Scaling a Business From $60M to $1Billion | Adam Blankenship, COO Blue Grace Logistics (Podcast 372)

I think when I first got here and it fits my style really well, I think what this company needed more than great salespeople was it needed structure and it needed help. Kind of thinking about how real companies emerge from fun little entrepreneurial workshops.

All right, so I am really excited about today's guest. Today's guest is Adam Blankenship, who is the CEO of bluegrace Logistics. I actually work behind the scenes coaching the CEO and Adam and a few of the members of their leadership team. About five years ago, I coached them for a period of about three or four years. Really got to see Adam scale up in his career and go from the head of sales, head of national account sales, and now into the CEO role. And this is the real deal COO. He's the CEO of $1 billion revenue company. When I met them, they were doing about $60 million in revenue. He helped navigate them from 60 million in revenue to a billion. And this is real revenue, real sales, but 650 employees. Adam joined Bluegrass Logistics in early 2012 and has been since leading and been responsible for developing the company's strategic direction. Along with leading all aspects of Blue Gray sales and client support organizations, he began his career in Freight almost 20 years ago, has held senior executive roles in sales, leadership, pricing, procurement, analytics and customer support. He uses data and best practices expertise, a lot of self learning to help scale himself and the company. And as I mentioned, they've gone from about 60 million in revenue to about a billion dollars today, from about 50 employees to over 600 today. Going to learn a lot. You're going to gain some really great insights. And Adam is a spectacular leader. Really lucky to have him on the podcast. You can also watch this episode on our YouTube podcast channel. Make sure you subscribe to both the Apple podcast and the YouTube channel so you can always gain all these insights going forward. We'll see you on the inside. So, Adam, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.

Great. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I used to work with Blue Grace kind of behind the scenes a little bit working with you and the leadership team and got to watch you really from that earliest days, probably going back about 10 years ago now when you were pretty much Bobby's de facto second in command back then. But now you're truly the COO of the organization. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about what bluegrace Logistics is and then give us a bit of a background on how your career got you to where you are today inside the company.

First, bluegrace is a large third party logistics provider where we exist to help customers move to freight from one place to another. We typically serve large and medium sized businesses, ship to other businesses. Most, most traditionally we have really we kind of made up of two pieces. We have what I would call a very traditional freight brokerage that services the less than truckload and the full truckload community. And then we have the slightly larger piece of our business which is our managed transportation organization where it looks a little bit more like consulting where we're helping clients serve slightly more complex needs in traditionally a more exclusive, contractual, full outsource sort of way. So we'll sort of customize a solution to sort of take care of those problems as opposed to more of the one off transactional brokerage approach. So it's been a great journey. Bluegrace has been around for about 14 years and I've been around for about a dozen of that now. So it's got a lot of growth and it's been a lot of fun.

What's the size of the organization? Just so everybody listening or watching us on YouTube have a bit of a perspective. What's the size in terms of revenue, number of employees, where you operate?

We're about $1 billion. We're just under $1 billion in top line revenue and we're setting today I believe a little over 620 people.

620 people, about $1 billion in revenue. I'm going to ask you in a little bit about a transition that our transaction that happened probably, I'm going to guess five years ago where you did a big raise. But in the 12 years that you've been there, I think when I got to meet you and the team, you were about 40 or 50 employees. You're at about 620 now, so 10, 15 times bigger. I can't imagine that the company is the same. How has the company changed and how have you as a leader had to change?

When I got here, we were about 50 people and about 50 or 60 million dollars, the top line. So we've seen your numbers are pretty much spot on right there. So you know, it's been an adventure. When I came to Bluegrace, you know, when I walked through the door day one, I saw a company that was pretty much just a selling organization. So we had, we had a bunch of really cool good salespeople and we had nothing else. We had no business process, no structure, no organization, no compliance. No. There's lots of challenges that you walk through. And find a highly entrepreneurial, highly sales focused organization. And so really, you know, coming into bluegrace, getting an opportunity to kind of shape a lot of that work, trying to take a really cool business and turning it into a really sustainable, yet still really cool business that has, you know, longevity, can kind of move into the world and attract investment capital and think about, you know, something other than the next year. So you start thinking about a longer life cycle of what Blue Grays can ultimately do.

You've taken a very different path from most people who are in the CEO role. Most people in a CEO role come out of operations and kind of transition through operations. Sometimes they come out of more of the finance side of the business and they take over more of the operations. I don't think I've seen very many people come out of the sales organization because you used to head up the sales and national account sales, but admittedly you were also very strategic. You weren't the typical salesperson back then. In fact, I think when I even first met you, I was confused as to why you were running sales because you were so buttoned down and process focused. Has that always been part of you or.

Yeah. So, you know, I think I describe myself as kind of a consultant by nature, meaning I like to solve problems. And I think that's been the early stages of my career where a lot of that. I also have always been more of an analytically focused decision maker and leader as well too. You know, coming through our industry. You know, I think you're right. I think the operational path, the finance path, the sales path, they do tend to be kind of different things and they do kind of stay siloed into those paths and don't tend to kind of cross over that much. So. But one of the things that I always really liked about Blue Grace and one of the things that attracted me here was I didn't really want to run a sales organization. I wanted to run a growing business and I didn't really want to, you know, be a part of running a finance team. It's like, I want to run this company, I want to do cool things at a business level here. That's going to change how the industry sees us. And one of the things that I think I've been pretty good at and that I think is really instrumental in our company is you can be fantastic at, let's call it as a practitioner of your craft inside the world of finance or operations. But if you, you don't understand how it all fits together, if you don't Understand why customers choose us, why customers buy from us, why we lose customers. And then ultimately, on the flip side of that, if you don't understand the decisions and make the things that we do to help customers buy from us and stick with us, how that translates into our pocketbook and what we have to do to service them and what it costs us to do that. I just think you're not in a very good position to ultimately lead the company strategically. And so I've always tried to approach my career of I want to be involved in how we run this business, and let's call it the. What my specific role is at any given point in time. I'll flex around that to the extent that I need to, but I want to be involved in how we think about where we're going and what's needed there and just kind of plug the gaps candidly, because I think that's the other thing with a, you know, rapidly growing company. The stuff that I do today is very different than the stuff I did six months ago, and it's radically different than the stuff that I did, you know, 10, 12 years ago when I first got here.

It makes sense because when I was first meeting you, you would whiteboard a lot of stuff. You were always kind of standing up in parts of our discussion to, like, talk through it, whereas a salesperson would stand up and talk with their hands, were actually physically looking at models and processes. And so were you less of a salesperson and more of a business leader right from the get go, do you think?

Yeah, I think that's probably true.

Maybe more of a charismatic. Were you more of like a charismatic operations person who.

Yeah, I think that's probably. I think that's probably a fair assessment. And I think, you know, I still have all the same whiteboards here that I think you probably saw the last time you were here. So I still probably do that a fair amount. And honestly, I tell people right off the bat, they're like, hey, you see a lot of whiteboards in here for a reason. Like, I'm signaling to you it's okay to challenge ideas and talk. And, like, I don't expect you just to bring totally buttoned up stuff to me. I want to talk about that stuff. So, you know, I think, you know, running sales, I think we've been able to, as we've been able to grow and diversify our company size, we've been able to bring some people that are fantastic practitioners of the craft of being, hey, customer facing point of impact, great sales leaders. We've been able to kind of do that I think when I first got here. And it fits my style really well. I think what this company needed more than great salespeople was it needed structure and it needed help. Kind of thinking about how, how real companies emerge from fun little entrepreneurial workshops. And I think that's, that's one of the things that I always kind of observed here was like, there's a cool business hidden in here. You have to keep the fun and the entrepreneurship of what's happening in here from sort of stifling like a successful, stable, growing business that can continually reinvest itself and protect its key people over time and do the things that let's call it slightly more mature companies may do. And so I think that's. And then balancing that with Bobby, I think that's always been a good opportunity for he and I to kind of frick and frack kind of the world through two very. We see the world through a similar lens in a lot of ways, but we get there in very different manners. And I think that's always been kind of a nice blend for us.

I want to ask about that. So Bobby is the CEO and the founder of Blue Grace. You've been with him since really at the very beginning. He is a very loyal human, like extraordinary loyal to his people. But he's also been able to make some tough decisions in letting people go over the years. And some of them being senior executives, some of them helping those senior executives transition out. And you've watched the original senior team, some of them transition out or get let go and then others being hired in and then let go or transitioning out. Why do you think you've not survive that? But why have you thrived in that 12 year period and gone into the role that you're in? I know the loyalty was always there and the respect was always there, but what else was there that helped you stick and move into this role, do you think?

There's probably a lot of reasons to that. And I think Bobby is an incredibly loyal person and I think that's a fantastic attribute. I hope somebody says that about me. But at the same time it also creates some challenges in a growing business that has to kind of continually reinvent itself. And so that can actually create some, you know, some, some issues for us at times, you know, as it relates more to me and my role here, I guess I kind of felt like I was always brought here to help us get to an eventual massive size company with lots of opportunities for either big exit or Something really cool that's going to really drive this company to where our founder wants to go, whether that's five years down the road or 20 years down the road. I guess that's kind of always where I viewed myself through that kind of, that sort of measuring stick, if you will. I'm wired a little bit different. You know, I read all the time, I do stuff all the time because I think, not because it necessarily I have to, but because it's like I view myself of like, if I'm not doing something to make myself better on a personal level, I don't feel very good about myself. And so I try to challenge myself to do a lot of different stuff to try to grow so that I don't get sort of boxed into like this one stable path. And you know, you and I have joked about it before, but like, honestly, I try to find additional things to take on at our company and every place I've ever been, candidly, because my boredom factor sets in too after a while. If we're not running fast and attacking big problems and stretching ourselves to do more than what we've done, then this place isn't as much fun. And I, I came here to be really, really, really challenged and impactful. And so as part of that, if you're going to say that that's your goal, you kind of got to do your part of getting yourself ready so you can be capable to do those things as well too. So I think it's kind of a little bit of self investment, but then also just kind of matching the environment to what you're going to ultimately bring to it.

So, you know, in that, in that you always like taking on the new challenges and the new kind of business areas or projects, how do you stay away from getting sucked into all of the areas of the business too? Like, how do you, how do you start to balance? Okay, I'm taking all this on, but I'm going to start delegating this more or I'm going to take all this on, but I'm going to give that responsibility because you do have a fairly balanced life. You're very active in fitness and with family and, and you, you're not like this massive stressed out workaholic, you know, coo, either or, or you weren't.

Yeah, well, I think today I would maybe answer that question differently than maybe four, five, six, eight years ago. I think early on I think the company needed my fingerprints on more than it does today, if I'm being honest. So it needed me to turn More wrenches at the ground level because we didn't have a built out infrastructure. When I got here, I saw a lot of good people that were great at their job, whether that was a frontline ops person or a salesperson. But we had no middle management layer at all in the company. And even our senior leaders that were here had people that had kind of grown up into the business and maybe didn't have diversity of sort of backgrounds and skill sets. And so the company needed me to sort of kind of push on it in different ways in today than I do today. Whereas so over that period of years, you know, focusing on how do we build business process, how do we recruit good talent, where we actually have, if you look at my team, my lieutenants, if you will, will are really good. And so there's a lot of days I don't need to be nearly as involved in the blocking and tackling of, hey, are we talking to this customer? Are we going to get this deal closed? Do I need to, you know, are the engineers doing their job right as our procurement team, buying? Right. Like, yeah, I mean, I'll pick at that stuff because that's my background and that's ultimately my accountability points here. But I don't have to turn the wrenches on that most days. And so I think that's been a big piece of it. And as we've grown and built out and solidified our team, it's allowed me to take maybe a half step away from the business, if you will, to take a bit more strategic view of it, to have more of a true leadership instead of sort of goggles looking in on the business. And I think that's been very helpful, you know, especially in more recent years where, you know, through an investment process with Warburg Pincus and as we continue to look for additional investment capital, those are distractions. And it's really hard to run a great business, especially an entrepreneurial, focused business, when you're doing stuff like that. And I mean, I have these conversations all the time still with my, with my teams and say, guys, if I can take that off of your plate, if I'm the sacrificial lamb that deal with most of that, so you guys can go make sure that this business is awesome. That's a good trade. That's where we need to be.

I'm going to ask about that Warburg investment. It was a commitment of $255 million investment by Warburg Pincus. We're going to ask about that in a few minutes. I want to Ask though about something you just touched on. And it was around five years ago, I'm guessing maybe six years ago. There was a transition point in the company when I think you and Bobby realized we needed to retitle almost everyone in the company. And it was a lot of the very early stage people had been with the company from like 40 people up to 600 and they had VP titles, but they were really directors. And there were other people that were more like directors that should have been VPs. And you guys did like a full on almost retitle, as I recollect of everybody. That's a very tactical and strategic move at the same time. How did you do it? How did it go? How did you execute with that?

You know, first off, I think that that's basically exactly what happened is we took, I would say look at about 70 plus percent of the people that were maybe at the director level and above had some sort of tweak or change their title and the way that they're structured the organization. And we needed to do that to sort of, you know, level set kind of where we're at. Because the company at $200 million of top line is just not the same company from complexity as it is at a billion dollars. And so, and it didn't really afford us the opportunity to sort of reward the highest performers, whether that's from compensation or titling. And then you kind of get this weird sort of job grading compression. You just had a lot of issues that we really had to kind of work through. And so I'll tell you what, I wish there was this really elaborate, cool piece of software you could go buy that does that for you, but we haven't found it. And so there was just a lot of kind of slugging through some hard conversations. And in certain circumstances, and we still see this today, in certain circumstances, it's, we have good people that the business has maybe grown a little bit beyond kind of what they were, what they used to do at the company originally. But they're still good people and they have, they have great utility for us. We just have to match the role with the people a little bit over time and constantly refresh that. So if you, if you focus in on first off, it starts if the company trusts you or if you, excuse me, if your employees trust the company, this competition is a lot easier. Right. So, and I think Bobby has always developed, as you mentioned earlier, a lot of loyalty. But I think Bobby's also developed a lot of trust from his team. And so when Bobby has Made some of those conversations and promises in the past. He delivers upon that. And that's something I always, and I'll actually call people out on this to say, have I ever not done something that I told you I was going to do? Because I wear that as kind of a badge of honor. If I tell you I'm going to do it, I'm absolutely going to do it. And if it creates a problem, I will deal with it. It won't be counter to what I tell you. And I think over time you develop a reputation for people just quite frankly, they trust you. And so if you go into it with the right intentions of doing what's best for the company, honoring your commitments to the people at a very personalized level, I think you can get there. That's not to say that you don't lose some people in that process and doesn't create some heartache and some animosity here and there. But I think a good company that wants to think about itself beyond, let's call it this, you know, small founder led business into much larger, you know, private equity owned company to, you know, multi billion dollar company. If you're not willing to do those things, which is okay, just you have to kind of get off that ladder if you will, like you just can't going down that path if you're not willing to sort of have those hard conversations. And it doesn't necessarily mean you have to hurt people in that process. It just means you, you're going to have to put the energy into how you sort of land the plane the best you can. Getting done, you know, 70, 80% of what all needs to get done in a reasonably compressed period.

And it sounds like it's because of all the deposits that you and the leadership team have made around the core values that's built all that trust that then allows the company to make all the tough decisions because the team trusts. Right? Is that.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you, it, I don't think a week goes by, you don't hear somebody in our leadership team use the term, you know, be caring of all others. That's, that's, that's our number one reason you will get fired here as it relates to our core values is that if you do something counter to that, you're going to have to explain it. And I think when you do that, you start building that equity kind of throughout the business, that that actually is real and it matters and you need to factor that into kind of how you run the business because of it.

And I'm not going to go on the core value stuff. You guys have built one of the best companies to work for in Florida. But we've done a lot of episodes around core values. But you guys are the only company who I've ever let choose one a single word, core value. And one of yours is simplify. I'm like, it's just so good. You can't turn that into a short phrase. Simplifies. Perfect. So I, I do want to ask though about a few transition points that I recollect. And there, there were three or four that I remember as being pretty big transitions for the company. One was this really explosive growth when you went from like 40 people up to about 700. There was also the point when you raised the 255 million from Warburg Pincus, and then probably Covid would have been a massive one because you were a very office based. 700 people in a company in, in one building, very strong company culture, all open office environment to then was it work from home like in Covid? Talk about each of those three transitions and maybe what you learned.

I'll just start with COVID I'll kind of go in reverse order here. And I think with COVID I think it's been interesting. It's a little, kind of a funny sort of story here. But you know, our investment partners at Warburg have been fantastic and we literally started these conversations with, guys, we're gonna have to really buckle down here because we think the economic forecast for your business is somewhere between the end of the world and the Great Depression. Like, well, fantastic. That that's not a fantastic if that's your good and your bad scenario. Like this is not a jump, a great jumping off point to like what our forecasting look like. So when Covid first hit, we went from being vibrant culture with, you know, let's go probably at the time, 500 and something people to. I remember, you know, a week into this thing, I think there was probably six of us here at the office. And so in an office of, you know, 70,000 square feet, there's six people in it. And they tend to be the six people that I deal with the most anyway, so it's, you know, very, very different world now. And on the backdrop of that, you have our private equity group setting behind us going, we think the world is ending here, guys. And like, you think about scenarios where you may lose 50, 60, 80% of your business in the next three to six months. How do you think about rationalizing that business? And so we had A lot of very, very, very late nights and, you know, a lot. A lot of heartache around. How are we going to kind of run this business? First off, we actually did some hard things, and I think that's actually one of the things that really helped us is in a hard moment, we did some hard stuff. And then the market was significantly better for our space than what it was forecasted to be. And it catapulted us. It launched us to where we're at today. And so it helped us sort of shed some of that last. Pieces of. I don't say dead weight, but pieces of people that are people and processes that maybe didn't fit perfectly that moment in time help us kind of shed some of that and to kind of move into a new sort of footing where it had to be more results based. We've got to survive. We've got to survive and keep going. And that really launched us to kind of where we're at in the company we are today. And so, you know, I view that as, you know, obviously, economically, Covid was a boom for, you know, logistics space in general, but I think it was a boom for bluegrace in general because it really helped us kind of become a little company and shed the. The last pieces of, you know, maybe, you know, small business startup, if you will, that struggles with some of the challenges of sort of, you know, some of the people and processes kind of having to kind of evolve. So.

Interesting. Okay, speak to the Warburg investment. I mean, that was a really. And I think I have the numbers correctly, it was a commitment for 255 million. How much did you bring into the business initially with that, and how did that change the business? And I would imagine that it can be good and bad at the same time. On the good, it's like, wow, we have all this money to spend on the bad, we can get pretty sloppy and people can get cocky or take their eye off the ball. How do you navigate through that?

I feel like you just described this right there at times, right there with that. So it was fantastic. It's good to do anything for a period of time and have some level of success. Enough level of success that a massively prestigious private equity group says, hey, you guys are pretty cool. How about we buy you guys? Like, okay, well, that's. That's flattering. So it'd be hard to not at least be excited about that. But when you get past the 255 million commitment, I think that the net money in, at the. At the moment of close Was, was probably only about 80 million thereabouts. A lot. So what that did for us, though, is it really allowed us to kind of springboard into a couple of things. And so as you might remember, when we went, when we, at that moment in time, we still had about 50. Approximately 50% of our business came from a franchise network. And the other half of our business was direct corporate control business. And so we actually did two things with most of that money and the capital that we brought in. One is we completely retired over the next 18 months our entire franchise network. So that was a fantastically good event for us. We were able to get rid of all the chaos surrounding running a franchise model and the inconsistent approach. And especially in our space where we have so many carrier partners, they very much appreciated us having direct control over all of our business and all of our, our mechanisms of how we interact with them. But the second piece of that, and this is where I kind of laughed and you kind of threw this out here, is we did kind of, we were kind of the drunken sailor on, you know, 48 hour, you know, pass on the, you know, in Coney island there for the weekend. So we did make a bunch of those investments and we did do some dumb stuff and we did dream on some leadership capabilities on, on, on, you know, locations and people and processes that maybe weren't as built out as what we thought they were. And so not only did we buy all those franchises back in, which was great, but created a lot of chaos and a lot of operational heartaches. You got to bring all those customers in, not lose it, kind of re home it from a leader standpoint. But we doubled down and hired huge amounts of sales reps at a time when we probably weren't quite ready to do that from a training and an infrastructure in a middle management leadership standpoint. And so that created a lot of heartburn. And I think a couple years into that, for me personally, one of the things that. One of my experiences with this was I spent a big chunk of my job transitioned into cleaning up some messes that we made for ourself. And that was very difficult because it's not fun to go into an office where you've got 100 people and a year later you've got six. Like, that's, like, that's just what you want to do. And you know, we've had, had, you know, an example or two like that where we've built some big offices and then shuttered them all the way back down. And so we've had Some of those false starts like that. And I think it's is what's interesting about that is that learning that we've been able to do kind of with that though as we've seen some of the post Covid run up where everything looked like a great idea post Covid because the market was so hot. So. But we didn't really get way over our ski tips again because I think we still behind in kind of in the back of our minds we still had the. Oh yeah, remember what happened when we did this the last time? The world was fantastic and you couldn't make a bad decision. Well, we got into a spot where we made some bad decisions and so I think it was really good, that kind of learning exercise there to kind of help us to where we're at today. Even though it was, it was pretty chaotic at the time. But you know, it worked because we had an investment partner that kind of saw it the same way and was willing to take some risks, but then also patient enough to kind of play out some of the cleanup that had to happen there as well.

Some of this growth that you've gone through and some of these transitions that you've gone through has been learned from experience. Some of it comes with the wisdom of time. Bobby's been involved in, in ypo, the young President's organization for at least a decade and he's gotten a lot of growth and connections and support there. Where do you get your growth and your connections and your support? How have you grown as a leader during this period?

Yeah, so I've done, I've done a few things like YPO in the past where I've taken, you know, a few things like that I mentioned earlier, I read all the time. So to me that kind of aligns with just fitness and exercise and stuff like that. If you see me with AirPods on, I'm not catching up on the top 40 hits. It's you. There's 100% chance that there's an audiobook going on in the back of that. So I try to pour that stuff in and I consume, I don't know, I probably consume at least a book a week. And so, you know, you know, my rule of thumb is if it's great, keep going. If it's not great, probably keep going and if it's terrible, just stop and grab a different one because you know you're going to take good stuff from those things and over time that's going to make you a little bit more well rounded and a little bit better. And so I probably get a lot of that one thing that I like to do and I think it's still, and we talked about this earlier too, I still like to whiteboard. I love the whiteboards. I want to talk about all of the dumb stuff we could do. And I think that makes me better. If we're looking at every angle of our business on all the good ideas and the dumb ideas, I actually think that's a good growth exercise for me to think about our business from a lot of different directions. And so I still think that's just a good, that's just a good muscle exerciser to kind of keep challenging yourself to not just run the business that you're currently running. So I think it's a combination of kind of self learning type stuff and occasionally I do some random stuff here and there that may present itself. Ypo ish type stuff.

You mentioned the silos, that silos can happen in organizations. And I know that there was a stage where silos happened naturally at bluegrace. How do you and how have you, I guess as a leadership team and then us coo, help the company navigate to pull those silos back together? Right. Where you know, each division is focusing on Blue grace first and their division second. Any thoughts around that?

I. I think at times, first off, I think there, there's silos and politics are kind of different things. So I would kind of disconnect those. Silos to me really are a function of a handful of different things. What I've seen worked well for us is that when we recognize that I think there's three big drivers in, in silos, one of those, your incentive process doesn't break down the walls of silos. That's a problem. The second thing, if your reporting process doesn't break down the walls of silos, you have a problem. And the third thing is if you're not ultimately messaging constantly, the need to interact, you're not going to get where you need to be. And so any one of those things that you don't address, I think you're going to really struggle to break down the silos. I think silos can be really hard to get rid of in your organization. And quite frankly, I think maybe up until the last couple of years I think we've really struggled with that as well too. And I think it's ultimately, you got to talk about it right at the leadership level. If you and I are leading different companies within the business, if we're not ultimately talking about how do we ultimately win at the Blue grace level. It doesn't matter if I win at the, you know, company, you know, sub company A, and you lose a sub company B, like we didn't win at the, at the blue grace level. You have to be talking about it at the leadership level at a master company level. But then if you don't follow that up with a reporting mechanism that allows both you and I to objectively look good at the sub company levels, be compensated properly at the sub company levels for doing the right thing for bluegrace, I think you're having a real, you're gonna have a really hard time to sort of get the adoption that we've needed. Because every time we've ever tried to fix one or two of those things, we always talk about it. Right. What I've seen is historically is that we don't necessarily always incentivize it. Right. Or create the reporting around it. Right. And if you don't nail all three of those things, I just think you're not going to get there.

Makes sense. All right, I've got two more big questions for you. The first one is there were stages in the growth where you wanted to make certain decisions for the business and Bobby, the CEO didn't, you know, firing somebody or strategic decisions that you knew in your gut to be right and he was holding on to something, either fear or belief or just liking people too much. How have you navigated those now? What kind of lessons can you give somebody listening who has that entrepreneurial CEO who you know, won't make the tough decision where you know it's right, how do you have that discussion with them? When do you do it, how do you approach it? And then how do you know when to kind of walk away and not argue to the death?

That can be a trick for sure. You know, I think part of it is you have to build your credibility up. Right? So if you don't have that basis of credibility with your CEO, you're to going and probably struggle in that conversation. I know in my particular case, I've always found it's. For me, Bobby's a very analytically driven decision maker and yet he'll sort of kind of top that off with also at times to be a very emotional decision maker as well too. But ultimately, when you give him a moment, he'll grind back to the data. So if you, if you, if you make sure you have the right data, the data is going to help you tell the right story. The other. But that's kind of only part of the battle. The other Part of what I view as my job here is if I'm going to ask you to do something hard that I know you're not going to want to do, I need to give you an off ramp that's going to be possible for you. And so. And it may take me two moves to ultimately get something that maybe I should be able to think about it, like, maybe we can get. Maybe we should be able to get there in one move. But if I ultimately know I need. If it takes me two moves to get this done, but it moves us in the right direction, sometimes you just have to take the small win and then build on it, and then ultimately you get to where you want to go. Maybe it wasn't quite as quick as it could have been, but you get to the right place and you balance some of those issues. Because that can be very painful in many times, especially when around people issues is many of the people that the business may have outgrown today were instrumental in putting you in a position huge three, four years ago that allowed you to even outgrow them today. So, yeah, and so it's. It's so difficult. And to come into that with a flippant attitude and not sort of appreciating and understanding kind of the role they played, I think just sets you up for success. So, because I've seen executives come into here and just, well, here's what we need to do. And, you know, this is obvious. We have to. I'm like, okay, well, let me give you a little bit of background. It's like, that's not how we're going to make decisions here. And if you don't believe some of the core value stuff, read them again because they're right. And it doesn't mean. I always think that we nail it every single time. And that doesn't hurt us at times, because at times it does. It makes us react a little slower. But you have to put this stuff through the lens of what creates the culture of the company you're trying to, you know, run at. And then run at a pace that the CEO can digest, too, as it relates to some of these really hard decisions around people, especially around people. Processes are generally easy. Processes is largely data and good plan.

All right, I want to prove a point really quickly, and then I'll ask my final question. But what are your company. What are Blue Grace's core values?

Oh, man, we simplify. We embrace chaos. We be caring of all others pursue outrageous goals. Man, you get those right and you are good to go. Here.

So there's the proof for anybody who's listening right now, your company's core values are not core values unless your employees can actually recite them off the top of their head without stumbling and making them up. And I know that you just recited the full core values perfectly. So it's why they're so ingrained in Bluegrace is the leadership team actually not just knows them, but you live them. You live like they're that or you.

Don'T even have to recite them perfectly. You just have to, they have to be part of the fabric of how you operate.

Correct.

I don't, I don't. To be honest, I don't care if somebody knows them perfectly. I care that they live them every day with them.

Yep. All right, I want you to go Back to the 21 or 22 year old Adam Blankenship and give yourself some advice. What advice would you give the younger you that you know to be true today?

So some stuff that I think helped me. I always say today, the most valuable career experience that I ever had was a couple years of being a consultant. I thought that was fantastic because I think, I think everybody should have to go do that for a couple years because it's, it's humbling at 21 years old to get thrown into a company where you're probably billing out two, three hundred dollars an hour and companies are going to interrogate you going, why are we paying this amount of money? It's a great practice to have to learn how to not sound like an idiot, you know, two weeks into the job with somebody on something you don't know. So I, I think that getting, setting up early in your career, just challenging yourself into some hard jobs that teach you how to critical think, I think is huge. Ask great questions, I think is also huge. You know, something I tell our young people right now and I every time, I hardly ever talk about my job. When we talk to new people right now, I almost always talk about how to, how do they do better. And it's, don't think about your world in a silo. If you don't understand how the economic engine of your company works, you're not going to be a player on the big game and be fantastic at finance. But if you don't understand how the economic engine works, it's not going to matter. And so that to me is, if you're not chasing career opportunities on your path to do that, that it's just not how I'm wired. Like, that's the stuff I want to play at. And so I need to make sure if I can't talk about how our finance and our ops and our sales and our IT all fit together, then how on earth could our CEO and our board of directors trust me to lead it?

Yep. I love it. All right. I would be very remiss to not ask this question. Of all the books that you read every single week, have you got a favorite business book?

Ooh, favorite business book. I like Hard Things about the Hard Things. I like that a lot.

So good.

As much as I hate to say it, I like getting naked. I like that book a lot too. From, you know, it's been been out for a minute, but I think as a sales focus, client engagement book I think is really good. But boy, I tell you what, if you're in the slugs and the trials and tribulations that I'm in right now, Hard Thing about the Hard Things is probably about as good as it gets.

By Ben Ben Horowitz it's on my list of favorite books on my website.

On the 2nd honestly, right now I've been pimping outlived pretty hard because I think if if you're not healthy, it's gonna be hard for you to be successful. So I like that a lot with with Peter Atia too.

So he's solid. All right, Adam Blankenship, COO for Blue Grace Logistics, thanks so much for sharing with us on the second podcast.

People aren't really as invested in terms of what you're doing. They're invested into you. Who is Tommy? Like, they want to know about the day to day. They want to know about the behind the scenes. Like I got in really good shape last year. Like, and I'm traveling full time and I'm at the gym and in just sharing kind of my my stories with.