Episode 101: Stories featuring Gillian Hammond, Kevin Mullaney, and Steve Rone (A skucon Production)

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

You're not alone. We've all been there. We've all survived it. It's completely okay to crawl under your desk. You're not alone. You can do this. For every crazy story where you make $22, there will be an order where you make 6 months' rent.

Big order fails, brilliant client saves, narrow margin orders that went south. Product disasters, embarrassing client moments, and big unexpected wins. We've all had them. Most of the stories in the industry are normal, the simple price we pay for being in a crazily adventurous, anything-can-happen, deadline-driven business. But these stories, the best of the best of them, 10-minute promo tales to put a smile on your face, make you think, and mostly to remind you, you are not alone. What you're about to hear is a new series we recorded at SKUCon this year, 10-minute segments called SKUCon Stories. They are outlandish, bizarre, risky, and hilarious. SKUCon stories are stories told from the trenches by some of the most experienced pros in the business. Today we have 3 stories, 3 storytellers. Our first, Jillian Hammond with BrandFuel. Our second is told by Kevin Mulaney with Brandito, and our third by Steve Rhone with Snugs USA. Steve's story included a presentation. You can find that on the CommonsQ blog at community.commonsq.com. And our stories today are brought to you by CommonsQ, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. Begin your free trial now at commonscue.com. And don't forget about our multi-city event called Common Skew Sessions, the promotional product industry's one-day conference for distributors who want to ignite their sales growth. We recently updated the website to feature a panel of sales pros we'll be hosting in each market. Common Skew Sessions will be visiting Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. You can learn more at commonscuesessions.com. And now on to our stories, with the first one being told by the witty and amazing Jillian Hammond.

I am Jillian Hammond. I'm recently married, so if you're from the IRS, you know me as Jillian Utesh, but everyone just calls me Money, or G-Money, as it's kind of evolved over the years. I have the extreme pleasure of working with the most insane and fun and brilliant people under the creative label of Brand Fuel out of Raleigh, North Carolina. Why they hired me, I have no idea. 14 years later, they haven't fired me. Still have no idea how that happened. It was Birdman who said, "I run my shit." But Beyoncé said, "Diva is a female version of a hustler." All right, so these are my hustler stories. The first one, client calls me and she's like, "Hey, I want a circle, but I don't want it to be round." Okay, I can roll, I'm a little too sober in the morning when I get this call, but I'm like, I can roll with this. Oh, you want a cylinder, you want a cylinder. No, no, no, kind of more ovally. So, we go back and forth in our conversation and about 20 minutes later after she tells me what her cat had for breakfast and, you know, her daughter's swim meet, I'm like, oh dear Lord, I find out she wants a cylinder award. Great, now we've got something I can type into Sage, I can write an order from this. She gets 6 pieces, she roughs me up over the setup fee, I made $22 before taxes on that order. The next one was a name badge. All right, great. How hard can a name badge be? We have circle, we have square, we have a star, we have long cords, we have festoons. And it's a Friday when I get this request, so I'm going all above and beyond. I'm putting them all on my little presentation. I'm giving her the little rectangle ones now. Oh, she might want a magnet back, she might want a pin back. I'm like, I am rocking this. I send it over to her. No, no, this isn't what I want. Well, good lordy, I gave you every name badge option that I had in my search tool. What are you looking for? A few conversations back and forth, I realized that she wants an asphalt-friendly adhesive to go in their employee parking garage because they've had an issue with people jockeying each other's parking spots. So sister was looking for a parking spot label, not a name badge. It was at this point in my career when I realized on my resume, right under Microsoft Word processing and great interpersonal skills, I needed to list excellent at identifying what someone's trying to say when they don't use the right word. It's almost like when you're fighting with your spouse 'Use your words, honey. Tell me what the problem is. I think you hear me, but you're not listening.' I mean, these are the conversations we have with our clients. That order I made a whopping $157 on before taxes, the asphalt sticker. I'm moving up in my career now, yeah. The next one is simply called the volcano, and when I was sharing this story with another distributor, which they're like, oh, Jillian, what story is she gonna tell? Because I know you guys have shit to talk about. He had a very similar experience with the same supplier. Now, this isn't to say this supplier is a wacko and you don't need to work with them. What this said and what this confirmed to me in this conversation was that this supplier partner was exactly the kind of supplier you want to work with. They were a challenger. They did not go along with the status when you called them and said, hey, I wanna do XYZ and have it here tomorrow. Yeah, I think we can make that work. Let me think outside the box. I'm not talking about overpromising and underdelivering, all that nonsense, no. I'm talking about doing something different. So in this story, we were doing something different. We spent 15 days in product development, then we get the pre-pro in, that takes another 15 days, Then, of course, the client's like, "Oh, I'm sorry. I know I said I wanted a circle, but I didn't want it to be round. Can you revise the pre-pro?" Of course I can. So we revise the pre-pro. We wait 15 more days, and of course, at this point, ain't nobody got time for a boat. It's like, how much is air freight? I will fly it Amelia Earhart style over here if I have to, 'cause this is gonna happen, 'cause I wanna get paid on this before December, and you know if you start something in April, you ain't seeing We don't have money till December, so you need to keep it rolling, people. So I have now at this point missed the boat. My only option is to fly these things over here. Then comes the volcano. I get the call from my supplier, he's like, Jillian, you're never gonna believe this. Well, with you on the other end of the phone, I will probably believe anything. He's like, yeah, there's this volcano and there's some ash from the volcano. Volcano, and the FedEx plane can't fly. Sorry, sounds like my stuff's not gonna get here. And that's not what I wanna tell my client. And so we kinda work through, and yeah, there's no other option. I have to wait for the ash to settle, get the product over here. It arrived late, I had to give the client a 20% discount, and I already had to bid it low 'cause it was all these quantities and it was overseas, the whole nine yards. I lost money on that deal. My first overseas volcano deal. So moving along to one similar in its craziness is simply called Starbucks. So you know clients are like, yeah, well, I have to pay for freight? I don't understand. It just arrives here. And the people who drive it here, they don't have kids or families or power bills and they shouldn't get paid. I shouldn't have to pay for freight. And, and, okay, well, if I'm gonna pay for freight, okay, okay, I'll pay for freight, but I want it here at 8:05 AM because I have to leave my hotel and I have to go to my show and I can't ship to the show 'cause you know they charge you to ship to the shows and ain't nobody got money for that. All right, well, I can't control 'cause the FedEx guy and I had a breakup and so he doesn't really listen to me anymore when I tell him to have his little butt there at a certain time. I don't know when it's gonna get there, 'cause of course she won't let me ship it overnight. I have to ship it ground because, you know, she didn't have the budget for that 'cause she thought freight was free. So I come up with this idea that I'm gonna ship it to a Starbucks that's in between where her hotel is and where her event is. I'm looking at the map, this is back when we had MapQuest, okay? I'm looking at the MapQuest, I'm like, yeah, there's Starbucks about right here. So I put that in my shipping, I sent it to the vendor. Vendor's like, you're gonna ship it to a Starbucks? I'm like, don't question me. I am the brains of this operation, you're shipping it to Starbucks. All right, we don't want, we saw what happened to the last guy that upset you, so we're not gonna, we're shipping to Starbucks. My client's like, so, am I just gonna walk in? I'm like, girl, you're gonna walk in with your head proud and the boxes are gonna be in the corner and the barista is gonna be busy steaming their milk to 168 degrees, they're not gonna be worried about you pulling these boxes out. Walk in, pick your boxes up and walk out. All right, I need you to partner with me for your own success here. Go and get your boxes. She walks in, she gets her boxes, everything turns out wonderfully. All right, I have 3 minutes left, so I'm gonna finish with the last story, which is a happy story. I told you all the crazy stories. This is a crazy happy story. So this crazy happy story, client calls December 31st, and you know you're not trying to work December 31st, you're trying to punch your time clock, bide your time, and get home, get your drinking on. She's like, "Oh, Jillian." Oh my God, you never can believe this. I woke up this morning and I have $40,000 in my bank account. I often lose $40,000. I don't know if everyone else has that same problem. I often lose it and then, oh my God, I found it again. So it was very similar. We can all relate because that was exactly what happened to my client. And she was, I need to spend it today and I want to pay you today because I need to get the money out of my books today. And I want to do an exact repeat. And in common skew you go, okay. Copy, copy, copy. I mean, it's like, thank you, Mark. Exact repeat of these mugs I did last year. Awesome, pumpkin. Click, click, click, and in 7 copy clicks, I had 6 months' rent in one order. So you have good, the bad, the ugly. The main thing is to remember, we are a community here, and if you're in your office by yourself, if you're sitting at your kitchen table by yourself, and you get a call from FedEx telling you they have dripped hydraulic fluid all over your polos that are fur from event date, and do you want to just submit a claim and get some, something back in 3 months? You're not alone. We've all been there. We've all survived it. It's completely okay to crawl under your desk. It's completely okay to have a drawer in your office for in case of emergency, which can cover everything from chewing gum, down the gamut of things you may see. So you're not alone, you can do this. For every crazy story where you make $22, there will be an order where you make 6 months' rent. Stick with it.

You're amazing.

We're gonna move on to our second SkuCon story of the day. Without further ado, I would like to invite a man of boundless energy to the stage, Kevin Mulaney with Brandito.

How we doing?

All right, microphone works. I've never been mic'd up before. This is the first time for me, so I feel like I'm taking over Britney Spears' residency in Vegas over here. Oh baby, baby, how was I supposed to know? All right, all right, first joke worked. All right, all right. All right, my name's Kevin Mulaney. I am Vice President of Brandito. We are a distributor out of Richmond, Virginia, and never in my wildest dreams when I started in this business 7 years ago did I think I'd be on stage at SKUCON. So I humbly want to thank the Graham family, my favorite Canadians. But since we're here in Vegas in the United States of America and I'm not stepping on any SKUCON swag, I just want to make sure we got a couple USA beanies out here for any of you Canadians. That's right. Give it to Holly. Apparel sells. $2 billion in apparel, now I just gave her a hat. So my brand marketing story really starts in high school when I ran for class president. It was the year 2000, and my campaign manager and I, my mother, we had these great ideas. So instead of Y2K, it was V4K, vote for Kevin, be a part of the millennium. So we used to hand out t-shirts to all my friends in the different cliques, the jocks, the skateboarders, the potheads, the ROTC kids, so that I had a brand influencer in every group to really tell my story as opposed to my competitors that were just hanging up poster boards, and the impact that that was getting from the poster boards versus someone actually telling my story is a lot different, right? I mean, Common Skew, when Adam from T-Shirt Tycoon says, hey, here's what Common Skew is, here's what it does for us,, it's much more impactful than when Mark or Catherine talk about common SKU. So I'm not saying my mother and I invented social selling. Trust me, I get that, but it was my first kind of dip in the water into the marketing game. I've got really bad ADD, so if I'm making you motion sickness with the pace, I'm sorry. This is what's calming me down, so my apologies in advance. It's another beanie. Yeah, all right. Sorry for the back row. I do not have a cannon with these things. So moving forward, we are going to talk about my order, my, my story, if you will. It starts back in April. It's April 30th, 2018, and I am meeting with one of my biggest clients. But this is a new buyer. So this is a really good opportunity for us. You really work hard on the small ones, but these big opportunities are really what, you know, kind of get you motivated, gets the juices rolling. So I meet down with this client and she says, we've got a huge anniversary gift. It's going to be anywhere between 1,000 pieces for their corporate employees or 25,000 pieces for all employees nationwide. So I'm very excited about this opportunity. And then she says, but we don't have a budget. So I need some ideas from like $0 to $1, $2 to $3, $3 to $5, $8, and then $10 to $15. So this is, this is a little bit tough. But I'm really excited. I mean, we've got 25,000 potential pieces at $15. I mean, I'm getting super jacked up about this opportunity. If you were to fast rewind 7 years ago when I first started the company, I would have been super jacked up. I mean, think of Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He finds the golden ticket and he wants to jet back to his house as fast as possible to tell Grandpa Joe the good news, right? So that's how I was with my boss. And I ran back to the office. I was like, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, got to check this out, man. I got this awesome opportunity. We're going to get it. We got the golden ticket. Here we go. We're going to win it. We're going to win it. And Mike knows me well enough, and he always meets my ideas with some hesitation and some skepticism. I used to try and date his younger sister in high school. That didn't help. But once, man, just once, I hope he got Grandpa Joe excited with me, right? Like I think of going into his office and he's sitting behind his office and I say, Mike, we got this opportunity. I want him to just slowly get up from behind that desk and grab his cane and walk around. And then we meet eye to eye. And then we'd spontaneously combust into a synchronized dance of, I never thought my life would be anything but catastrophe, but open my eyes and look what I see, a brand new life for me, 'cause I got a golden ticket. I've got a golden twinkle in my eye.

Woo!

Yeah, come on, come on. That was scary. Cartwheel, I'm 34 years old. That thing gets sketchy up there. All right. Camera guy's freaking out. Sit still, man. So after we get down from our sugar high, we've got a real problem here, right? So we've got some wide varieties. We've got some wide price ranges, wide quantity ranges. Again, 1,000 pieces or 25,000 pieces, $1 or $15. That's really great. Who has kids here? Who takes their kid to see Santa Claus? You take your 3-year-old to go see Santa Claus. And I mean, that's what this order was. You know, what do you want? You know, I want crayons. I want chicken tenders, French fries, a unicorn, and a new sister. You know, like, that's, that's what I thought I was going to go back to the idea factory and bring back to this client. So anyways, so we're looking into this and then anyone who's my distributors out here, give me some love. So anytime you're a distributor and you have these awesome opportunities, you want people to just get Grandpa Joe excited with you. And herein lies my first hurdle is, you know, I'm like, all right, I need 1,000 pieces or 25,000. Could you be more specific? I'm like, nah, man, this like, here's, here's the opportunity. I need to quote both prices. I'm like, ah, we can't do 25,000. I was like, all right, I get it. We don't do virtuals. All right, well, that's not gonna help. I need someone to create some art for me. So anyways, after I figure this all out, I dwindle it down, focus on a ton of products, 'cause the breath is very long. This is gonna be an issue, by the way, on this clock. So, as I get it down, it's 40-page keynote presentation, 2 to 3 pieces per slide. I mean, this thing is larger than the New Testament when I send it over. She's really gotta thumb through this thing. But anyone have regional buyers that you just connect with? This person was out of the Northeast. We sat down, she starts to love the ideas, and the ideas that she hates, she tells me exactly. She's completely transparent. She says, "Ah, I don't like that. That won't work for us. We've done that before." And it's just so much nicer than the people I typically deal with in Virginia and North Carolina when I bring them a bad idea, Or I say something stupid in a meeting and they're just, oh, bless your heart. You like, do you like it? You just blessed me. So anyways, so we've got the product. She decides on a bottle and here we go. We're ready to go to production. Now we gotta deal with the inventory. They want 25,000 water bottles. No one's got that in America. So we've gotta take the calculated risk. We've gotta go overseas with this product. If we wanted to do that, again, now we're in like late May, we really should have done that about 2 weeks ago. So I'm nervous, she's nervous, and on top of all of this, she's got a daughter that's getting married in like 3 weeks. So she's planning a wedding and orchestrating this 25,000-piece order. It's big, big time in her life. And here I am having this nightmare that, you know, we're slowing down and we're not getting the order done. And there I am right there at the wedding. She gets to sit down and I'm right next to her and she's appalled. Told that I'm at her daughter's wedding, and I look at her, oh my God, Victoria, I love your dress. So glad the weather held out. If you could just sign this virtual proof, we need to get to production. So we get it signed, no issues there. We outsource it, we get the order in, it's June 10th. So we're all pumped up. June 10th, 25,000 water bottles. We're gonna get it from China, we're gonna have it delivered by September. We're good, whatever. Then 5 days later, the man whose name of which we do not speak, President Trump, issues $200 billion of tariffs on all products being sourced from China. I'm freaking out. This is sketchy stuff. I told her it's not going to be an issue. Here's the price. We agreed. Everyone's good. Then we've got $200 billion of tariffs. I'm doing what most— I do really well. I never count the money. I never count the deal until it's done and the clients happy. But this one I did, and I thought, okay, I've got to grow this company 25% every year. This is what's going to get us there. So I counted the money. That was my number one issue. So anyways, I now need to really understand what the problem is, right? Okay, $200 billion of tariffs. How do I communicate this to the client? So I do what everyone does these days. I go to the Google machine. Dear Google, what is A tariff. Been a while since I've been in civics class, folks, so really needed to understand. Google machine tells me a bunch of things that I don't want to hear, so as a 34-year-old man, I call my dad. My dad is a Vietnam veteran, 70 years old, 25 years as a special agent in the FBI, guy loves politics, raging Republican. So I said, Dad, what's the deal here? What's going on? And he goes, look, this is just political peacocking. You're going to be fine. You're going to be absolutely fine. So I'm like, all right, cool. We're just gonna roll with it. We're just gonna roll with it. So time is getting short, so I'm just gonna try and move it along a little bit faster now. So we get the order, it's in production, it's overseas, we're all good there, and then all of a sudden the client calls and say, I need the order 3 weeks earlier. And I'm just like, oh Lord. But what I had been doing for the past 10 weeks, where are my suppliers at again? Yeah, you're gonna cringe here. You're not gonna woo this one. I called every single Friday, say, hey, where's my order? How's my order doing? And they're just like, yeah, man, just talked last Friday. It's good. It's on the production. There's nothing you can do. And I was like, all right, cool. So did that every Friday, every Friday. So when I called them, I said, hey guys, I need this 3 weeks earlier. They're like, oh, God bless, son. We are so sick of hearing from you. It's already on the cart. It's going to arrive. So I'm sorry I didn't finish strong. I left out a lot. I went off the cuff. I really hope you enjoyed my story. I hope you guys have similar stories that you can share with me. I'm here to learn. My name is Kevin Malaney with Brandito. I absolutely had a pleasure speaking to y'all. That one got it, yeah!

All right, next up we have another CommsQ story. Many of you know this guy, my good friend Egon Schiele. Actually, Mr. Steve Rohn.

Hello. So, all my life, from whenever I was a little kid, I wanted to be a painter. That's all I wanted to do. I went to art school, got a painting degree. I was gonna get a nice studio in Paris or in the Village, paint nude French girls every day. But now I'm celebrating my 30th year in the industry. And so my college-aged kids are like, Dad, why'd you give up on your dream? You left and you were supposed to be a painter. How are you in the promotional products business? Why did you choose to do that? And I tell them, I said, I didn't choose this industry. It chose me.

Right?

The title of my talk is Rock the Roll. This is a self-portrait I just did. On my whiteboard on my fridge because that's all I can do now. I have magnetic dry erase markers and I do little drawings and my kids are like, you're weird, Dad. So that's my self-portrait with tiny fists raised. Resist. Right? So I'm supposed to talk about crazy shit that happened, wild stuff, you know, you're like, All you could come up here, we could spend till next week talking about all the crazy stories. But I'm kind of more interested in just this crazy absurd industry. Like, what is this? I've been in the industry for 30 years. I still haven't figured it out. Every day you turn on the crazy. Like Jillian says, you just turn on the crazy every day. You know something weird is going to happen. It's crazy how we get in the industry. I mean Kirby, right? He wants to brew beer. He's here. Mark Graham, Mark Graham, where's Mark? I haven't even seen him yet. He was a financial guru on Wall Street or whatever and said, you know, I think I'm gonna quit and sell t-shirts. And Bobby, he's just a cowboy poet. He's like, okay, I'm gonna start making catalog programs. It's so awesome, but like what do we do with all this crazy absurd stuff? So I was reading all the bios and I kept looking at words, you know, that I read all the speaker bios and you watch little videos about Common Skew. All you guys, some of the words were eccentrics, innovators, rebels, seekers, doers, swagger, and even weenus was in there. And that's from Lee Fine, you can look it up. And Lee, you know, he was a bartender that wanted to be a filmmaker. Look what he's doing now. He's busting out awesome, cool promos. You know, we didn't call it branding 30 years ago when I got in the industry. I came to my first show and this was the product that blew the whole show away. The Snugs eyewear retainer. Isn't it cool? This was so innovative back then. Their booth is all new product, the only product they had in the whole booth, and it was almost as cool as that sponge you put water in and it expanded. And look where we are today. So, you know, I also read Jillian's bio. This is super cool. Every day is different, its own expression of a volcano erupting, epic yet beautiful. I thrive on the symphonic collaboration of people working in varied time zones. Varied roles all coming together to get ink on a product delivered on time. It's akin to threading a needle in the dark with a team you've often never met. Yeah, let's be in the promo industry. But remember those words because I see a whole group of people out there, rebels, right? We were talking earlier, I was talking with different people in the audience, talking to Jillian, she was saying, well, yeah, you're the guy that, you know, you raced in there and studied for the test in the hallway and went in there and still made a B, but you almost got it. You know, you're, you're those kind of guys, the last minute people, which is so cool. But how do we survive? How do we get through all these crazy things that happen to us? You know, I, I remember an order when I first started at Snugs, uh, I went to Snugs and we were hanging out having a sales meeting and I noticed it was all hands on deck at Snugs. Everybody was just going crazy trying to assemble these gift bags. So I'm like, what's going on? They're like, oh, this distributor called. We do a lot of fulfillment at Snugs. People don't really realize that. You can send us all your stuff. We'll drop a lip balm in there and send your stuff out for you. Somebody, this order came from China, these gift bags, and somebody had put feathers and chicken bones. They thought it would be funny, I guess. It was all in like 10,000 bags from China. Wow, what about that day? You're a distributor. What am I gonna do? I've got bird pigeon bones and feathers and stuff all in my gift bags. So, you know, what do you do every day? It's crazy. And I'm actually gonna start a self-help hotline. Angela Morris is here from Geiger. She's gonna run it. She told me she wanted to be paid, but I worked on a little logo on the plane. I did this on my phone. We're gonna call it Common Screw. Yeah. So you, when your order goes south, when the crazy shit happens, you're like, oh, I'm just gonna call the hotline, Common Screw hotline. Talk me off the ledge. Talk me "Hey, don't push me off the ledge." So, you know, it's funny how— I'm just kidding, Mark. So then I'm like, okay, why do we do this crazy stuff, you know? How do we cope? What can make it easier to get through our day? So I, of course, being the, you know, the art major, the weirdo, I turned to French philosophy. So this is my drawing of Albert Camus, he was a famous French philosopher. Doesn't really look like him, but the realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, only a beginning. This is truly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action that are drawn from it. So life is meaningless. Life is absurd. Shit's going to happen every day that's crazy. And guess what? We can't explain it. It's meaningless. It's just shit. Can't explain it. So how are we going to deal with it? This industry more than any other industry. I got friends that are accountants. They're like, oh, somebody didn't dot the I and cross the T. I'm like, well, I'm trying to get product that's got chicken bones in it over to thinking better, right? Crazy. So, you know, Kamau looks within.

You got it.

It all starts here. Sorry, I had my mic. In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. Kamau, right? Nothing's gonna get me down. Come on, bring it on. Bring on that UPS man that never delivers my stuff on purpose. Or like, here's your coffee mugs, right? So Camus wrote this famous article back in the '40s. It was called The Myth of Sisyphus. Has anybody ever— I did a drawing, Myth of Sisyphus. Anybody? Sisyphus was this famous Greek king and he was so cool. He loved life. He was passionate. The gods hated him because he was just like throwing it in their face all the time and didn't want to worship them. He's like, I don't care about your fates. And all that stuff. I'm doing what I want to do. So he took death and he chained him up so humans could live forever. What a cool guy, right? Reminds of— I bet half of you in here would do the same thing. But you know, back in mythological times, the gods said, we're going to crack down on this dude hard. We're not going to let him go rogue all over the place. So his punishment was for an eternity to roll a giant boulder up a hill. And then only to have it fall back down again and then he had to roll it up again. Just meaningless. But Camus says Sisyphus is a happy dude. That was the gist of his whole thing. Sisyphus was happy doing that. Yeah, because he accepted his fate and found meaning in the rolling, right? So I'm thinking like, that's kind of what we do. You know? We roll the stones up the hill. It's falling. So we can die and kill ourselves. Community is like the only important question to ask yourself is whether to commit suicide or not basically. But that's kind of the chicken shit way out. You've got to fight it. You've got to be rebels, disruptors, innovators. This is the industry to do it. This is like the Wild West. Of all industries. You can do anything you want to in this industry. There's a million ways to skin the cat. Heard that conversation today from Gail Goldstein. It's what her dad told her. It's a million ways to skin the cat in this business, Gail. Go out and find the best way. We can also use to cope, we can look to another famous Sisyphean absurd character, The Dude. So you ask around, this is the most famous movie in the industry. Everybody's like, what's your favorite movie? Big Lebowski. Why? Do you even know why? Because the Big Lebowski is just the myth of Sisyphus on paper, Sisyphus on paper, you know, in a movie. The dude, you know, what does he do? He's minding his own business, drinking White Russians, and all of a sudden somebody's slamming his head in the toilet and they're pissing all over his rug. Has everybody seen this movie? It's just like what happens to half of your orders every week, right? So he's like, damn, you know, what am I going to do?

I think I'll go bowling.

What's he doing? He's rolling boulders, man. Rolling the boulder up and down. Meaningless repetition, but he only— he loves his White Russians and And he loves just chilling at home with his perfect rug. You know, that's his passion. And I think, you know, the movie starts out with this Donnie, you know, Steve Buscemi. He says, first line in the movie after he gets his head thrown in the toilet and everything is, hot damn, I'm throwing rocks tonight. Here we go on this absurd journey, right? So my thing is, and Camus will back me up, you gotta pick your boulder. What's your boulder? Kirby and Bill, their boulder is like doing those podcasts. What is it, like up to 150 now or something? They're going to keep going. That's their passion. That's what they like to do. What do you like to do? Make catalog programs. You like to go out and just be really innovative with your clients. Maybe you like to just go out and sell a bunch of snugs. I'd like that. But find your boulder that you want to push. Push it, and that's what will give you meaning. And then it won't matter whatever maelstrom that's going on in this industry, the boulders falling all the time, you're just going to keep pushing it because you have that passion for it.

Right?

So find your boulder, hot damn, throw the rocks.

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