Building GLOBAL Business Partnerships That LAST | Gary Mottershead

There are three things that you have to accept when you come to work for us. The first thing is you have to check your ego at the door. The second one is, don't come here for a job. I want you to be all in. And the third one is that disagreements are acceptable, but conflict is not.

Our guest today is an entrepreneur with 30 years of experience in the rubber and industrial products industry. He launched and built GCP Industrial products into a successful multi million dollar international business in Canada, the United States and in China. He's led the industry in ways of doing business, new ways of doing business with suppliers in China. Really incredible. And he has coached thousands of executives through the Strategic Coach program. Welcome to the show, Gary Motorshead.

Richard, great to be with you. Thanks. Thanks for this opportunity.

Now I'm excited to talk about some of your journey. I had the pleasure to get to know you through the Coach program. You being the coach for me for the first number of incredible years. And of course, I want to make sure before we get too far to celebrate that you've just launched a brand new book in the background. You can see it there, Nimble Future. So for any of our viewers, if you want an incredible read, make sure you go and find a copy of Nimble Future. Eye opening, incredible content. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about your amazing journey as an entrepreneur. Now, Gary, I think people will learn a great deal from your story because we all have experiences where sometimes we've been having progress and then it feels like we're literally going backwards. I know I've had that in my own life. You experienced something similar and it happened at a point in time in your life when, you know, a lot of people feel like they're really established in their career path. So walk us through what transpired for you and how did you overcome this setback?

Yeah, you know, I mentioned one beforehand which I will talk about, but I think maybe even the first one was when I was working with dupont and I was on a good track to move on. And I realized that while working there that I just didn't see myself in that future anymore. I had two children, one just born, and I had to decide what I was going to do and I decided I didn't offer to go work for a company. And Peter Press, vice president of the company, I'm just step up from where I was and I said, no, I can't do it. So. But I walked away from the business. I walked away from my Job. My wife is pregnant with a second child while she's in the hospital. My mom's in the hospital. Cancer. I got another sister in the hospital too. And so. And I walked away from all of it and said, okay, I'm going to start over. I'm going to start with something. And, you know, that was, you know, maybe that's an interesting one, because the biggest challenge that happened, I started the tire cycling business in 1989. And when people won't remember that, but here in southern Ontario, there's a major fire called me and tires went on fire just outside Hamilton. And I bought this, got this facility with partners. I didn't know we're going to put this together. I had this dream. I wanted to do something that somebody else hadn't done before. So there I go, off and do that. Not worried about what the money was going to be like. Had to throw some money into it. And I'm not working. My wife's not working because she's not on maternity leave and jump into this thing. And as we get started, there's a big fire. The government comes along and says, any place with over 100,000 tires on is shut down. We had over 100,000 tires, so we were totally shut down, couldn't start. Not only that, we had to have a guard 24 hours a day, seven days a week that we had to pay for. That was my start as an entrepreneur off from that point. How do you get out of the straitjacket that they put you into? Spending money, which you couldn't and you couldn't earn money. And then we were given a time to get out, to get this finished and get done and get tires cleaned off site. Well, anyway, real scramble. Probably one of the most difficult things I ever did in my life for eight years is to put that tire recycling business together. Recovery technologies. And we sold our units around the world at that point in time. So I'd been familiar with some international businesses. So that was the start as an entrepreneur. And so somebody says, well, you know that the, the camera's not working or your pen's not running or something's not happening. You go, what the hell is that? That's not. Because you just think of all the challenges you went through. But the one you're referring to is, is that when I had finished with recovery Technologies and again, I got out of it with my shirt, even though I sold it, kept my shirt and put everything else back together again. And I had to decide what I was going to do. And I'm 45 years old. And so I was actually having to start all over and but the, my wife, I said, why don't you go get a job? I said, I can get a job and I'm no good. I, I can't work for anybody. You know, no one's going to want to hire me now. I'm a bit corrupted as being an entrepreneur, if you want to call it in the parkour life. So from there I said, all right, I gotta decide what I'm wanting to do. And I actually, to get started, I actually rented an office, hired a full time assistant, bought all the furniture, took my wife and kids and my mother in law on vacation to the Dominican Republic. Brenda who was working with me at the time, I said, brenda, furniture is going to be delivered. My father just passed away, so my furniture is going to be delivered. While we're gone, Val's going to come in and hook up the phone and backslide. That's how technically savvy we were because of all those, the cell phones and Internet and anything else back in time. And I said, I'll be back in a week. And I said, when I come back, I'll figure it out. And so when I came back, I asked some friends and they got me a job with be the president of a company for about six months, which gave me a few thousand dollars a month income. And I just started working at it. And so at age 45, I think it was at that point in time I had to go and put something together because at that point in time I didn't have a pension. I hadn't worked long enough for anybody to have a pension. I didn't really have any money built up. My son is not too far away from getting to go to college and I've got a young daughter a number of years apart. And so I said, something's got to work. And so I really sat down and said, you know what, what do I do to make this work? So I understand what it is to bootstrap what it means to get the first $20,000 order and turn it into a 20, $25 million a year business. And been there from the beginning, but that is probably the biggest challenge. But now looking back on this now 25 years later, in August of 2024 was our 25th year, I look at it and say, wow, what a ride that's been on. People have done more, built the businesses faster, whatever it was, but it was built to be able to provide my wife and I with an income in future. Years, we call it that point of retirement. We don't use that so much in coaching more, but it's done that and it's done more than that. And now I see it has a future not only for me, but the next generation. My son and a number of other young people are all involved in this business that put 15 to 20 years into the business. And so it's time to create something for that. That was one of the biggest. In an overview on some of the biggest challenges I've had to over building.

Something from nothing, from scratch, committing to the, the process before you knew what you were going to do. There's a little bit of a ready, fire, aim aspect there.

You got it. Well, you know, the thing thing about it was I'd never been in the business before either. It's not a business that I knew. So it's just like, okay, I guess I. People, people approached me for a couple of years. I said, would you sell this product Reset rubber tire, rubber sheet from China? And I said, ah, I never, I always sold raw materials. So I was on del. Raw material. I never sold binge product. Well, after a couple of years of bugging me, I figured I got to do something. I figured how do I need to sell it? The interesting thing, Richard was three years into the business, I decided to ask my customer, I said, why did you buy from me? Basically the message that came back was well, we believed you can do it. I had never done it before, I wasn't sure I could do it. But somehow we convince other people that we're able to do this. And I think that's one of the real powers of a nod to commit and be able to have so much commitment as you talked about and then passion for it that you and failure wasn't an option. I mean, what was I going to do if it didn't work? It's not something that I can walk away from and say, well, I gave it the college try. No, it had to work.

And what an incredible lesson about setting a vision and being able to convey that vision to other people, clients and customers so that they can see what's transpiring as well. And at the time that you started bridging the gap from Canada to the, to China, there really wasn't anyone doing it to the degree that you were, you really were a trailblazer in that environment.

Yeah, you know, I'm glad, I'm glad you brought that up because I was thinking as I was listening to you and there were, there were some things that were really very important that we decided upon was that because I had some international deals before and I was advised before I first went to China that your first visit was a social visit. I'm going halfway around the world. They don't really have any money. Why is it a social visit? Because he said, they know why you're there and if they want to bring up business, they'll bring up business, but they want to know who you are because they may not trust their police and their government, but they need to be able to trust you. And so that really, really made a big impression upon me because we keep thinking of different. All these people in different cultures are really different, but they're not, you know, we do, we have a little saying in our company called mutually beneficial long term relationships. Unless it's going to be a long term relationship, unless it's going to be mutually beneficial, then there's no point getting into it. And so if that's what it took going over there and rather than taking me around wherever you wanted to, drinking with them, whatever wanted to, whatever social things they needed to do, I was just going to do that and let that happen. And as a result, I've got a 27 year relationship with people who've been awesome to me. We have no contracts, by the way, there's no contractual agreements out there. It's all been handshakes, if you want to call it that, all been built on the personal relationships because I learned, and particularly for entrepreneurs, we all speak the same language, regard, it's Mandarin, French or Spanish or German, Italian, whatever it might be, because we all have to rely on other people to help us and support each other. And so that made the huge difference for me is that I said, okay, I'm going to trust you. And they had to trust me because when I first went to them, I said, you know, I'll help sell your product from you, but I can't afford to pay you.

Sounds like a great sales technique.

Yes, I can't afford to pay, but once I get paid, I'll pay you. And so that's the way We've operated for 27 years with this one particular factor. And normally it's money up front, letters of credit, everything else. And I just said, I need you to trust me, I'll trust you. And if there's a problem and it's a quality problem, you've got to take, you've got to take responsibility for it. So when I think back over it, we did, we did a lot of trailblazing in that sense, because nobody made the drives that we want that we needed to have made. We had to get them to change what they were doing in order to get it made. And so we just had the. I guess I was, so I was stubborn, pigheaded about it that this just had to work. Anyway, it did and it worked out for that. The gentleman in Tiger who I deal with, both of us have said when we talk to each other, we changed each other's lives for the better when we first met in November 1997 and then started doing business in 1999. So it, but that's just an. Do you write a script for that, Richard? I mean this is, you know, it just, it just the way. Because we were all committed to the same goal. And my goal was to make them to be into world class suppliers at a real clear goal. What I want our suppliers, instead of just being a domestic supplier, I wanted them to be. And that's what they want. So, okay, then we need to work together. If you want the US market, which was a prime market, will get you. And they had to, they had to trust me. I'm a Canadian working in, outside of Toronto and saying, hey, I'm going to get you into the US market. So I don't know how this story ever could have got written before Richard. I really don't.

Confidence creates clarity, I believe is how it goes, Gary.

Something like that. Yeah, absolutely.

And we'll hear more about the confidence Gary has when we come back after these messages. Are you looking for a great book to read? Turns out I have one for you. It's called Cash Follows the Leader. It's available anywhere books are sold. But if you want to get a free copy and you can download it right to your inbox, you can go to coachcanfield.com cash follows. We are back with Gary here hearing about his incredible journey on creating an international business really from handshake deals, the importance of relationships. Now, Gary, something that came up for me as you were sharing this incredible story is that you've been in business 25 years. Congratulations. And you've built something really incredible, employing lots of people, really making the economic machine churn in more than one country in three different countries. So there's a ripple effect of that activity. But what's curious, you know, you mentioned these handshake deals and working with core suppliers and building those relationships. But people shift and change over time. They move on to different parts of the job, they move on to other companies. How, how have you been able to maintain the consistency of your, of, of your business flow and, and, and the relationships that you have. What's been the cause of that filter down effect from those original handshake conversations? I'm very curious about that.

Yeah, you know, it's, it's been really, it's interesting to think back over that time frame because one of the people that I've been dealing with for 27 years has stayed the same. He was a young man who got started, he's still there now. He worked for bigger organization at the time and he's since gone out onto his own. And I watched that organization change but really happened was establishing the relationships again. So the people we had good relationships with, when we could see that the organization was going to change, we'd get back in and talk about those relationships again, stay there, be with them. I did go to China twice a year for a long time. I've been 30 plus times to China and that made a big difference. And the other thing is that the real commonality in all of this is that the majority of the people that we deal with are entrepreneurs. And so a lot of the companies and the owners and so there's a lot of continuity with the owners and now we're seeing the transition to the owners, children, sons and daughters that are there. But then we've gotten to know them all as we transition our business the same way. So Richard, as I, you know, we always been very fortunate. We've been, we've been blessed that that's there. But the biggest part of it is, is that we have people who think the same way that we do and they wanted, we all want, we, we all want stability, we all want to see growth, we all want to have opportunity and we don't want to have a lot of problems in our, in our world. And so you know, it much as much as all the turmoil that's happening, we're like, we like, we like this consistency, clarity as you talked about, we like to see that and the people we're working with are the same way. So if they believe you are trying to work not only on your behalf, but on their behalf, then they'll go along with you. If it's a once, if they can sense it's a one sided story, lock them at all. Well, it's, and that's what I think we found. Just I had to be who I was and my concern was to help them. They knew clearly if I was helping them, it was going to help me. And we just put all three of us, let's just Say that the customers and ourselves and the vendors in a kind of long call partnership basis, totally transparent. They knew who we were selling to and they knew who we're buying from, so they wanted to go around us, which I've had happen, by the way. And that was another one of the biggest challenges. But then it's worked surprisingly so actually the only people that have got around me have been tolerance. In North America, Chinese never did actually.

That, that's interesting. That's very interesting. And, and I think it's a real testament because you mentioned that even, you know, for yourself, you know, your kids to some degree are moving into roles and positions within your organization and you're seeing a generational shift happen. 25 years is a long period of time, but you're also seeing that same thing happen in your suppliers in, in China. I mean, I really think that that's quite incredible. So you're, so you're, you're aggregately growing generational businesses, you know, across the globe. I mean, that's fascinating.

It is. And can you. Those aren't, those aren't things you think about when you start. You're only thinking about survival and making sure you get the next order and you get paid. But now we're seeing, I mean, one gentleman who I worked with for 27 years, he wasn't, might have been married, but no children. Now his children are growing up and probably getting ready to, went through college, getting ready to become in the business. And that's kind of a crazy thing. My son was 17 when we first went over. He's now 40. He's been working for 17 years. Our daughter has her own business, but we do, we work closely together with her. And you know what the. I think I will say this about businesses too. You know, if you are not looking after your future, I think that's really, really critical factor because we're seeing a lot of people, and I see this in your world, Richard, but we're seeing a lot of people whose businesses they haven't built the next generation. They haven't built what's coming next, they haven't turned it over. And in my, in GCP person who's next closest to me in age is 18 years younger and they go to 40 years younger than I am. And so the business has been built to be able to carry on. The challenge for me is how do I create, how do we create it big enough so that there's enough for that, that next generation as I've had the opportunity. But that's our challenge. Now, but if you're not thinking about the future, thinking about yourself, then it's not, it's not going to survive that long. It needs to be thought about in a much longer term.

Well, and in the midst of this, there's a global supply chain and you are highly interconnected to that. And so I know for a lot of typical businesses, they don't see the impact of the supply chain and how it directly connects to them until there's a problem. Like as an example at the time of this recording, there's a major hurricane happening down in Florida that'll probably disrupt some supply chain issues as well as, you know, hopefully everyone's doing okay down in those areas. You know, we're wishing them the best. But major issues, you know, natural disasters, a lot of geopolitical type things get in the way and disrupt the flow of products that are coming specifically from, you know, people who are retailers in some way and they're, they're buying manufactured goods in another country. What are some examples of how that's shown up for you guys in your business practice?

Well, if we, if we take it back just a couple of years, because you're one, you're absolutely wrong. But if we take it back just a couple of years, we're in the height of the pandemic. I remember one specific incident where we were selling some product into the Chicago area and there's product that's big conveyor belt type of material and it's going to end up in the agricultural business and we're having trouble getting containers. So a 40 foot container at that point would go for 3,000, $3,500 transported. Well, Melanie, who looks after things for us, got a quote for $30,000. 18, not 3, 30,000. But wouldn't was no guarantee.

Only a slight percentage increase.

Yeah, yeah, just order order of magnitude 10,000.

That wouldn't impact your margins at all.

No, no. Except considering sometimes that, you know, we were working at 5%, you know, maybe 10% for the product, we got over 50% for transportation instead of the small numbers anyway. But she couldn't even get it delivered. Well, she finally got something secured at $27,000. I went back to the customer, said oh great, thank you very much. So, you know, you just think we've gone the whole pendulum swung that way. And since that point in time, I think more and more people are beginning to see it. There's not the same amount of product on the shelves. It's not. The costs are certainly beginning to rise. People seeing that much More significantly, because there's just that total flow through, whether it's been international shipping lines, Transocean shipping, or railways. We've had a strike in Canada, there was just a strike in the US There have been lockdowns at the ports, and all those things filter through. Trucking changes, fuel oil changes, all of those things affect the supply chain. And in fact, also the other problem with supply chain is people. It's not. They're not the people that want to go into the trucking business. The longshoremen in the US are really striking against automation. Well, problem if we don't automate, we're on the people to operate those things. And so we're just in a real. We're really at a crossroads right now, and it's creating a lot of great deal of uncertainty. One particular example, whatever reason we've never figured out, is we ship 500 containers a year. We have one container that got off the boat in Los Angeles and got put in this park pile, and it sat there for seven weeks. We've never had anything sit more than four weeks. And you could basically go and see it, but couldn't get out of the yard. And so you go, why would this happen? And so if you're planning on product, we used to be able to deliver in eight weeks from order to production and shipping, and this thing sat after production, after shipping across the ocean, sat for seven weeks. And you kind of go, how do you plan for all of that? And so that's. I'd say you want challenges. That's the biggest challenge we have right now. And I think this is. But anytime there's a challenge, Richard, there's always an opportunity. So we have to figure out how to gather that information in order to help companies be more predictable. What they need to order, when they need to order it, why they need to order it, but they have to look much further out. And, you know, the further out you look, crystal ball becomes a lot cloudy. So we're working our way through that, but I think that's really the next level. It's a challenge right now, but the next level of opportunity to bring more of that certainty and dealing with all the variables that happen in our world.

Yeah, very interesting. And your take on looking at it, I think, is a key takeaway for our listeners, is that I don't know any entrepreneur that would exist if it wasn't for some great challenge. Every great challenge presented is the. Is the tackling fuel for the future that we're trying to create. And it's the thing that inspires people to get into business usually in the first place. I think I can solve this problem that I have because other people probably have it too.

That's exactly what we do. We got a problem to solve it. That's how GCP got started. People couldn't get supply and we went out and said, well, we didn't get it choice. And I remember Nathan, who's still with me, calling people and saying, well, I can get it for him. It's going to be 30% cheaper. And they say, where's it coming from? China? And they'd hang up the phone on them. But then when they couldn't get supplier, the supply chains were real restricted. The major suppliers were selling to and then their costs were going up. Now the door opened up. So we have an opportunity because other people have problems.

Amazing. Well, I'm so glad that you're here on the forefront of that and you're really creating massive opportunities, not just for the people and the customers you serve, but also for the supply chain vendors and for all the incredible people that work for them. So if you really think about the impact, Gary, it's an aggregate basis. And I think that's one of the glorious things about entrepreneurship. You don't know exactly how you're impacting everyone, but you recognize that if I do this and I help these people, we create some jobs here. Jobs get created up the line and down the line, typically in all that circumstance. And that is one of the glorious things about the entrepreneurial journey. So thank you for being a part of it. And with that in mind, we're going to talk about some of the incredible innovations that you're working on when we come back after these messages. What is this incredible thing called the Colby A Index I keep hearing about? I'm a certified Colby consultant and I can't wait for you to discover what your natural instincts are. It works incredible for teams, for business owners, in families, with our kids. The more you can develop and understand your knowledge of how you go and get things done in the world and how that happens with the people around you, everything can get so much better. Take the initiative. Learn more about how this might show up in your life. As a certified coach, I'm happy to sit with you and help you understand the depth of your own superpowers. Get the process started by downloading my free guide@coachcanfield.com we are back with Gary, and we're looking back on 25 years of incredible history and growing an unbelievable business. Over those 25 years there's a massive amount of innovation that took place in order to obtain the success of even making it 25 years. So many businesses fail in the first five and, and you're, you're five times that amount. So Gary, recently you were able to celebrate this with your team. Very recently you had this 25 year look back on everything. And during the break you were sharing something with me about how you were able to recognize all the firsts that you've accomplished. So our listeners a little bit through how you reflected on that 25 year journey and you started to pick out these isolated instances of how you really changed the game.

Yeah, well, you know, when we got started, I'd started, I'd been in the retire recycling world. I think I talked about that at the beginning. I started Mobile Recovery technologies back in 1989 and out of that in mid-90s. So I'd been involved around recycling tires and that was a passion of mine. I wanted to make sure because you could recycle a lot of other products. But Paris was not something that everybody, the rubber industry never liked. It was inferior and so they never wanted to see it. So anyway, when I was dealing with China, we were all using all recycled material. So now I had to bring in product into the commercial world, into the United States and make it recycle. But I couldn't tell anybody it was recycling because they didn't want it. And I also couldn't make it to the same specifications that the industry was supposedly selling it. So just for the sake of a terminology, a thousand psi pellets per square inch was better than 500 psi per square. I couldn't make any more than 500 psi. But I said nobody needs a thousand because it's all under pressure. They don't need, they don't need that. They don't need to have this great tension. So I said I'm going to sell it as 500 psi. Well, we sold recycled material and have been doing so for 25 years without failures using 500 psi. And we verify certify everything and forced all the industry to now say the stuff you're selling at 600 and 700 and calling it 1000 really wasn't. And so we forced the industry to become clean and come through on that. And then the other thing we had was they always wanted to sell by the pound. Why do you want to sell product money? Well, in rubber business, the way you make it cheaper is you put in a filler and the filler is heavier than the polymer. The polymer is the good part. The filler is the cheap part. So they'd put it in. So they wanted to sell by the pound. Well, because I use recycled material, I couldn't put filler into it, so my product was always lighter. So I didn't want to sell by the pound because I would lose money. So I said, how does everybody use it? They use it by the square foot. We're going to sell them by the square foot. Industry entirely sells by the square foot by square measures, because that's how people use it. But if you looked at your own perspective. So we could now compete with a product that they considered was inferior. We changed the specs, so that became that way and we changed the industry to be able to be much more practical from a customer perspective because it wasn't sold by the pound. I lost a couple of people early on because they always wanted to deal with that by the pound. But those are companies, mostly in New York, that were dealing with the governments and they weren't willing to change. But all that has changed. But, you know, when we look back over, we actually changed how the product was packaged, how it looked, how it smelled, I mean, all sorts of things that needed to be done to be able to make it worthwhile. But I did it because I needed to. I think a lot of us had made changes partially because we need to, but also in recognition of where the industry really needed to go and need to be much more transparent. Well, on that basis. And so it was fascinating. One time our guys were out there and one of the bigger companies who we sold to was saying, yeah, well, and they dropped all their distributors, just were picking up their distributors to come work with us. And they said, well, this company used to sells everything by the pound. Nathan Bozen. HE LAUGHS yeah. You know why they sell it by the pound? Sorry, Sell it by the square foot now, is because we taught them how to sell it by the square foot. But it all becomes industry norm by the time it came back to us. So it's kind of interesting how the world turns around. There's a story I did want to tell you, too. We talked about innovations and in about 2005, and I've been coaching now for about eight or nine years at strategic Coach. I began to look at a call one day from a friend of mine and I had some spark. Was a coaching company. GCP is a rubber company. And she said, which Persona Gary am I talking to today? And she was kind of being funny. I go. But I didn't laugh. I said, oh, Well, I really have that two different Personas. I'm like, I didn't really like that idea. So I had to go back and think about that. And I said, well, who am I? Because the people in the rubber business never saw me as a coach and the people I go coaching couldn't see me as a technical person. So I clearly had two Personas. And I didn't like that because now you're always conflicted. What are you thinking about? What are you working on? So I sat back and said, what do I want to do? I said, I want to be the coach. So. Well, that's a nice thing to say, but you think about in. Do you follow football or hockey, Richard? Normal sport. Do you follow?

Yeah, I'm more of a hockey guy.

So hockey. Where's the coach?

On the bench.

On the bench. He's not on the ice, right.

He can't go make the plays. He can't put the puck in the back of the net.

There you go. So what meant for me was I was the guy that visited everybody, went out and saw everybody, set all those things up. And I said, I'm going to be the coach. I have to come off. I have to come off the Eddie and now I have to coach someone. So I started then to be able to build a team around me so that I could do what I did best and give up being a star player because actually Wayne Gretzky unfortunately was a great star player that didn't make a great coach, but I felt I'd make a better coach than a player. So that's what's happened. So over that class, 19 years or so, I moved myself off of the ice and behind the bench and coach my team. But that made fundamental changes. And you also had to get used to the fact that you weren't going to be the guy on call all the time. You weren't going to be the star. And for a lot of entrepreneurs, that's hard on their equal. They want to be the man. They want to be the man in the center and help their D. And don't get me wrong, I still like, I get to be the center of attention when I go to coach. I get to stand up there and be the center attention. So I don't shy away from that part. But what the challenge was, I said, if you're going to build the business that's going to be able to operate without you and have some value, you have to do it so it doesn't demand your attention. And I think that's the biggest change an entrepreneur can make to get them into that spot. You don't do that. So I think that's something that's, yeah.

The, the innovation of recognizing that you can outthink the way that you work in your business.

Yeah, yeah. And so you've got to get yourself in a position where you're valuable, only valuable in a certain way. That's important for you.

Yeah, amazing. Well, and that's a big part of the coach system and you know, being coaching, you've been coaching now for 30 years. I think with, with coach a lot. Yes, pretty close. I mean that's incredible on its own. And I, I really recognize and resonate with your, the concept of the, the two different Gary's. You know, I, I, I definitely feel like I had that at one point in time in my life and, and it probably still does show up from time to time. But the idea of merging, you know, what, what you do, so there's more consistency there, I think makes a lot of sense and that's probably very valuable advice for a lot of our listeners.

Well, I, I think we, we, I think as an entrepreneur we always have different parts of our life and so, but whenever we do that, we also have conflict and internal conflict and maybe your home or it's your home or to your businesses. And if you have multiple businesses, which some people do, to me it's really important you decide the role that you're going to play because you are the same person. You're all in your own body, you're all in one brain. So you really want to be one with yourself as much as possible. And so what, what happens is if you're going to pretend about innovation, if you're going to be innovative, I believe there's three things that you require. You need to have time, be able to think about things. You need space, and I call it mental space. And you need the energy. So you can't be tired, you can't be totally busy, busy all the time and you can't be totally tied up in your mind. So you need the time and space and the energy. And if you're a conflict, that takes more energy and it takes more space in your brain to do that. So the more you can simplify that down and clarify, then the easier, the more innovative you can become. Because innovation is really just connecting things together and you connect things from the past, as you've seen work that's going on at Strategic Coach and what you need to do to connect them. But if you can't Think about it, you don't see the connections, you don't see how to put those together.

Yeah, I think that's so tremendously important. I was thinking about your story and recognizing even something that came up today with my team we deal with insurance and underwriting and there's underwriting challenges with people's health and some of those challenges are more consistent than others. And as the modern days progress as an example, behavioral related issues seem to be a big topic of conversationally especially in children and they can have an impact on insurance. And so why is it that we don't have proper templates and details together when that happens? And seeing the trend line of those so we can communicate that effectively to parents, to clients, the people that we're trying to serve. And so that's now something that we're looking to implement so that we have that available on an ongoing basis.

There's always, there's always, always something more to innovate. Now we recognize in our world too that we could see that talking about your situation but letting it to ours, we could see we have the same problems all over again. And so one of the biggest issues that everyone was having with products from China was quality. So at Strategic Coach we'll talk about dos danger opportunities and strengths. So we'll give everybody a danger. The first danger was quality and then their second danger was quality and then their third danger was quality. So I asked them for one more and they said communication. So we, we put together a process that we call the risk free supply solution. And it really totally dealt with how you communicate. And one of the best things we ever did was institute probably 10, 12 years ago. Friday weekly order update and Melanie puts together where their orders are, where they are in production, when it's shipping, when they expect it to be shipped, when they expect it to be delivered. And that has been the single most important document. None of our competitors have ever copied it because you have to be able to communicate and have the transparency through your organization and right through the supply chain. And so why it seems to us to be pretty simple. But when we did it, it's cut the number of phone calls and messages to our office in half because now people know what to expect and probably.

Save thousands of man hours.

Everybody looks for sometimes really great, huge things to innovate on. But service is one of the most important ones to be innovative on. And can you be respected for being the best responsive service? We have this expression with ours probably been around a while. Bad news does not get better with age. So get it out there as fast as you can and get it there and deal with it. And so that's when you do those things. How you handle those issues you talked about makes a big difference. So a lot of the innovation that we look at is just how do we get better at making sure we communicate externally for sure, but also internal. And processes, everybody's got to have processes. No matter, you can do those things together. So how we deal with hr, I have a, you know, we have all of our core values, everything. But I. One of the innovations I really, really like for us is I say there, there are three things that you have to accept when you come to work for us is the first thing is you have to check your ego at the door. My ego can't come in. Your ego can't come in, stays outside and pick it up and leave. At the end of the day, the ego doesn't come in. The second one is don't come here for a job. I want you to be all in. I'm all in. Everybody's got to be all in. If you want a job, there's other places to go and get a job. And the third one is that disagreements are acceptable, but conflict is not because we can disagree, which means we have an open communication policy, we can talk about it. It's not just a top down scenario. But if we have conflict, that means there's disrespect and I won't have that in an organization. So I think every organization should really develop their own key criteria for where they're going to operate. And we can talk about technical innovations, which we're going to do next segment. But just sometimes the people innovations can be really, really important to because they're the core. They're the core and the key to your success and your future goal.

Amazing. With that in mind, we'll be right back after these important messages. In the year 2009, my life completely and totally changed. Something momentous and incredible happened to me. That thing was this incredible book, becoming your own banker. It was written by my mentor, an amazing friend of mine, R. Nelson Nash. It completely revolutionized and changed my entire life. You can learn all about it by registering for a free on Demand webinar@learnibc.com Take the initiative, you won't regret it. Well, we've heard some incredible things about different types of innovation. 25 years worth actually from Gary and his business and the importance of having the right people on the bus and how to innovate even just in the people Zone. But so many more things can happen on the technological front. And you know, you talked about these important weekly meetings and how that's saved a ton of time, but you're also innovating in the technological space, implementing some AI and implementing some supply chain mechanisms that are going to really help establish probably even some new precedents, I would think, in your industry and maybe even that can be drop shipped into other industries that deal with supply chain models. So walk us through where this came from, Gary, and how did you develop this idea?

Yeah, well, it really came from the fact that our worlds are becoming more complex, Richard. And as when we as humans don't really deal with complexity very well, we think we'll say they do everything else. But reality is, I don't think they deal with it very well. And so I came across an expression a couple of years back which I've got written on a whiteboard. It said emotion destroys intellect. And so when we, and coincidentally enough, I've also always had a little expression that we use that if someone comes, if someone comes at me with a lot of emotion about how things aren't working, I go back to them with facts. But if some come back to me with facts, I don't go escalated, I go back to them with emotion. So I always like to counter emotion with facts or facts with emotion. So in this expression emotion destroys intellect came up, I got, okay, well, what happens to us when we cannot make a clear picture with things? We get, we let our emotions take over. We don't, we don't let the rationality take over. And that's sort of normal because we're human beings and the human part is the emotional part and the being part is the intellectual part and human beings. So the emotional part always comes first. So it's not natural to allow the intellectual part and the rational part to take over as much as we say that. And entrepreneurs are the worst because they're all emotional beings. They're all really emotional about things. We'll always remember the one thing that went wrong as opposed to the nine or ten things that went right. So always have to come back and gather data. Well, interestingly enough, while we're doing the investigation on how we can utilize AI to help gather the data and be more predictive about what people needed to order, we came across something that's very important. And no matter our business that there were three elements to making artificial intelligence or machine learning to be successful for you, one is you have to know what you want to get done because then filter Everything through what you want to get done, what's the goal you're looking for? The third one, the second piece is you have to know where the data is coming from. Because for artificial AI, things requires lots of data. The more data it has, the more it can learn, like us as humans, although we come to conclusions a lot faster. And the third one is you have to have processes, and the processes have to be articulated clearly. Without those three things, your AI will not work, will not give you, because then you've got garbage in, garbage in. So you've got to make sure you know what you want to accomplish, where the data is coming from, and then what the process is that it's going to go through. So, because it doesn't really innovate so much, but it helps you control those numbers. So when we look at the complexities of the supply chain, from the production times to getting it on the boat, to the port, on the boat, from the boat, off the boat, into a train, under trucks, whatever it might be, or multiple molds, and then getting it delivered, you now start saying, well, what are all the factors that can get in there? Well, there's a ton of factors. Weather can be affected, wars have been affected, the drought in the Panama Canal, strikes in there, oil prices, because they might slow the ships up or speed them, slow them down or speed them up, depending on what the cost of fuel is and what's the overall amount of transportation going. We're seeing more and more what they call blank sailing, which means those ships are not going even though the schedule will go. It's like being booked on a plane and the plane doesn't go, okay, they're on the next plane whenever it might be. So there's even a lot of that going on. So. So I said, how could we get to the point where we could now begin to manage some of that data? Not to answer the cool question, but could we do. Could we do 80% of the heavyweight. We do 80, 12, could we do the data? And then could we compare that with what's happening in an industry, what's happening in the agricultural industry? They may be really emotional saying, you know what, we're not going to make any more tractors for a while. You're going to go, well, people are still going to eat. Like, why aren't you going to make tractors? Well, because they feel a recession coming. And so they might slow that down, but their business might not slow down. And meanwhile, if they haven't built the stock, as you pointed out in one of our breaks, There may be one piece that's missing and they can't ship the tractor or they can't ship an automobile, whatever it might be. And so they can't operate machinery because they don't have the seal, the gaskets. And so to me, the complexity even becomes greater once we go beyond it. So we're looking to make a system whereby we can not only use past data, but we can also gather import data and other historical data that's going on around the industries. Bring that together with the challenges that we now see. It's a much bigger project than I thought about, Richard. And I got into it, I thought it'd be pretty simple, but what's the process? And then marry that with what we think the future, the future industries are. And that to me is really important because there's some companies who look at the forecasts and they don't take it emotionally, they don't take it by political ways. And you bring those company called ITR Economics, actually Hampshire, we looked at, they do that and they do those forecasts and we look at bringing all those pieces together to put into your hands if you were a customer. Here are some scenarios, Richard. Here are the things that we see. Here are two or three scenarios about what you're doing might need to order and prepare for in your business. And we aren't seeing anybody that's gone beyond their own ecosystem to gather data. All AIs has been working. They take their own data and they manipulate it put together. We want to bring in data from outside sources and multiple sources to be able to give them a much broader picture of what's going on. And that to me has turned out to be a big challenge. But the more and more we go down, I hear two years ago, what do I want? What do I want to be predictive for? And now they're telling us, well, we don't know what to buy right now, so how can you help us? So even in a two year period of time, people have changed their minds about what information they need to have, but they don't know how to gather it. Right. So we're seeing that as an opportunity, I think, not only for us, but for others. But again, you need to know what is it you want to accomplish, where your data is coming from and have you got your processes laid out so you can actually treat the algorithms that'll make sense.

There's so many ripple effects to what you're building. I can see a myriad of possibilities on how it could help, not just the ordering process, but even just the forecasting thought process around how you might look at growing your business or how you might make a strategic move today based on some of the trends that you might have. Again, you know, the, the past informs the future. It doesn't create the future. People say that history repeats itself. I, I think it's more that history, once forgotten, tends to repeat itself. It'd be a better way of looking at it.

Absolutely.

And so you're taking these pieces, these various pieces, and you're putting together in such a way where really any industry will be able to start to see a bit more of a forecast, progressive view on things that have a high probability of impacting them in some degree. You know, even if you're again, a retailer and maybe you're not ordering from, say, overseas, you're not maybe affected by maybe the trade routes of the Sioux Canal, but you might be affected by the oil price pretty drastically. And you might be affected by your main supplier is in a different part of the country and they have a major, you know, you know, again, like we talked about as example down in Florida, major hurricane, maybe they're impacted by that and that's going to delay the ability for you to receive inventory.

Well, you know, and I think because of the intricacies of the supply chain, we don't really know how much is dependent upon overseas. And as much as we talk about manufacturing coming back to the United States, some of it will. There's a lot of it that won't just will never. There's no one's going to want to make the investments in our business in particular, Noah's gone. The investments that are necessary to eliminate imports. So. And people have been trading for more than 5,000 years, so I don't see that stopping. So, you know, when you begin to, it's hard, it's hard enough to go back and say, well, why, you know that, that box of crayons that we bought, well, where did all those materials come from? You know, it might seem pretty simple for your children or grandchildren in this case, but even to the inks, where they all come from, I don't know. You know, so if you went back through all the supply chain, how much is it now? I'm not talking about going into that kind of depth, but it's not necessary. But we all are going to be impacted by the supply chain disruptions, and there's a lot of it in domestic supply chain disruptions too. So. You're absolutely right in that, Kim.

Well, and this reminds me of Gary I think about Larry Reed, who wrote, was the founder of the foundation for Economic Education and he wrote hundreds, thousands of essays. And one of them, that's my favorite, is called I Pencil. And it's that no single human being knows how to make a pencil. All the components which creates a pencil come from all over the globe and it requires people working in this, in this magical thing, this, this, this chaos, but yet this order within chaos to create an eventual pencil. And it's through that supply chain, economic component. And so you need the graphite, you need, someone's got to go mine it, you know, the wood, the wood's got to come from somewhere. You know, the, the ink, the eraser, all these different components and then eventually they need to be assembled. But if you can't get the things to the factory, you can't have the pencil. So that whole idea environment is a living construct of your current business fundamentally and so many others. And what you're building has the capacity to really help them think design differently. And if we can think differently at the business level, we can make a lot of powerful changes in how we run that organization for the end result that we're looking to achieve.

Well, you know, we have to think differently right now. Our world has, the world had been changing for a long time. I looked at the years between 20, 1975 and 2025 as an economic revolution and economic war I actually called it, because I was in the digital. The first computers were started. So the digital world began around 1974, 1975, and we'll become much more digital output as we clearly see this by 2025. So that 50 years has really changed from the analog world and scarcity to a world of a lot more abundance. But the thing is accelerated even more so in the last five years since pandemic happened in early 2020. So we're not going back. It's not going to get less complex, it's not going to go back. But we as humans aren't always ready to accept it. So if we can get some help, this is where I think computers and AI and all these things can help us because we can think of what it is we want. Let them do all, let those machines do all the crunching, let them do all the work, puts it together, because then that helps us get smarter about what's going on. And as I had a wise man told me one time, all forecasts are wrong, so all predictions are wrong. So what you want to do, which ones do you want to choose and get the options that allow you to pick the ones that make sense, but utilize the data that's out there to be able to do that. So that's. That's the direction that we're taking.

Amazing. Gary, thank you so much for being with us today, sharing your journey. For those of you watching, make sure to tune into next week's episode as we continue to unpack all the ways that the entrepreneurs of today are moving things forward into a better, brighter future.