we will get to an introduction in a second, but I'm Kaden Hutchins. Alongside me is my co host, Karina Neff. And we are having a bunch of fun doing these. So today's guest is John Hill. John, welcome to the show. Go ahead and introduce yourself.
Well, thank you, guys. I am. I've been a CFO and of many companies. I'm the CEO of a robotics company now and I have a long career. I'm just a few years older than these guys, but I am enjoying this conversation. I am going to enjoy it. Cheers.
Awesome. Awesome. Well, John, before we get started, we're doing this new thing. We're starting this episode. So you're a guinea pig. All right, we're going to do two truths and a lie about your career. Just to see, you know, if you can throw Karina or I off your scent. We'll guess which one's the lie.
Okay, so I. I played 30 years of rugby. That's one thing. Let's see, I was an auto mechanic when I first started working. And let's see, what's something else I can say? I have five degrees from college.
Okay.
Yikes.
I know. I'm stumped. Okay. I think for sure he played rugby because that was like so organic. It just came off of his tongue. And I don't think that John's a liar.
Psychology.
Okay. And then Otto Mechanic, Kaden. I think he also did that because it lends to, like, robotics a little bit and like, his. His experience. I don't know. I think I'm gonna say the last one. The five degrees. I think he probably has four.
That's a good point. It could. He could have six. Yeah. Or, you know, but there's. I. I've seen the. The wall behind you of a bunch of things and like, so I'm like, let me see some of those. How many are right there? You know, you're John, you're military as well, right? I have, yeah. Rugby definitely fits the mold. I think that's a truth.
Yeah.
But you also could be lying about the 30 years of rugby.
Yeah, touche.
Okay, well, I'm gonna sync up with Karina. I think it is the five degrees.
Well, I played. I kind of misnomered the 30 years over. 30 years I played rugby and it was five degrees. But I've been an automatic. I can't fix anything.
Oh, my gosh, John, good for you. You Stumped me. Stumped us.
I'm the first.
Wow. Wait, rugby, okay? You have to expand a little bit on that. You played rugby for over 30 years?
Yeah, like. Like Kaden said, I started in the navy. My first game was in New Zealand. And, you know, playing overseas, it's a big sport overseas, so, you know, I was 18 and I just kept playing. Was my last game in Ireland. Northern Ireland.
Wow, that's so cool.
How cool is that? Yeah. Oh, I like this.
No, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah, it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I got too old to play, but. Yeah, yeah, it was fun.
Very cool.
That's an awesome run. All right, well, no one go to John. He's not an auto mechanic.
I can't see anything. The guys around here will tell you that they don't let me around tools.
So that's.
And the 5 degrees, though, really quickly, though, what are the 5 degrees? Before we move on, I need to know that.
So I have accounting and information systems and real estate undergraduate degrees. I have a real estate broker's license and CPA, too. And then master's in an MBA and a master's in information systems.
Holy smokes. Listen.
47.
Brilliant. Brilliant.
Come on.
Yeah, come on. That's why I always. I always tell you, you're so incredibly smart to be able to have conversations with you. I'm like, just.
I just work hard.
Now. You're incredibly smart. All right, let's go.
That's awesome. Yeah. Let's dive into some quick control by Karina on what the technology committee is doing.
Yes. Before I do that, though, I do want to give a shout out to the Tuvi family and specifically Kaden. I have a new mic today because of them, and they have been behind the scenes and helping us edit the podcast and doing all of the back scene, back the house work for this podcast. So I do want to give a little bit of love over there because it takes a lot. Takes a village, and they've all. And I don't know exactly who is involved, but I know there's magic that's happening over at the Etuvi family. So huge shout out to you guys. Kaden, thank you so much for leading the charge and helping us with the podcast, but let's jump into quick control. So our last episode was actually the Smart Building Blind Spot with Junaid from Zanc Compute. Do check that out. We posted it. It's a great episode, a lot of great information. They are definitely leading the charge over there at Zen Compute. So we were super grateful for him for having him on the show. And then our next episode is going to be the training trap from. Actually, we're hosting both Tony and Vince from Core America and Smart Inspect, so stay tuned for those. And then the highlight of my Quick Control segment is the CLX. This CLX is going to be hosted virtually on March 25th. Also posted yesterday a link to register. The topic is artificial intelligence. We've got some powerhouse moderators, so please sign up, get involved. We've gotten tremendous feedback about the CLX that we hosted at the Issa show, so we're bringing it to the association. We're super jazzed about it, so please sign up. All right, done. Time for Clear Cachet.
Let's go. Clear. Maybe that should just be the coined term of the Hard Refresh podcast is Clear. Clear the cache.
Yeah, I'm leaning in. We're leaning in.
All right, well, we're going to dive into this segment. John, this is, this is going to be all centered on you. Today's topic is the ROI fallacy, and you and I started discussing this a couple days ago. But first, I want you to give your, your basic synopsis of what this topic is. And I mean, an entire career in Financial Services, Mr. John Hill, has dominated the market in this regard. So why, why the ROI fallacy, particularly on the word of fallacy, what is misleading about roi?
So, so with, with equipment is what I'm really talking about. You know, in roi, it's this calculation that, you know, when, when someone you know in the industry has a sales guy come out and talk to him, they always say, oh, the ROI is. And, and, you know, most people don't understand the components of roi. So, you know, you really need to understand your financials to understand not only your financials, your strategy. And ROI is such a generic type of calculation that doesn't take to consideration the time value of money or the, the, the risk and reward or, or, you know, is it aligned with strategy? And so it doesn't take into the consideration the overall, the overarching. So when you're cfo, those are the, you know, really some of the three things that you start to look at is, and is it interdependent on other projects and stuff? So when you're buying, you know, an investment or equipment, that calculation is just really hard to do. Even if you get it from your CRO, p and L, you know, your, your financial statements, your profit and loss statement, it's looking at historical information, really. If you're buying an investment, something capital you want to be looking in the future, does it support your strategy for the future? It just doesn't do any of that. I mean, net present value and internal rate of return are much better calculations. And if you're going to the CFO with a capital expenditure, they're going to look at your ROI and pick a lot of holes. Is much better to go with net present value, but again, it should, should align with strategy. And so ROI doesn't do any of that stuff. And typically when you're, you know, like if you're in a cleaning company and you're being, you're might be talking to procurement. So you know, procurement's different than operations. So an ROI to procurement is going to be a lot different than an ROI to an operator or to a facility manager. Right. So we can get into what I.
Can I ask you. Sure, yeah. I love that you said that. Because can you unpack that a little bit from a department perspective? And you're saying ROI is different from hr, ROI is different from for ops, but from, if you're trying to think through this, what's the best place to start? Are you start starting top down. So from a company perspective, what's the ROI goal? And then you drill into the department, like how would you even start that conversation?
So you know, it all gets back to Peter Drucker, the basis of business. Right? You have to understand your business. So what is the investment? How is the investment fitting into your growth? Right? And that's where strategy comes in. You know, when you're, when you're positioning an asset coming in, then you know the whole idea of the asset is how much revenue is it going to produce for you or how much cost is it going to save. So that's really what you're after. So net present value takes the time value of money because a dollar today is worth less than a dollar three years from now. Right. So that's why it's more accurate from a department, from an organizational. How many cleaners get their whole P and L get the whole profit and loss statement. A lot of times they just get their labor and that's it. Right. You have to have a whole kind of comprehensive profit loss statement to even understand, understand roi. But you know, when you're looking at bringing in a piece of equipment like, and that's what I'm talking about is more of a piece of equipment. If you're buying a business, ROI is a whole different calculation. It's so high level, it's really high level. But when you're Buying a piece of equipment, which I think most of our guys who are kind of. I kind of think about them. Is this thing going to add income to my operating profit or my operating income, is this going to bump my. Because that's what I'm measured on is my operating income. Right. So if I buy say a machine or even a consumable, that can save me money. That's the calculation I'm looking at. That's not roi. All that is an operational exchange, right. So let's say you buy a machine and it saves you labor. Well, but it costs you equipment. So that balance, you have to adjust. And if you don't know your profit and loss statement, you can't make those adjustments accurately. So you're not going to see that operating income boost that you might have thought of. Unfortunately not a lot of clean companies drive their P&Ls all the way down to like a store manager so that they can, they can manage it.
But I like seeing that from your perspective, John. Like the both sides, right? Like to balance it out. And it's purposely named that the balance sheet. You have to be able to see how it impacts on both sides. I think to your point, one of the things that I remember doing from a BSC perspective is we would give metrics to area managers, but we would only give a certain amount of metrics. They wouldn't see all of the things that were really speaking to our balance sheet. And so to your point, getting that full picture, I think gives. Goes to strategy and really paints the whole world in, in a different way for them.
Absolutely.
Yeah. John, one of the things you were mentioning just made me think about when you're, when you're PI. When you're buying a piece of technology, in this case, let's call it a robotics machinery. And let's say, actually let's say it's not even robotics, just advancement of technology of things that a backpack vacuum versus a corded one. Right. Advanced technology and batteries. Like, the idea is that it's supposed to make you more productive. Right. Being able to do the same job faster and more efficient. And I, we were talking the other day, you had mentioned that like ROI is everywhere and people really don't understand what it means. People use it as like a phrase, oh, what's your return on investment? What's your return on investment? It makes a lot more sense at the top line of the business level. But like you're talking to a supervisor down on the front line. You're like, hey, we need an ROI on this and they're like, what? Like, okay, you know, let's dumb it down. All right. It's. Your staff is going to be doing this task for an hour. Well, if we bought this piece of equipment, you could do this task and this task in that same hour. That's like the language they understand there, right?
Yeah, that's exactly right. And so when you're, when you're looking at, when you're, when they're looking at purchase of this equipment, leases are coming more important because, you know, they can just take the expense out and then add that lease expense and you can, that's something they understand. Right. Or, you know, the company might have depreciation. So once they get that understanding, now you can have a conversation about what you just said. Okay, if I get a piece of equipment that relieves my labor, like, like, let's take a backpack back. Right. Battery powered versus corded, about 30% more effective. Right. And so, you know, now what you can say is you can pick up some add on for them to do or just be able to do the work where they don't have enough people. When we talk to folks, most cleaning companies and most even in House or BSCS have about 70% of their employees that are really good, but they have 30%. They need really some type of automation or something that takes up those activities. So backpack, increase your product.
What I was just going to add too, like from what Kaden just said, I think you measure ROI both qualitative and quantitatively. Right. And I think that is something that you, from an operational perspective, like I just remember thinking like ROI is directly correlated to dollars. Right. But not really. It's also based on so many different qualitative factors. And so getting that mindset to change, I think is really critical from the top down. Right.
Yeah. The ISS has, Issa has a pamphlet on the value of cleaning. It was written probably 10 years ago or so and they might have updated it since then. But they talk about asset preservation, you know, when you clean every day, you know, consistency, health, sustainability. I mean, all these things that aren't on your balance sheet or income statement, but they're so important.
So important.
Yeah.
John, What I'm curious, talking about machinery, equipment, let's move into like the other side of tech, which is software, automation, even AI. What's the ROI fallacy advice you would give in this realm?
That's a good question. It's new and we're going there. You know, my advice is, you know, I'm an old guy. It's like the Internet was in 95. If you're not in it now or trying to pursue it in 10 years, you're not going to be in the game because you need to start understanding how you can combine data to increase your productivity. We've talked, all of us about the foundation of AOI is the data you collect, at least for your business. The data you collect and how you use that data to pick your segment, hire your resources. I mean, develop your whole company, which is your strategy. Right. So without that data, AI has a hard time really helping your business grow. From that perspective now, there's a lot of advantages of AI, and what I see it being used for now is like someone who wants to go out and say, hey, I'd like to find out more about HR policies. And boom. I was just looking at power attorneys from my parents. So what do I do? I go out and look at durable power attorneys. Gives me a whole bunch of stuff to read. But if you want to use it to actually enhance your business, you're going to depend on it. You need to feed it with really good data. And that's an investment, it's a monetary investment to do well.
And I love that you said that, because one of the things that I'm hearing a lot from the companies that I'm working with is really data viability and credibility. Right. And ensuring that the data is good data. And what do you do? How do you build data governance and policies within these organizations and then set up benchmarks or just. It's such an iterative process, too, when it comes to data analysis. I think that's one of the misconceptions that I would say is like, it's not a set it and forget it. Right. It's like you got to normalize and standardize data, but you have to be diligent about it, because if you're making these big decisions based on data, you got to make sure that it's. It's good data. Right. And so I love that. You certainly touched on that.
Yeah. Well, Keaton and I, when we talked, we were talking about the consolidation of data and looking at your customer. So I worked at a company, a local bank that became Capital One. And so we did a lot of statistical analysis, but with a. An AI like database, right. With customer databases. And what you're able to do is look at your company from a customer level, and so then you can avoid those customers that use too much of your resources. And so that's where I think a company might want to be with AI. Is looking at new customer segments that overlap with the existing customer segments, but with your resources and skill sets that you can align with and you let your competitors have the ones that you don't. I think Progressive and Church used to have an advertisement where they said, come to us first if we can, if we can't serve you, we'll send you to the next best guy. So, you know, I mean, with the idea, they wanted to get the guys who fit their segmentation.
Yeah. Like I, I'm thinking about this, the ROI of a time invested. Right. Everything is going to go back to some type of monetary end outcome. Right. In business, we're in business to make money. So, but setting that, not setting aside, that's the outcome. I, I think about what you just said, John, something to be careful of. When your time invested into AI can also be not a good return on that time investment. It can pull you down into the pit of data and information that goes nowhere.
Yeah.
Right. Like I, I, I struggle with this all the time is I get fascinated about learning things, about the insights that's being gathered. So it's a balance, just like your balance sheet.
Right.
There's things that go in, things that go out. You've gotta be super protective of clean data going into things. Otherwise you're gonna spend way more time and then you aren't gonna get a return on investment. Like I, when we're talking about software, you could have software just duplicate a terrible process. Yeah, right.
And drive, drive you completely out of business.
Yeah. And then you don't get a return on your investment, whether that's time or the finance side. So like this business strategy, like go in with the lens that like, what am I trying to solve? Because if you don't have that clear roadmap. We've brought this up a few times on episodes now.
Yeah.
So if you're listening to the podcast, I hope you're catching the hint. You've got to have strategy before you implement technology anyways.
Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's a very good point. Because you want to rely on the data that you get. And as a CEO or you know, like you are, you don't want to give your people information that they're making decisions on that you know, is not correct. Right. I mean, that's kind of silly. So your input and controls around your input make all the difference in the world, you know, because that's where it all begins. But you know, it's still, every company is a little different. And so finding out the data that drives your segmentation takes time to do. And then building the database around that and then the kind of the algorithms to help you do that. I mean we, you know, in the industry we talked about, you know, like data information, but then knowledge. So knowledge is taking that information and then applying it to your specific strategy. But then wisdom is taking that data and applying it in a competitive way that's sustainable from your competitors. So some people have some information that they've put together over time. That's a competitive advantage. So we all want a competitive advantage. Sometimes it's sustainable.
Anyway, I'm going to ask Kayden a question because I'm actually very curious from a platform perspective. Kayden. And you guys get a lot of questions from a customer base, right? And like, what, what do you say to customers that are asking you, like, what's the ROI in using a platform like this? What's a clear. I'm sure it's. You touched on it a second ago in terms of like, what is the actual problem you're trying to solve for? Right. That's number one importance. But like from your perspective, when people are asking that question to use your product or any platform, like what. What's the narrative?
Yeah.
Well, one of the things that drive me crazy, I'll start with this. It drives me crazy and this happens all the time in this industry. I'm hopefully it's not just us that experiences, hopefully other softwares, but a commercial cleaning company shows up on a call and they say, I don't know what you do, you're just in the RFP and so I have to get you. And it drives me nuts because I already know we're going to waste time onboarding someone that will cancel as soon as they lose that contract and never implement.
Right.
Absolutely. Drives me bonkers. As you can tell, my passion's coming through on that one. But, but when people come and they ask about like, hey, what's the ROI of your platform? Often I will tell someone, listen, our platform and many other platforms, software in general just automates and streamlines successful or unsuccessful processes. So the ROI is actually dependent on what you need to have as a process and solve because you're going to get to a very bad outcome much faster with software. If you're going to have it go do a process that's bad going to arrive at that destination faster or you're going to arrive at a better destination faster on that strategy. Typically what all go. And I actually John and I were talking about this the other day for Us, we talked to the, the commercial, the building service contractor side and some in house. But we're talking about someone who's trying to make money, grow revenue. So every expense is connected to revenue in some way, shape or form. And I always relate it to three things, which is acquisition, retention or expansion. Like I'm, I, I don't need you to be a super mathematician to go figure out the P and L and how the balance sheet is going to figure this all out. But can you put a simple statement together that says if we invest in this tool, here's how it's going to enhance the acquisition of customers, make it faster.
Right.
Shorter sales cycles, whatever it is, or is it going to help us retain. Right, we're going from a 30% client annual churn rate to a 20% client annual churn rate or it's going to help us provide insights to our customers that enables us to get them to buy more of our services throughout their property management network. Right. We have two buildings, they have 37 in their portfolio. Right. So those are the statements I try and simplify it, tell me in some way, shape or form, let's create a blanket statement together. It's going to do this for acquisition or it's going to do this for retention, or it's going to do this for expansion, or it's going to handle all three. Then you can lean in with like the confidence of this is a good investment.
That's awesome.
The. What you, you know, the three things that you just identified are hard to do because you have to really look at your acquisition. What's it cost you to acquire a customer? What it costs you to retain a customer. So in the industry, there's a lot of people that don't do that calculation because they just churn their accounts. Right. It's kind of silly a little bit, but, but to do those calculations, you really need the information. Now if you have the information that in the strategy, that information in your strategy, you could use AI to then go out in the marketplace and, and start to profile potential customers. I mean, with that information. But then you'd have to, you have to set up something like that. And, and I don't know why the industry doesn't do more of that because it would be. Some guys focus on different things. To me, that's where AI comes in and then you build your resources around so you focus, you can focus more. A lot of guys are just out there returning bids on RFPs and.
They.
Get it and they don't get it.
But I think too, like, I love that you said that, Kaden. But when I remember having this fight with Chase, a Pioneer, and in terms of like, how can we really point to the value of Quora because we were building a fully integrated proprietary software, right? And so I was like, I always, I'm the champion of Quora. I'm like, we're winning because of tech, we're winning because of tech. And it was like, well, there's four factors, right? It's price, relationship, innovation. For Pioneer, it was innovation and service. And how do you really point the needle or point the arrow and say it was because of tech or it was because of service or was because of price. It was because of relationship. And so that becomes internally, I think if you can sustain, you can add maybe a weight into those, into those categories, you have a better representation of how you're winning or acquiring or retaining to your point. But knowing those metrics, especially when you invest in technology, becomes critical because then you can show and say like, actually we got this new business, retain this new business because the survey from a client said that they appreciate the analytics provided by Otubi or we were able to acquire new business because of this or you know, yeah, one of the.
Things I've done in my past is financial services is retention. So you look at your customer base. You have several departments like you were just talking about Karina. And so you have to household these accounts, right? You have to put them all together because one guy might take one division, might irritate your customer and they take the whole relationship away. So you have to, you're looking at larger BSCs need to look at across their portfolio because the retention might not be where they're looking. It might have been somewhere else. And so knowing that gives you a lot of insights and. But you know, what we're talking about is some pretty advanced information system and decision making, so reporting tools. So not only input but a nice process and a good output and then training your resources to make these types of decisions, which, you know, a lot of the resources in this industry aren't used to looking at information to make decisions. They're all, you know, they've learned from a manual sense. So, you know, this is where your generation is going to come in and kind of use more information. My generation really doesn't, you know, use that much. It's more, it's more from an experience perspective.
I think from a retention perspective, like I would encourage people to think through, let's say you're using O2V and you're able to provide analytics to your customer. Right. And you're showing how the inspector quality control program's coming up. What you could point to in a clear monthly business review or quarter business review is, like, how you're really measuring up. And then when time comes a renewal, you can say, hey, this is what we've been tracking. This is how we're improving. This is how we were catching. And that way, you can tie these tools to retention. And that's something that I think a lot of companies struggle with. They're using the tools, but they're not doing a good job digesting the data to their clients and showing and bragging a little bit. Right. Because the fear is always like, oh, no, what if it's a bad score? And it's like, no, it's not about bad scores. It's about being accountable and transparent and saying, hey, we may have gotten a bad score, but we also corrected it in less than 12 hours. Right. We were able to fix that error. And this is how we're being proactive with the tool. Like O2B. Shameless plug for OTUV. Look how much love.
Yeah, right. And, and, and, and beyond that, though, there's several tools, fellow competitors, that understand the same exact Princip. I love. Like, it's, it's really hard if you're the only one pushing that message. But there's. There's half a dozen of us that are pushing that message to the industry. The coolest part about being a part of the committee and what Issa is pushing here is the fact that we are going to be shakers and movers of the future of the industry.
Yeah.
And getting out of. The whole point of clearing the cash of your thinking is how do you use data to go influence sales, to go influence marketing? I was on a coaching call with a client yesterday, and I said, you are not using operational data. You have it right in front of you. You know inspection scores, you know your average response time to customers, and you don't have it in a single piece of marketing collateral or in your sales process. I said, this is gold. I actually posted this morning about this on. On LinkedIn, because this, this person's competitive advantage, he's like, oh, well, I talk about how we train our. Our staff. I said, that's a given. Yeah, you better train your staff.
Yeah, right.
How to do good things. But they don't care about how you train your staff or that you did do it. They want to know the outcome. So go sell the outcome. And the Coolest part is if you're using software and technology, go showcase that data actually exists. You're like, hey, here's our 200 customers locations. Here's our average response time across all of our business portfolio. Here's our average inspection score. Boom. This is why you should do business with that.
And this is why I get so, like, excited about it, because I think this is such a great example of where marketing and tech come together. And it's a fusion, it's a beautiful relationship of how do you use technology and how do you use branding and marketing to your advantage. Right. You can provide to your point, a sales or one pager included in your sales presentation, show off those stats, give those high bold that 95% retention score and like use it. But now you actually have a source that you can point to and say, this is how we're able to give you that score and now make it look sexy. I mean, that's so cool to me. I think it's the reason why I do what I do is you show off. Right?
You know, is that that old adage you, you can't, you can't manage what you can't measure?
Yes, yes.
So you have to be able to measure it. And, and you know, it's, it seems simple. You know, I taught business for a long time and, and a lot of these concepts are pretty simple, but they're so complex.
Well, and I think to your point too, it's challenging the status quo of a static relationship with data. Right. And that's, and I'll be the first to admit that I had the same issue. This was like three years ago. We were using clean code and a bunch of our buildings loved it, implemented it, but then it was just like sitting, the data was sitting there. So I didn't have a dynamic relationship. I wasn't looking at the data like consistently and reporting back. And I think that is what is critical. Look at the data consistently and make change and drive that influence into your organization. Because if you just use tools and let the data sit there, that's not really moving the needle. There's so much information like look at it and do something with it.
And that takes training. You know, I mean, organizations from a top down just can't say, okay, we're going to implement a system here and we've got a bunch of data, so go for it. I mean, it takes some, some training to do that.
Yeah. Well, the, this conversation, I sure hope has been incredibly fruitful for our listeners. We could go for hours longer, but we don't want to dry out the eyes of our listeners. So one, one last thing to close out.
I'm.
I did this on a podcast I was part of a few years ago. I'm going to introduce it here. Karina has no clue what I'm about to do.
Okay.
I love surprises to talk about these things before being on the air.
No, I love it. Surprise me.
We're going to call it the final porcelain thought.
Okay. Now toilet.
That's the toilet. The shower being at the sink. This is the cleaning industry.
It works.
Yeah, it does work.
Okay, so this is the porcelain thought in those moments, or it's at, like, our kitchen sink doing dishes. Right. Think of where porcelain is. Right? These are moments to, like, really think. We call it the porcelain thoughts. For me, it's like the shower.
Okay.
My wife, it's like when she's actually sitting in the tub. Right. These thoughts come to me that are, wow. When I calmed down and really thought about what it is that can really speak to me. So, John, what would be the porcelain thought that you would want to impress upon everyone's mind? One final thought? The porcelain. Porcelain thought to take away from your message today.
Just do it. I mean, just get involved with data and start to better understand your strategy and culture. And then everything derives from that, I guess. That's great. Mine walking. I walk and I used to run, but since I have my knees replaced, it's more walking now. But that's where I get clear thoughts.
That's awesome. The porcelain thought, the running thought, the both work.
Both work. Okay. My porcelain. Wait, I have to do one too, right? Or are you going to.
You do. You do.
Okay.
You have to do it. You can do it.
Okay. I will make my best. I promise. My porcelain thought is ROI is measured both qualitatively and quantitatively. So take that and just remember, because I just feel like I had an aha moment because I have always measured it by dollar value. But I just realized, you know what? It's actually qualitative as well.
That's a good point.
Love that. All right, well, my final porcelain thought is the inputs and outputs of your personal life. We're all in business, but let's remember that the ROI of your time, your energy put into something should have an input and an output to you and don't lose track of it. So that's my porcelain thought.
Oh, my gosh. Kaden, of course. He goes last because he has the best one. I love it.
Thanks for the conversation. It's been great.
Yes, John, it's been a pleasure to have you. For those of you listening, be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel for all things content related to the ISSA Innovation and Technology Committee, but particularly catching us on the next episode of Hard Refresh. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining.
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