Episode 155: The Disaster Preparedness Playbook

This content was created by Josh Turley. This content was uploaded by Josh Turley. This is a YouTube episode (Episode 155: "The Disaster Preparedness Playbook") of the Fleet Success Show hosted by Josh Turley with guest/co-host Sarah Burnham, published 2024-11-21. The episode is a conversational interview/discussion aimed at fleet managers about disaster and hurricane preparedness: building detailed playbooks and checklists, wargaming scenarios, redundancy (generators, fuel, vendor contracts, radios), staffing and shift management, cross-training, post-event postmortems, and practical lessons learned from multiple hurricane responses. The discussion includes concrete operational recommendations (pre-season checks, vendor guarantees, paper backups, contingency plans for contingencies) and is targeted to fleet professionals and emergency management practitioners.
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This is the Fleet Success Show dedicated to helping you and your fleet succeed using the experience of fleet professionals and Hall of Fame fleet legends. The show that explores how the pillars of stakeholder satisfaction, intentional culture, resource efficiency, and risk management all combine to lead your fleet to success. We're glad you're here. Now let's get into the show. All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show with your host, Josh Turley, and Sarah Burnham. How are you doing today?
I'm doing great. How are you?
It's good. The weather is finally cooling off here in sunny Arizona. We, I think like the high might hit 70 this week, which is weird. So we're busting out the winter coats. We're all, you know, frosty over here, but it's pretty awesome.
So that's awesome. We're getting a little bit cooler here as well, which is always nice.
A little, little break from the endless summer, as we call it. But Well, I know, you know, today we want to talk about, you know, something that's very recent. It's kind of, you know, hit Florida especially, which is where you're at. And obviously we've got another storm brewing. But this is the time of year, as we like to say, you know, it's lovely hurricane season. It's something that, you know, all Floridians really have to prepare for. And pretty much anybody in the kind of the Gulf states is dealing with things like hurricanes. But outside of that, You know, there's obviously a lot of states that have to deal with things like California has their wildfires every year. You know, Texas can either go through a crazy, you know, heat wave or they will have a freezing, you know, rain or something like that that they have to deal with. So they get both extremes because they're fun. But I think everyone has to deal with emergencies of some type or another. Right. And so I wanted to kind of get your perspective and talk through today as you've prepared, you know, been in Florida, been a fleet manager in Florida. What some of the things are as we go through and prepare for emergencies. What are things we want to make sure we do? How do we prepare ourselves? How do we prepare our agencies for it? And then what do you do in the moment? And then kind of what happens after? So as we think about, you know, as you've prepared for, you know, hurricane events and just recently we saw Milton and obviously Helene go through, You've been through, you know, several hurricanes. How many hurricanes have you had to prepare for as a fleet manager? Let's just start with that one.
[Speaker] It's been 6 or 7 where we have a hurricane that's coming for our area somewhere in the model. And so we have to prepare as if it's coming towards us because you have to make sure there's a timeline between when you find out that you could potentially be in the path and then when it might hit you. So you have some time to kind of prepare and you have to prepare as if it's coming for you. Because I mean, honestly, in the end, you really don't know until maybe a couple of days right before exactly what the likely path will be.
[Speaker] Because it could break left, it could break right. You just don't know. But if you're anywhere in the cone of uncertainty, you have to prepare as if you're in the cone of uncertainty, right? Like everything is uncertain. So we've got to prepare as if it's, it's coming straight for us. And I think because the worst case scenario in that situation is what? That it breaks for you and you didn't take it seriously, you didn't prepare for it, right?
Yes. Yeah, that would be a devastating experience if we weren't prepared.
So I think one of the things I know I've heard you say this before, and especially as you know, we're very passionate about helping new and upcoming fleet managers who maybe haven't gone through this before. Maybe this year was their first time going through it, so they probably learned a lot. As you talk to, you know, kind of yourself 6 or 7 years ago or, you know, 6 or 7 hurricanes ago, we'll call it that in hurricane years. What are things that you wish you would have known or, you know, that you would tell a new and upcoming fleet manager as they get ready for their first hurricane?
I would say the most important thing is having a very detailed plan in place. Because what happens is, it's, especially if it's your first experience, it's pretty scary because not only are you dealing with the yourself and making sure that you and your family are prepared, but now you have your whole team and whatever organization that you're responsible for to make sure that they're prepared. And so when you're in these kind of high stress environments, it's very, important to have something to be able to refer to and be like, okay, we're at this stage at the hurricane and these are our steps that we're going to actually have to follow to make sure that we're prepared in the best way that we can when something does come our way.
So making sure that you can—
And then also—
Yeah, go ahead.
No, I was just going to say, and then also making sure and walking through all the different kind of scenarios that can come up and Making sure that your team knows exactly what they're gonna have to do just to be fully prepared.
[Speaker] So as you think about, you know, as you've done the preparation, right, we mentioned this, is that sometimes you're in that cone of uncertainty, and I think what you're trying to tell me is that the time to prepare is not when you're in the cone of uncertainty. The time to prepare, it sounds like, is actually months in advance of that moment, 'cause you're only gonna have days to figure this stuff out, right? So what would you say as you go through and you build that, what is that kind of, as you build the playbook, what does that look like?
Yeah, and that's a great point because there's actually a lot of things that have to get done before hurricane season. So hurricane starts for us beginning of June. So there's a lot of things that we have to make sure that are done before June, such as making sure our generator fuel is in good condition because what happens is that the fuel can sit there for who knows how long because the generator hasn't ran and the the fuel starts to degrade. So if you try to run the generator, then it's not gonna operate because the fuel's bad. So there's a whole process. We had over 120 generators that we had to fuel, but we didn't have to test every single generator. It was more of our critical sites as far as the fuel goes, like our 911 tower and our emergency operations centers, making sure the fuel for those pieces are in good shape. And then somebody would obviously be testing the generator for operation and the electrical side of it. So there's different things like that. And then making sure that your radios, if you're going to use radios to communicate, because there's a chance that the cell towers are going to go down. So you have to be, be sure that the radios are charged and they're operational and then making sure you have certain supplies in place before hurricane starts. So there's all these different little things that you have to think about. But first would be putting that plan in place and walking through the worst-case scenarios of what are my key infrastructure pieces that could potentially be affected, like power. And so, okay, how am I going to operate with power? Do we have gen power or generator power or Do we have a facility maybe that we can go to and operate like as an alternative location? And kind of walking through these different steps and making sure you have a detailed plan in place for different scenarios.
So I really like the concept, you know, we call it war gaming, right? And you'll see football teams do this as they have a scout team that they're preparing against, but they're constantly thinking about, well, what if this scenario happens? What if this scenario happens, right? And they go and they practice things like the 2-minute drill. What happens when we have 2 minutes left and we're down by 4 points, right? We have to score a touchdown or else. And they have, you know, a set of plays that they run and then they practiced it, right? But I think the idea of like, what if, what if, what if, is a critical exercise for any fleet manager to go through to really think about, you know, what are the things that could go wrong, knowing that you're never going to think of them all. Because I think a lot of people will just not go into it. Oh, I'm overwhelmed by this. I have like, it can create some severe anxiety if you're not ready for it. Because there's a million different ways that things can go wrong. But we kind of look at what is the most likely to happen. And then the other side, so you've got the, you know, what's the most likely to happen. And then the other side is, what would be the most catastrophic if it happened? And we look at those two things. And we say, You know, for example, you just mentioned what happens if we lose power? Well, losing power might not— you know, it's almost a guarantee. So it's very likely to happen. How catastrophic is that? Well, it's not catastrophic. We have generators and we tested the generators. We run those. But then where would we lose power that it would be catastrophic? Losing power at the state or the city park? Not catastrophic. Losing power at the NOC? Catastrophic. Losing power at the cell tower? Catastrophic. And so I like this. You kind of talked about that. The way that we talk about it is above the line risk and below the line risk, right? When a ship takes damage, you know, like, you know, the old wooden sailing ships that you kind of see in the movies or whatnot, when you see them take a cannonball and it's above the waterline, it's okay, we can survive that, right? If it takes out the mast, that's going to really suck. We're going to be dead in the water, but we can survive that. If it's below the waterline, we're sinking. Right. And we lost the ship. And I think a lot of times we have to think about that kind of risk is, is this above the waterline risk or is this below the waterline risk? And so as you're wargaming and asking that question, what if, you know, that's the kind of the way that I think about is what if this happens and how big a deal is it and then what do we do about it?
Yeah. And then also having a solid strategy in place for when it does happen. One of the things that most of us have learned about reacting to the aftermath is the more sustainable you are in, in handling what happens, the better off chances are that you'll be. Because, you know, when there's a lot of devastation, everybody's kind of competing for resources. And the more that you have things set up well for yourself ahead of time and in place, the better off you'll be. So in our case, we were we wanted to be very self-reliable on getting our fuel. If something were to happen to the supply chain or the port that we would get our fuel from, making sure that there's other ports that we can get fuel and not having to rely so much on a vendor to deliver that has maybe a limited supply or something like that. So to make sure that, another good example would be like our, your parts supplies. So do you have multiple suppliers that you can reach out to that maybe you have specific contracts in place for emergencies versus relying on one, one specific vendor? Then, you know, you're really kind of limiting your options. So looking at when you are looking at, okay, what am I going to do if this happens? And looking at, you know, different strategies and having almost backup plans because, I mean, you really never know, as you said earlier, what exactly is going to happen.
One of my favorite sayings comes from Jocko Willink. You know, he's got— wrote Extreme Ownership, Navy SEAL guy. And it stuck with me. And I don't know why. I never got taught this in Boy Scouts or anything, even though the motto there was be prepared. But it was the saying was one is none and two is one, right? So one is none and two is one. And I love the concept of that is like, think about your plan and then what's your backup plan for your backup plan? You know, so, okay, contingency 1 is this, we're gonna have generator power. And then contingency 2 is, you know, what happens if we need more fuel? Well, then I've got a plan A for that. And okay, what about plan B? Plan A is no longer on the table, now what? And so I love that whole idea of, you know, we don't just have 1 generator at a site, we have 2. We have a standby and a hot, right? And we run the hot power, and then if that fails, then we switch over. If we run out of fuel from 1 vendor, then we switch over. If we run out of parts from 1 vendor, then we switch over. I love, you know, you watch, and I think this happens everywhere when there's an emergency. We saw it during COVID right? All of a sudden, there's a toilet paper shortage, and you can't buy toilet paper anywhere. And the people who are just totally fine with that were the people who had bought toilet paper 2 weeks earlier. And, you know, like, I know our house, we actually moved it. This is how crazy we were. We had stocked up on toilet paper, not knowing there was a shortage, because we've got 8 kids. So, you know, you've got to go through a lot of toilet paper with kids. But we had, we probably had, you know, 2 or 3 cases, like the big Costco-size cases. They're sitting out in the garage. And Andrew's like, you know, I don't know that that's a good place for that to be. So we literally moved it all upstairs. So it's inside, you know, out of sight from, you know, prying neighbors, whatnot. But we were totally fine. We're like, okay, we're gonna have enough to get us through at least the next 2 months. And then if something happens, you know, Plan B is going to be really nasty. But you know, we'll go the old-fashioned way, right? And we'll figure something else out. But we felt really confident because we had planned and we had already been preparing for that kind of thing. You see this with drinking water. All of a sudden, the water is the first thing to fly off the shelves at the stores. And then it's perishable, non-perishable goods like canned food. But if you've done all that ahead of time and planned A and Plan B, and what happens if we have that and you secure, you know, because you talked about vendor contracts, that means you had those conversations way in advance. Right. And so I like that you're thinking about those things and then, okay, what do we need to do now? To prepare for that contingency when it happens. So I really like that concept of, you know, one is none and two is one.
Yeah. And it's super important to have things in writing, have contracts in place for like the fuel contract that we had. We had a guaranteed allocation that before the storm our allocations could increase and that they were guaranteed. So that's really helpful because you could have a conversation with a vendor and, you know, they can promise you all the things, but unless it's in writing, you know, it doesn't really do a whole lot of good. So just making sure, you know, you have everything in writing and in contracts is key as well.
Would you ever test your vendors at all? Like, hey, you know, we're going to go through a scenario, we're going to, you know, do like an emergency drill and we need you to do a drop as if it were an emergency. Have you ever, like, would you ever go through that type of scenario, put that into a contract as well?
We kind of did that with the hurricanes because we had so many, one after another, so we would have to kind of prepare as if it's coming. And so we were always kind of putting them to the test as that way. But I think that's a great idea. It is important to practice. And then one of the things we would do after a hurricane is always would ask, what could we have done better? Is there anything maybe that we missed that we could improve our plan on, things like those. But yeah, I think that's a great idea is to test your vendors and see how they respond.
[Speaker] Well, I know, 'cause I know we do that for other scenarios, you know, like we war game it and then we test, you know, for us, we're a software company, so we do pen tests and we do things like that. But we'll test the readiness of the team. You know, schools will do that, they'll do fire drills, just, hey, we talk about it, but then when it actually comes time, What do we do? Right. And at least when the stakes aren't as high and if you fail, it's not catastrophic. But then you go through it. I love— you just hit on another really key point for any emergency plan is to make sure you're doing a postmortem either after a drill or after the actual emergency. And so you can figure out what needs to go better, what, you know, what did we do really well that, hey, we need to keep doing that. Where do we need better documentation? Where do we need to maybe practice a little bit more? Although if you're getting 6 to 7 a year, you're getting plenty of practice. I don't know that I'd put anybody through more of it. But, you know, the idea of, hey, let's do a drill on this. Let's actually test our procedures. Let's test our playbooks. Football teams have the advantage, you know, they create all these playbooks and whatnot, and they test them every week. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But they're constantly testing it. But then in the offseason, they're still doing the same thing. They still practice, they still are, you know, preparing, they're lifting weights, they're doing all that stuff. To get ready for, you know, essentially their hurricane season. And I wonder how much, you know, we do that in fleet and how much more we probably should do it, is having those playbooks and then drilling those playbooks and then, you know, ultimately reviewing them and saying, yeah, this play was terrible. This did not work as designed. It got blown up before it ever started.
Yeah, and you bring up a really good point. Staffing preparedness is key. Because a lot of times after hurricanes, you may be having to operate 24 hours because the crews are operating 24 hours to clear the roads or deal with flooding, what have you. So, it's really important for fleet staff to be available. And so, figuring out how you're going to split your shifts, how long are your shifts going to be, are you going to have to feed them, are you going to have to provide water for them, and then making sure that they have the training that they need because In a hurricane, you may be pulling out a technician and he may be doing a different role that maybe he doesn't do all the time. And so making sure that there's that cross-training and that flexibility to pull somebody from one place and put them somewhere else. So that's another aspect of it is having that training and then making sure that your team knows that they have to be really flexible because, you know, you may have to put them anywhere. Something that they may be doing fuel or something like that. So.
Did you ever have anybody when you were doing all this, like going through these, where they were just like, yeah, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm like, they just didn't want to be flexible. They were living in Florida. No, I don't want to do that. That's not me.
So that's an interesting question. So part of our interview process is we ask them a question and that is, you will be required to respond to a hurricane or disaster in the event that something happens. Are you willing to meet that requirement? And they have to answer yes or no. So everybody kind of knows the drill. And hopefully they wouldn't have accepted the job if they weren't willing to. But you do have to be flexible too, because, you know, they and their family could be going through something during a disaster. So, you know, you kind of have to allow for some flexibility there for them to be able to work and make sure that their family is okay.
I know that happened for us, you know, as we were doing our event in Atlanta. Right. You know, there's— I want to say, what was it, Milton? Yeah, because it was just after Helene and then Milton rolled right through the center of Florida. Well, we've got 3 employees that live right dead smack in the center of Florida. And it was very quickly, it was like, okay, well, we're gonna have to pivot. And they just need to go do their thing. And they're going to be radio silent. They're not going to have internet. We're just not going to hear from them. And we have to be okay with that. So, I think for any of us, because it may be the same situation as, hey, we really need you here. But oh, by the way, yeah, they need to go home and they've got to board up their house. Or, you know, they have a sick grandparent that's living with them that needs emergency power that they need to get their stuff set up for. So, definitely, you know, you have to figure out how to balance that, the needs of the county or the city, and emergency services versus, you know, it doesn't run without the people, and the people can't run if they're totally distracted by something else going on at home. So you definitely have to lead with grace through those situations, for sure.
Yeah, and like you, we did, you know, we had to pivot, and we just met the challenges that came our way. And that's pretty much what happens when you're in a hurricane. Like, who knows what happens, but you have to just deal with everything that comes along with it and just be flexible and just be able to pivot. So it's really interesting that I would say being able to pivot and just change directions is something because I've dealt with hurricanes is like, I feel like I'm really good at that now 'cause you just have to be able to do it.
You practice and prepare as much as you can. And I think the power comes in the preparation, right? Mike Tyson said something, is everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And then you got to adapt. And I think the idea is that the preparation itself is what makes you, right? It's what prepares you. It's what gets you ready for that moment. You know, like every scenario is going to be different. Like you said, you just got to be ready to adapt. But when you have the preparation to fall back on, it makes it easy to like, okay, well, we can go to this plan. It has nothing to do with what we originally intended, but this will work right now. I've got a whole utility tool a utility belt full of tools and playbooks that I can run back to because we prepared. We spent the work preparing. I know we talked about this with COVID is that nobody ever planned for COVID, but we've definitely planned for an office shutdown. So that playbook came in real handy. It was like, okay, we can execute that playbook. And no, it wasn't what it was designed for, but it worked. And so I think being able to be adaptable and be flexible, and in our case, like with Milton rolling through, Okay, no, we didn't actually didn't have a plan for this at all. But we do have the ability. And so like, we can create a plan on the fly that works, and it went off without a hitch. And nobody was the wiser. You know, it wasn't exactly fun, but it wasn't terrible either. So, you know, the more we can kind of think about that stuff ahead of time, the better it turns out.
So, yep, exactly.
All right. So this is going to be a really random question, and probably dumb for even asking it. But have you ever had a situation where, you know, you couldn't get the personnel to where they needed to go, or you knew it was going to get bad enough, the roads were all going to shut down. I mean, you know, at some point, are you talking— you talked about feeding them, getting them, make sure they have water and all that. Did you ever have to worry about housing them, you know, and creating like a temporary field barracks or something like that for emergency staff or for, you know, lineman staff or your own fleet personnel?
Well, fortunately, there are shelters already in place. So we could rely on those shelters. We could get them into the shelters if we need to. In fact, that was the county's plan, was county employees essentially were required to work at shelters unless they were assigned to departments like ours in fleet management. So they had, you know, all like some of— they had cots and everything ready to go in case they needed to. To go to a shelter.
So that's something else that people might not think about, or at least somebody, it sounds like somebody else thought about that. But those are the kinds of things that you have to think through and be like, okay, what would we do in this case? What would we do if nobody could come in? And how would we handle that? Are there any other total random stuff that you came across, you're like, oh, I didn't even think about that before, that you would say to a new fleet manager, by the way, don't forget about this?
One of the lessons learned was, So we originally had like 12-hour shifts set up, but 12 hours is a pretty long ask of someone. So we ended up rearranging the schedule so it wasn't quite as long because, you know, everybody's already under a lot of stress anyways. And then to expect them to work 12 hours, they're probably not having good sleep and, you know, they're dealing with a lot. So I'd say that was probably one of them.
Yeah, I know I've done, I've done 12-hour shifts and they are not fun. You definitely, you're drained by the end of them. I was, I was going to school full-time at the same time. So like that stress is just, it never stops and you never get to switch off. And after, you know, I did that for a full semester. Um, and I will tell you, I will never do that again in my life. When you're in an emergency situation, that stress level, you know, like you're not going to school now. It's, you know, like the emergency nature of it just automatically raises all your cortisol levels and your stress is through the roof. And so you aren't going to sleep well and you're not going to do well, and you are going to be dog tired by the end of it, especially because you're working hard. You know, it's, it's not like a normal 12-hour shift. It's like 12-hour shift on, on steroids, right? Everything's turned up to 11. The intensity is turned up to 11. So definitely your stamina goes a lot faster than you think it would. That's a good, uh, good reminder.
Yeah, I did the two-job thing myself, and that was, that was the, the day I lost my ability to sleep after that. It, like you said, your cortisol is so high, um, so So being able to shut it down is really tough.
All right, so if we kind of recap for listeners, right, is go through and create a plan first. As you're creating the plan, think about the what-if scenarios. What if this happens? What if that happens? Evaluate the risk, right? Is this an above-the-waterline risk, below-the-waterline risk? Practice the plan, right? Make sure that you've got contingencies for the contingency. So a backup plan for the backup plan, you know, and that's— I loved the ask in here was talk to your fuel vendors, your parts vendors, think about the whole supply chain end to end. How are you going to get power? But how are you actually going to keep these things on the road? How do you make sure that you do what you need to do? And then, you know, once you've gone through it, you know, making sure you have emergency— I love that too, which I don't know if anybody caught that, but you had a plan in case the cell phone towers went out. You had radios. And then you made sure that the radios were charged. And so part of this plan, I think, included, I'm going to guess, a pretty substantial checklist that you kind of go through. And everybody had assignments, they knew what they needed to do, and they would kind of check through and make sure that we had everything ready, right?
Exactly. Yeah, and it was, there was a checklist of these are the things you do before hurricane season. And then these are the things you do as you've been notified. So like 24 hours. Out, you do these things, 48 hours. Yeah, exactly.
And then I think, you know, the other really key piece that you mentioned was once the emergency's passed, like it's not over. Now you need to review and reiterate, right? And you go through and do your postmortem to figure out what do we need to do better next time? So that way it's just constant improvement.
And then checking your— you need to read, go, not read, but just go through all the details every year because things change, whether it's we had a list of all our generators. So the generators, generators would switch out or our contacts would change. Little things like that that are super important during a hurricane, just making sure those things are updated every year. And like even addresses, we actually kept addresses of our employees as well in our hurricane plan so that we could kind of help with wellness checks if, you know, that was something that we needed to do.
And being able to have that, you know, and have it be accessible. I like that you kept it in, you know, kind of like it's a separate spot. It's paper backup, paper copy. Yeah, it's a pain in the butt to update and keep updated as part of your process, right? Because you don't know, are we going to have access to the, you know, the HRS? Are we going to have access to our payroll system? We don't know. And so we've got paper backup and that's what we're going to go to. But we've got to make sure that the backup is accurate. 'Cause a lot of people will forget about that. It's like, oh man, this information's 2, 3 years out of date 'cause they didn't have that be a part of their preparation checklist. So I like that you thought about that too.
Yep. Yep, exactly.
Yeah. So any parting thoughts for new and upcoming fleet managers or Sarah 6 or 7 hurricanes ago?
Well, it's funny. I was that person that my first hurricane here, I had been here in Florida maybe 6 months and a hurricane was coming and I was, that person that waited to go to the store to get all my supplies. And so it was pretty bad. And it was— it does cause a lot of anxiety when you've never been through an experience like that. But practicing or going through your plan as frequently as you can and just, you know, having that kind of comfort that you don't know what's coming, but at least you have your plan to refer to when you know, when everything happens and, and just being flexible, relying on your team, making sure that you're communicating as much as you can during the process and that you're working as a team, I think is helpful.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that when you didn't, you were a little bit stressed because you didn't have the supplies and you were out there shopping last minute. Did you ever have the feeling, because I know the Florida people, right, is that no matter what happens, though, I know I'm not alone. And if I need something, like I've got neighbors and I've got other people that I could talk to and, you know, that might be able to help me out. I'd argue that the same is probably true for fleet managers. And so especially in Florida, you've got a lot of people that, you know, they definitely have a lot of experience going through this. And so if you're looking for help building a plan, creating your first plan, reviewing the plan you have, I know both Sarah and Facundo, you guys have experienced that down there. But, you know, the FLAGFA community itself is a terrific community to be a part of for reasons just like that, you know, to get help and get resources, get input. And so you're not walking that road alone and trying to do it all yourself for the first time.
Yeah, that is an excellent point. In fact, at our last NAFA regional meeting, we all were kind of comparing notes on what— whoever— what everyone was doing. And I mean, you can even ask for somebody's plan and kind of share ideas and stuff like that. So that's an excellent point. We're all willing to help out in that way. So.
All right. Well, I think that's going to wrap it up for us on this time. Sarah, as always, it's a pleasure getting to talk to you. I know emergency management is one of the things that you're really passionate about, for good reason. And it's something that I find a lot of good common sense that people don't think about unless they're in the moment, in the situation. But it does, it applies to all of us, right? Whether you're in Florida and hurricane season that runs from June to June, essentially. June to November, right? Or, you know, the flip side is, you know, maybe you're up in the mountain regions, right? And your snow season goes from— I know those people, they start putting snowplows on in October because you just never know when that's, you know, when that's going to come around again. Then they take them right back off in May and everybody gets mad at them because they took it off too early because it's a freak snowstorm that comes through. But everywhere we have to deal with stuff like this. And the more that you can prepare for it and think about it ahead of time, the better off you're going to be.
Yep.
And one last, one last quote comes from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, which is a terrific book. But you never rise to the level of your— you know, you don't rise to the occasion, you always fall to the level of your preparation, right? The level of your training, the level of your systems. And I really love that, that concept of make sure that your systems and your training and your playbooks are in place, because that's what you're going to fall back to. So, all right. With that, we're going to sign off. And, you know, thanks again, Sarah, for joining us today. And we will see you all next time.
See you.
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