Around the Horn In The Wholesale Distribution - Episode 95

Good morning. You couldn't escape it. You thought maybe we had an international guest and I would not dance like I do for my intro. And, and I'd be responsible and adult, like.

But I was national and. Yeah, all that. Yeah, I thought so, too, but, oh.

Well, that Max, I just love that intro music. So I'm usually dancing as we come in and Tom gets. Tom and I have been friends most of our lives, so he gets a little.

A little.

Had enough of that. All of that. So, Max, how are you?

I'm fine. Looking forward to this talk.

Yeah, it's going to be good. It's great to have you visiting with us today from Germany. We're going to dive into getting to know Max Meister, who's joining us today in just a moment. Tom, you're doing all right this morning.

Doing okay. Max is about what, 6:00pm, right? It's happy hour there.

That's right. And I saw him only with a glass of water.

Okay. Yeah, we don't. We think it was water.

Yeah, that's right. Very, very good. Very good. So let's kind of dive in and get our day started. I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with my lifelong friend and. And business partner and co founder of Lead Smart Technologies, Tom Burton. We're very appreciative and fortunate today. We've got Max Meister with us who's with Ludwig Meister, large distributor based in Bavarian southern Germany. And we're going to dive in and talk about Max and Max's business and the technology that he works with and Max's podcast. And we're going to learn a lot about, about Max and European Union business and so forth today. But before we do that, we always cover a little bit of housekeeping before we get rolling. So again, welcome to around the Horn and wholesale distribution and manufacturing. We come to you every Friday morning. We do that unless someone is on vacation or stuck on an airplane with hat, which happens a couple of times a year. And what we do is we pull together the news of the week. We look at things in the economy and supply chain and manufacturing and distribution, sales and marketing, it, cybersecurity, AI, mergers and acquisitions. And we try and pull all that together. We put it into a newsletter we publish every Friday morning. It goes out to about 10,000 people. It's called, again, around the Horn in Wholesale distribution and Manufacturing. If you don't get that newsletter and you would like to, there's two simple ways. One, you can send us an email at helloadsmartech.com just simple helloadsmartech.com we'll get you added to that list. Second is you can go to the website for our podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and we will get you added in as well to that. If you're listening on the podcast or the recorded version of the show, what you won't see is we'll have up occasionally today that newsletter. But we go through that newsletter with our guests. Kind of break down what's going on with all of that and, and talk about the news of the week and how that impacts distribution, manufacturing before we jump in. We couldn't have done today's show or we're at 95 today. Is that right, Tom?

I believe so.

We're five weeks from our hundredth show. The excitement is gain gathering about that. That's not something that too many podcasts are able to achieve. And going to have a little party with that. So more to come on that shortly. Working with John Taylor, our producer and editor on all of that right now. But if you like what you hear as you join us, subscribe to the newsletter. But the best thing you can do to help your peers in the industry that might get some value as well as us is if you're listening on LinkedIn Live, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, hit the subscribe button, hit the follow button. You'll get updates each week. It helps us bring this show to you. If you're listening on podcast, Spotify, Apple podcasts, whatever the platform is you use, leave a review, hit the thumbs up button. That helps get this out to more people as we go. So, Tom, that's about it. Anything to add in our housekeeping? I tried to do a little quicker today.

That was good. That was well done. So, yeah, if you're out there, let us know you're there. And hopefully we're getting comments today. Last week seemed to be a bit better. Yeah. And welcome, Max, to Happy Hour. I think that's what we'll just call the show Happy Hour.

It's called a happy. We have international guests. We'll call it Happy Hour. So you know, Max, you we've been connected on LinkedIn for quite a while. We've had a number of nice discussions there. You humor me with my, you know, I say I with my mother being from Bavaria, not far from where you live, that I say, I know seven German words. It's just a different seven words every day and sometimes they come together and pour grammar into a sentence that somebody that speaks German can understand. So you've humored me with a few of those in our conversation, but we finally got you to join us on the show. Could you just maybe take a little time? You're. You're a. You're unique when it comes to CEOs in the distribution world. And when I say unique, that's my perspective because you're involved in technology, you have a podcast, and you're the co. CEO of a large distribution company. So to me, that's quite intriguing. I think most of our guests listening and will find that as well. Maybe give us a little background where you know, your background, the company background and things you're working on.

Yeah. Thank you. So I run the company together with my sister. Ludwig Meister is a power transmission fluidics tools distributor with roughly €130 million revenue. And I think it's very important to do some stuff different. And that is why I, for example, make a podcast. It's called Max and the Supply Chain Heroes now for I think, five years.

Wow.

Because if you want to get the best talent and if you want to get good people, then you have to track them. And that's the main reason why I do all these extra stuff. So until today, no customer called me and said, I listened to your podcast, it's the best one. I want to buy everything from you. So.

But you probably meet people that may surprise you that listen to the podcast, right?

Yes. On. On fairs, trade shows and some. Some conferences, the people ask me or tell me that they like the show. So the company is quite old. It was founded before the Second World War and I would say we are number five ish in Germany. The last five years we grew quite well. So since 2018 we grew 30% and we all did, we did this all organically. And this is maybe something we can talk about later.

Yeah.

I'm also very interested in digitalization. You called it tech. I think it's very important because we do. We build all our software by ourselves. We have a. We bought an erp, but all the logistics, software, web shop, purchasing, CRM, that's everything homemade by our team. And today this is one of our biggest differentiating factors, I would say, because we really add value for our customers. And the last one is I also have a company together with my sister where we invest in startups in the supply chain area, meaning purchasing logistics and stuff like this. And I'm over 40 years old, a father of three. And I always say I'm in good mood since 1982 and my slogan is it's all about sharing. So I would be happy to connect on LinkedIn because I think you can learn every day.

You do a great job with the posts that you do on LinkedIn. I appreciate that. Max does Ludwig Meister covered all of Germany or outside of Germany and other parts of the EU or just specific geographies.

It's Germany and Austria, but our focus is. So we do outside sales or territory sales only in the southern part of Germany, but we try to acquire target customers in all over Germany. So this is what we are starting right now. But today our focus is southern part of Germany and Austria.

Great.

And maybe a big difference to distributors in the US is that 70% of our revenue is with OE customers, meaning we sell bearings that go into the production, into the machine of our customers. So that is our focus.

Great. That's, that's wonderful. So all of those John Deere plants and all those types of customers that are popping up throughout Europe are probably using your, your products into their equipment that they're building. That's, that's, that's, that's great news. So that this gives us a nice kind of overview of your background and experience, which will be helpful. So, Tom, any thoughts or questions of Max?

I have a lot of questions, but I'll kind of hold off as we get through here. But, you know, Max, you're. You are very unique. It sounds like certainly, you know, we work with a lot of distributors here. Do you find that by using, like the podcast and some of the marketing things you're doing, you kind of find yourself rising above the noise a little bit, or you're differentiating yourself, you know, in the brand and the relationship.

Actually, we have a platform, it's called Kununu. It's similar to Glassdoor in the US and if you look at the, the ratings we get, it's getting better and better. And that's the same with ratings on Google and stuff like this. So I really think that this pays off now, but it took very long. So I started really five or four years ago with a podcast. Five years ago. And it, it took quite some time. But I think it's important to do stuff in a different way that is some kind of unique, because if not, then it's difficult to get out of the noise.

Yeah, well, you know, it's there. I'd love to hear that. Because there's got to be the differentiator. Right. Because everybody can sell a pair of pliers or a bearing or. Right. It's what you do and the support that you provide and how you, you help beyond that.

Right.

That, that helps. We, we use the term tied to our software as well regularly is, you know, the client success side of things is how do we understand our customer through customer intelligence to make sure they're successful being partners with us. So this is good. I'm looking forward to today. Tom, you ready to dive in the news, it looks like because you brought it up. And I'm, I'm actually quite shocked, my friend, that you waited this long because this is I think where you get to gloat a little bit this morning.

You know, I'm not, I'm not ready to gloat at all. In fact, I'm actually nervous when I see this kind of stuff.

Good. Glad to hear it.

Right.

But let's go Max in real quick on this. So Max here, I know Germany's gone through some recessionary times last year and I think things getting a little bit better now. We have this whole crazy high interest rates here in the U.S. so our federal Reserve, they seem to be, you know, kind of up and down with when they're going to do some interest cuts. So one Max, I don't know if I shared this with you, but you may know this from listening to the show in the past. Tom and I have been friends for over 50 years and so we don't say pull any punches with each other. So we have a bet over a steak dinner and that is that Tom thinks there will be one interest rate cut this year and I believe to this week. Tom, go ahead.

Yeah. Well, this week they stated that that they envisioned, the Federal Reserve stated that they envisioned just one rate cut this year. That all said there were definitely people in the meeting, some of the governors or whatever in the meeting that were advocating too. I get, I don't like it that they're stating this to me. I think it's actually going to hurt my, my bet a little bit. But anyway, I think it's, it aligns with everything we've just seen. Right? Is that, yeah, okay, there's inflation is maybe drifting down a little bit, but it's nowhere near there. And I agree their arbitrary 2% target and job growth is still really high. I mean, there's still a lot going on. Right. So I think their point is, hey, we'd like to get a little bit more information. We'd like to see things cool down a bit more before we start committing to a bunch of of rate cuts. But anyway, we'll see. I'm not, I'm not. And by no means taking this to the bank yet. No pun intended.

Very good. Glad to hear it. Because I will tell you, there's a little laugh is. What was this? That was Wednesday, I believe. Right. And we had the news on here at the house and lovely Mrs. Brown, Darlene points at the news and she was, they just said, it's going to be one. Tom wins.

Okay.

And I said, oh, all right.

Well, that's, if, that's, if she says that, then we should just call it off and be done with it.

Well, it's, she does have the power for things like that. So, so no, she, it was pretty funny. I was like, he didn't say that. She backs the news up on the DVR and said, see? He just said one like, oh, boy. I was waiting for the phone to ring, Tom. So anyways, we'll see what comes of it all. But regardless, you know, we, Max, we have here, and I don't know how closely you follow it, but we've got all these, you know, these statistics that the US Federal Reserve watches, and they just keep kind of going up and down and there's this, this, like the water can't quite boil. It starts to boil and we look like we're going to get to a place for rate cuts and then, you know, jobless change, jobless claims change and so forth. So we've been watching it pretty closely. It's, you know, it's important when we come out of this environment. We had like, free money and now money's so expensive and it has a lot of impact on distribution, you know, as, you know. Right. Inventory levels. And so for you pay an extra quarter of a percentage point on, on interest rates and you have a few million dollars of inventory. It's a big issue.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, but I think it will stay that way. So I think Tom is right because I also don't think that the inflation is going down very, very hard. I think it, there will be maybe even a higher inflation next year. But that's, that's my point of view. I, I don't know if you know the, the Bonier brothers from ITR Economics.

Yep.

I, I, I follow them closely, and they said maybe everything that you buy today will be the cheapest possibility in future. And I think that's true. Yeah.

I heard Alan Boyer speak at the Industrial Supply association event in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I, every time I've heard him speak, I leave with a knot in my stomach, you know. So, Tom, I think you've listened to a few of those Recordings. But yeah, I mean, there is some, there is some, I don't want to say doom and gloom, but there is some, some big cautious caution and they, you know, they back it up with good statistics. So I'm interested to see. I think, you know, one of the things Max and I, I don't know how this works in, in Germany, but, you know, here we've got an issue with the elections coming up, right? And with the elections coming up right now, we've got, oh, look that. We got a comment from Duncan in Canada. You must have met Duncan before. Duncan, Stacy, he, so he's, he's a good friend of the show. Duncan's with us regularly. He's a pipe valve and fitting distributor in Canada and a friend of the show and a, and a good man. But the, with our, we have an election coming up, right? And then we have this economy that's kind of fluttering right now here. So we've got one candidate saying, well, you know what, it was great when I was president before, and you're letting this guy have these high rates. The other guy really wants the rates to come down. But our Federal Reserve, that creates the monetary policy says we're not being influenced by the president. But that's where I think, Tom, to your point earlier, we may see that second cut is I think there's, they're gonna have to test the waters like we said, you know, last week we talked about. Because they, they need, there's pressure in lots of areas and if they did one in September, say, and things stay the same, I bet they do another one. So anyways, I am not prepared, though, after this week's statement to raise the stakes on the bet. Okay, so how's that?

Fair enough.

Yeah, we talked a little bit about this next article about the World Bank. We kind of included some international discussion, but the World bank talks about the bigger forecast of U.S. economy supporting global growth of 2.6% this year. You know, Max, Germany's economy is this, is it the third largest in the world?

Yes, I guess so. If you look at the population, I think it's even bigger. But yeah, in total, a third one.

I think from a GDP standpoint, I believe that's the, that's the case. So I, I, I, it's funny, you know, because of the size of California, where Tom and I live, I think we're the fifth largest economy in the world and in the state that we're in. But Bavaria, where you are, really drives that for Germany, right?

Yes, I would say Bavaria and Ban Gutenberg. So both of the areas in the south of Germany. But I don't know if this stays like that in the future because we are, we are heavily focused on automotive industry and all the companies that are tier one, tier two, and machine production companies and stuff like this. And I don't know how this will, how the future of automotive industry in Germany is. That's point one and point two. I also think that the infrastructure. So if you look at Bavaria, wind energy, for example, is quite low in comparison to North Germany. So I think it's also challenging times for the future. But for me, I always say I, I don't care. I don't care about stuff that I cannot change. So if we have to find customers somewhere else, then we will look for them maybe in Hamburg.

Sure, that makes sense, right? Or, or Strasbourg or wherever, right across the river. But the. So I want to unpack that a little bit. Your comment that you made related to automotive is that maybe tied to BMW, Audi, bam, they having like some US plants or plants in other parts of the world. Is that the impact that you're describing?

Or is the ev or is it.

Yeah, yeah. So I think it's the ev, because the ev, for example, for my industry, they have less moving parts. So it's a much simpler car, I would say.

Yeah.

Construction is different. So we will get more competition from China with byd, for example. And I think it's, it's very difficult to. So at the moment, maybe, except the salary. I do not want to be the boss of Mercedes or BMW because I think it's, it's very difficult. Challenging times.

Yeah.

Find the right strategy into the future.

Very good, Tom. Any other thoughts on that?

No, you know, I just. The one point that they brought up here in the article, right, is that while the growth rate was 2.6%, that's remained sluggish compared to past standards.

Right.

So it's, it's interesting, right? We're spending a lot, it appears. Costs are going up, it appears. But yet growth rate is not really growing at that, at that pace due to some of the things that they say here. So.

Well, and they, they talk about in this article, which is interesting, right, it, which is an AP news article, they talk about something. We hear about the US economy all the time is, they talked about, it says globally, but especially in the U.S. the economies have been, have proved unexpectedly resilient in the face of high interest rates. And that's. I, I guess it's just, you know, if, if I didn't want to, you know, think about borrowing or accessing some cash, you know, and have a need for high interest rates. You sit back and you just say, well, okay, the economy is doing fine. Those interest rates are high. But when you start looking about at that and you know, Max, we had a, a time and I don't know what, what mortgage rates are like in, in Germany, but, or other parts of the eu, but, you know, we had a time where people were getting, you know, 2%, 2 and a half percent, you know, mortgages on their homes. And that's very different than 6 or 7% right now. Now, we also had a time years ago in the US where people were. In fact, we had a guest, Eric Hoplin, two weeks ago on the show. He's the. Eric is the CEO of the national association of Wholesalers, and he talked about having a conversation with his father the previous weekend. And his, I think his father said that they bought their, their family home at 18%. So, you know, what, what are rates like in Germany and other parts of the EU?

Yeah, I would say higher than 5%. It depends on the length of the contract or length of how fast you have to pay. But to be honest, we are. So. You cannot see it here, but here's a big plan for a new logistic I want to build. Okay. And it is the biggest investment in our company history, and we will do it anyway, even though the interest rates are high, because I really think that the costs will grow so fast the next couple of years that I think it's a good investment. So I always say we are all in at the moment, even though the interest rates are high, because I think it will be very expensive in two years.

You think those rates will continue to climb?

The rates will stay maybe like this, maybe decline a little, but the prices for, for the products, for logistics, for steel, for everything, they will, they will really increase.

I'm so, so the, the return on investment is there, right? Yeah, you're going to pay a little bit more on interest, but the return you're going to get downstream from reduced pricing or not having to pay the prices that are, that are there. Interesting. And maybe that's a lot of what's happening.

I also think. And that's maybe driving future growth. I think many companies really, they had a good time during the price. Time of price increases the last two years. So once they tasted this good spirit, they want to stay in that mood. And because for us also as a company, the price increases were very good the last two years.

Mm. Yep. That's Good. All right, well, that's, that's a valuable discussion about seeing the comparison there as well. You know, Tom and I were talking to just kind of on a, on a personal note last week and just saying, you know, well, both tied to our business and then tied to some things personally as well, but sometimes you just have to look at those interest rates. I mean, I just say, you know what, we've just got to move ahead. And I tie it to, to gas prices, you know, and, and I think our gas prices. You, you would probably laugh because I think our gas prices are a dollar or two more per gallon than yours are per liter. And so we, I mean, I paid, I was happy. I filled up my gas tank on Wednesday and I paid five dollars and one cent. And, and I was happy that it was that low. But the reason I bring that up is sometimes we get wrapped up in the price versus the value and. Right. And so for me, I was thinking, you know, a 5 cent per gallon change in gas prices, I'm not going to drive out of my way to do that because my savings and a tank of gas is not worth my time to get to what I need to go do. So sometimes we just got to, you know, whatever it is in life, say I'm going to suck that up and I'm going to move on and get. Go create some value in something else.

Yeah, definitely.

All right, Tom, we're going to move into our manufacturing distribution segment.

And yeah, I mean, these, these are actually kind of both related, right?

These two are absolutely. Yep.

So there's two articles here boosting man of manufacturing profits, the impact of generative AI, and then the end of my undeniable impact of AI on modern manufacturing. Max, I know you're a big AI fan and you're using AI in your business. Any immediate takes from these and what's your thought?

So I have two thoughts. I think it's, it's a, it's a huge chance for the industry because if you, for example, want to reduce the stock level throughout the supply chain, you have to use stuff like AI. And we do machine learning. So we have an own machine learning algorithm that helps us to guess how long the lead times are for our 2.5 million SKUs. And even though you only get maybe 5% better results than with statistics, 5% of a 30 million stock level is quite interesting. So I think that'll continue to improve.

Do you think that'll keep getting better and better or do you think that kind of caps out?

I think it's getting better and better. That's point A and point B is I think it will be more accessible even for smaller companies because you can do a lot of analytics also supported by AI, even though you don't have program techies and stuff like this. So we have to use it in a better way not to try to lose some competitive advantage. So that's why I think it has positive impact. But it is also a threat because you will get other companies using it in a very creative way. That's my take on that. Yeah.

Do you see your competitors trying to do things like that though, as well as building those machine learning pieces and so forth? Like you're talking about inventory analysis and so forth?

I think maybe all the companies use chatbots, so we also have a chatbot with our internal data that we can ask. So that's not very difficult. But for example, the machine learning algorithm that we made, that takes into consideration the global supply chain pressure index, for example, that's external data combined with our data. So at the moment I do not know any distributors from my segment that do something like this, so I don't think so.

So right now it's a competitive advantage.

Yes, and it's a lot of fun, to be honest, because good results.

Yeah, yeah.

Are you using generative AI at all or model?

Yes, but for example, we have a API to OpenAI, so we do some master data stuff to improve the master data. And for example, you have a long text and you want to have all the figures and the size of the bearing and stuff like this. Then we take this out of the long text and save it in our database. So we use it every day already, I would say for a couple of months.

Well, I have more questions, but I'll wait as we go along because I know we have quite a few different conversations about AI today. Kevin. We did a good job of picking articles.

We think. Well, thank you. Is that my compliment for the month?

It was. I'm going to be having a steak from you, so I need to be complimenting you.

Max, before we jump ahead, is how many people in your company are using AI tools right now?

I would say maybe 20 people from our 300 people. And then I'm very sure that I have 20 people that use ChatGPT without my knowledge. Knowledge. And they put data in that they shouldn't do. That's maybe the guess at the moment. Yeah.

Okay, so maybe some, some corporate secrets are sneaking into the OpenAI learning model.

Yeah. Yeah. But I hope they always write that Max is A great guy. So I can ask later on who's, who's the greatest guy in power transmission distribution?

So that's my goal. I'll go ask some questions about that later and get your name in there and then it'll be coming from multiple continents. Very good. So. All right, Mr. Burton, let's kind of dive ahead then, huh? Yep. So E Commerce and marketing is our next segment. And you know, through this article here about B2B marketers say improving data quality is a top priority. And you know, it just, it just leads to everything right across the business of the importance of data. And this was from martech magazine.com and talking about, you know, some surveying about the importance of clean data and key era in using data in there for their marketing operations. But it's so much more than marketing.

Right.

That's the key. It's, it's just across the board. And Tom, we have a webinar coming up with one of the large US buying groups next month about, it's about smart CRM, but a big component of it is how to use the goldmine of data.

Right.

That and Tom, you talk about that so often, so maybe Tom, you can throw a couple comments about data in general and then let's tie that into the marketing component from this article.

Yeah. Well, I'll start off with the, with the article which I find actually promising is basically they're saying in the article B2B marketers say improving data quality is the top priority. Two thirds of B2B and B2B2C marketers survey cited improving data quality among their top three priorities that I don't believe would have been the case a year ago or even six months ago.

Right.

I don't think they would have put that as their, their priority. So what I'm, what I'm pleased to see is that the respect that data is starting to get, the respect that it deserves. And you know, we've been talking about this for a while, Max. You know our, my world of AI and what I work with is more in the, in the front office of distributors. Right. Working with their sales and their marketing and their go to market and their in their business part of things. And I see an enormous amount of valuable data that is just being ignored, wasted, not taken advantage of. And so and in the, and I think that we've been harping on this on the show for got a year probably or longer about the importance of data. But it's, I think that companies are starting to realize, hey, I gotta do something. I'VE gotta actually take care of my data a bit more and, you know, not just have everything on spreadsheets. Are you seeing that more? And, you know, you were talking about what you're doing on the back end, but are you also gonna be investing on the front end? And what do you see happening there as well?

We will definitely invest in the front end. So we made an own CRM. So my take, Tom, he did that.

Before he met us.

That's fair.

But the biggest advantage what I think of our system is that we really get a lot of traction to our salespeople. So we try to guess the right tasks for my salespeople so that they can add value for the customer. And I think I can help. But without good processes to really, to really use all the things you learn out of the system from the data and from the analytics, then it's a nice dashboard for the head of sales or for me bragging on conferences or stuff like this. But I think this gets even more important if you use AI because sometimes it will be difficult for the salespeople to understand why the system says, for example, you should look at this customer, maybe he's churning and he doesn't know why. And I think there will be some cultural issues. So I think AI, big advantage. We will do a lot of it. But you need good change management, you need good educational programs to really get all the benefits that are possible.

Yeah, no, I could not agree more about the change management aspect of things. For sure. One of the things that we're seeing. And I'll. Kevin, I'll try and keep this short, but I've. There's some interesting comments that Max said. One of the things we're seeing is taking structured data from the CRM, you know, structured data from your ERP or your CRM, combining that with the unstructured data of your processes, your business workflow, workflows, your best practices, putting those together and doing the analysis, but then returning the output based around the intelligence of the processes and the best practices because I think. And then, and then the organization understands the context, more of what is being provided on the other end. So I really do believe that those two pieces together, when we say data, I mean the others, the structured data and the stuff that's in your ERP or CRM, all of that stuff, that's super valuable. But if you combine that with all of your best practices and your knowledge and the things that you have in the. And we're finding over a lot of companies don't have it. Right. The sales process and the marketing process is an art. It's not a science. And it's an art based around who it is and how long they've been there and, and all of that. And obviously some of that can be captured, but you want to make that more repeatable. So I really do believe that change management is huge with part of that and having that incorporates that in there.

That's good.

All right.

The. I was just gonna kind of tie that, you know, a little bit back to Max's comment, right, about trying to prompt salespeople. That's something that we, you know, we do within our system. With Max, Tom and his team built a tool. We call it Genius Fee. Right. So within our CRM solution and customer intelligence platform, we connect ERP systems, marketing automation systems, E commerce systems. That data comes in the central repository for that is the CRM platform. And then we run the AI tools against that to say, hey, you know what, here's how you spend your day, right? This, this customer is not buying this, but they're buying that you need to talk to this person because these quotes are closing and so forth. And you know, that to me, and I think there was one of you mentioned earlier about, you know, that personal interaction with, with customers and customer intelligence as well is, you know, that's the beauty for me of AI is in, is we have the, this is a big broader discussion, not for this moment, but you know, people talk so much about AI replacing jobs and you know, AI is not going to replace that belly to belly relationship, you know, that ongoing discussion of people that we have interpersonally. But when we can use AI to say, here's the data that you need to make someone's job better, it's no different than if you think about it in medicine, right? If a doctor can use AI to help understand how to serve a patient better, the doctor patient relationship doesn't change at all. Right. But AI supported that value that came out of it.

I was just looking for a book, it's called the Machine from Justin Roth Marshall, and he writes about how outside sales people should be coordinated. And what he's using a nice term, and it's called meaningful conversations. And I think what is very important is that you use the data to create a meaningful conversation together with your partner, with your customer, with your supplier. And if you can help with supplying information that are really making a difference, then it's a great help and maybe will help in change management. Because if the people are successful because they have this data, then this is a big advantage. One sentence to the idea of a CRM combining all the data sources. That's a big difference in my company because we only have one Oracle database and everything is in one system from sales, purchasing, logistics, e commerce, everything.

Yep.

Is that basically a big data warehouse you've created for everything, or is that just one database you're using?

It's one database. It's not a data warehouse. It's a database. I always say we are the grumpy Germans, so we are librarians. Everything accordingly in one column.

I sure hope, Max, that my wife is not listening today because that term, grumpy German has been used in this household before. So. But that's. That's funny. The. But to continue on that line of thinking, right? When. When you have a salesperson that embraces the technology, right? Whether it's a homegrown CRM, it's ours. It's something else that is providing relevant data for the customer, right? Because it's easy to just go buy technology. And we. We talk to, excuse me, distributors and manufacturers every day, you know, that are. Oh, we. Yeah, we have. We have an ERP system, but their ERP system is antiquated bad data and no plan to make that better. Or. Yeah, we have a CRM, but it's a CRM that they bought 10 years ago. And once in a while, someone will put some notes in. You know, our view of things is that the CRM should be 50, 60, 70% of the data in. It should be the company putting data out for the salesperson. Because to your point, Max, about meaningful conversations from that book is that's what we want to create, is that environment that says you're now given all of these tools because customers are busy. The idea of having the regular meetings. In fact, you know, I go back, I started my career. I don't know that you know this, Max, but I started my career selling in 1989, selling industrial safety equipment, and then went on through being a manufacturer's representative company as well. And so, you know, the days of stopping by with bagels, you know, is there are some of those people left that want you to do that, but they're retiring, and their replacement is. Everything is about digital, right? And so when we can arm a salesperson with the things that goes and helps that customer say, wow, I didn't know what you're sharing with me about my own business, right? When that salesperson can come in and say, hey, we ran an analysis, and based upon what we're seeing is we think These things are going on and I've seen that happen with literally spreadsheet data from when I was in the manufacturing business of talking to distributors where they thought they were buying all of a category from me, but they weren't and I had to go share with them that it wasn't happening. And now what we look at how we can do that with AI of understanding what's really happening at the customer. We're truly serving the customer better in that case.

Yeah. And there was an article that came out this week. It might have been Mike marks, I'm not 100% sure where he said there was some surveys that in the distribution world, 22% of the company said they didn't want to have to deal with an outside sales rep at all. Okay, well, and I, I believe, and we're seeing this, if an outside salesperson is providing value and relevance to that customer, they'll want to see them or her. Right. And if they're not providing value now, maybe if they're bringing BRs and not bagels, it'll work, I don't know. But if they're not providing value, then that's exactly why it's just a quote unquote, waste of time along this thing. So there's a lot of capabilities for AI and to be not just helping to drive the sales process and the sales management aspect of it. But how does that salesperson, who hasn't been around for 50 years or whatever, how do we provide that maximum relevance and the maximum value to the customer, which will then cause the customer to want to have more interaction with that salesperson. That's kind of a win win.

Well, I think you're spot on with that, Tom. And you know, I, I believe what you're. We're quoting. There was Mike and Max. Do you know Mike Marks with that?

Yeah, I know him.

He's. He's a character, right?

Yeah. The NASCAR guy.

Yeah, he's a, he's a, A car racer. Yep. And. And character might be a understatement. He was on. Been on the show before. We had quite a good time with him. And. But I do believe that was Mike. And I think if, if I were, I might reach out to Mike and ask him the question is the, that 22% said they don't want to see anybody. I wonder if there's a caveat that goes with that. That is I want to see them when I want to see them versus I want to see them on the schedule of them being able, you know, my, you know, so go ahead.

So, so what. What we did, for example, is we created a software that is Calcul. When a product runs out in the supply chain and the customer only has to buy regularly at Ludicmeister. So you are an OE customer buying 10,000 bearings a year. I can give you a call six months before the problem happens. I give you a call and said we will have a problem in six months and how can we try to solve this today? And what we are doing now is we will create a customer dashboard where the customer sees all the data and he can ask for help. And that is why the topic just resonated with me, because I think it is important to be there for the customer whenever he wants to have contact support, a visit, maybe just a call, but he has to ask for it. And then when you really help and solve problems, then I think this will also be a good. A topic or a good chance for the future. But you have to be available. But please do not, I don't know, make the. Just get the customers busy. That doesn't work anymore.

No, I think you're spot on. We've talked about this a number of times and we talk about it with customers as well, is that, you know, the cut the button. The statistics right now are, I think it's 62% of B2B buyers are millennials.

Right.

And so I always make the comment, as you know, they probably ordered dinner last night on, you know, on their phone. They, they took their girlfriend on a date by, you know, calling an Uber from their phone. But they enjoyed having a waiter at the restaurant serve them.

Right.

And, and that is just the same. If we cross that over into distribution, we think about sales is I may want to fully engage with your chat bot that's AI driven about my orders and things like that in the business. But I also may have an application where in your case a belt system or a bearing system. And I want someone on site that can do a walkthrough with me to give me some feedback and ideas. But they want the choice is the key. Right. And so that's what I was kind of wondering, Tom, about that statistic from Mike is, and it probably was a generic question, but if you took that 22%, my guess is if you peel that onion a little bit further. Right. It's probably, it's not that I don't want to deal with on site salespeople is I would like to invite them.

Yeah, I think that's true. And I think his point wasn't to Be down to the letter. I think his point was, is bring value. Right.

That's really, that's perfectly said. Exactly. That's very good.

Statistics that are showing that the tolerance for no value is getting less and less and less. That's all there is, really.

Yep. All right, good. Yeah. So we had this, that the follow up article, how to create and execute marketing strategies and hit business goals. We, you know, let's move on for the case of time, I'll just quote there are three P's they talked about in that article. I thought was interesting, charting the path forward, really understanding what CEOs and C level executives want. Pick your priorities, make sure that there's outcomes that are coming from what marketing efforts are being done within the business as opposed to just expecting to have a budget. I love. I was listening Tom, to a podcast. We both listened to Revenue Vitals with Chris Walker last week and you know, he was talking about marketing should be zero based budgeting. So every year you have to absolutely earn and get a brand new budget based upon what you achieved the previous year with your marketing dollars. And I, I really thought about it and for me that resonated that that's a really good use idea. I mean a lot of organizations do zero based budgeting across the company, but when you think about it in marketing, it's like, well, you know, let's look at the activity and the return on investment in that activity and then do some zero based budgeting based upon that. So I thought it was pretty good. And then they talked about, you know, pivoting when needed, that things change and to meet your priorities, you've got to be willing to pivot or adjust and modify so that there's a couple of good points in that.

Yeah. And we're seeing more and more, I'm seeing more and more anyway and the people we're working with a, on the distributor side, an emphasis or at least some attention being put on marketing. But I see a lot of it's very, it's early and they're not really sure exactly what to do with it. Right. And so we may have touched on this last week is unfortunately seeing some bad practices being carried over from the tech world where, hey, how do we go get some, you know, leads? We talked about MQLs and all that stuff I think on the show last week. But I do think that as we're seeing more and more of what we just talked about, the marketing piece and the sales piece, the line between them becomes more and more blurred all the time.

Yep.

How do I get, how do I retain, how do I get acquire customers, how do I retain customers, and how do I provide a better experience? That's really the job of the, of the group that are there. So.

Well, it's interesting too, that kind of ties in. And Max, I'd love your thoughts on this as well. As we talk oftentimes about having the idea of having a revenue department versus a sales and marketing department because those lines are blurring so much now, right? Because if you think about some of the things related to this particular article, it's talking about, you know, trying to achieve goals of the organization. And I don't know how it is in your organization or what you see in Germany and outside of Germany, but you know, what we historically see here in the US Is marketing says sales sucks because they never close any leads. And sales says marketing sucks because they're bad leads because they have different priorities. Right. Instead of them looking together to say, hey, what is it that our customer needs from us? And then let's work sales and marketing together as a team that have goals that match each other's goals within the organization.

I think the last topic you mentioned is very important. So the goals have to be aligned. And it's not only marketing, it's sales, it's E commerce and maybe sometimes even purchasing, because you make a marketing campaign for a special product line, you have to have the right products on your shelf and you have to get the right brochures for the salespeople. So I think everybody has to be aligned. And in our company, for example, marketing and E commerce is separated from sales. But today it works very well because we integrated a management system. It's called Objectives and Key Results. And we started this in 2019. And for example, next week we will negotiate for two days what are our priorities for the next four months. And then everybody knows what to do. And then marketing, e commerce, sales, everybody is aligned. Everybody knows what are the priorities and what resources do they have to provide. So I don't think they have to be in one department, for example, at the head of sales. I think it's more important to be aligned.

Yeah, that's good. It sounds very much your process. Sounds very much. We use a system at Lead Smart called eos, the Entrepreneur Operating System.

Traction.

Yep, exactly right. In fact, I tell people all the time I said, you know, if you asked me what my top three or five business books are, traction would be in it. Because while it seems somewhat simplistic and not revolutionary, it is. Some of it's common sense, but common sense that we don't use regularly.

Yeah. Right. Right person, right seat. So I think many very good things in this book and I don't care how a management system is called.

Yeah.

Key results is very similar to quarterly rocks. But they really have to plan your resources and priorities and stop making yearly plans that they do.

I think that's well. And what it does is it keeps everybody rowing the boat in the same direction.

Yeah.

Right. And so it's. There's nothing worse than if you've got, you know, marketing working on this and sales working on that and then, you know, product building and like in our case, you know, building product features because they just wanted to build product features. Well, let's build product features and market based upon our. Our goals that have been set for a period of time. So good news. Hey, we need to move because of time because I wanted to talk about a little update here. We're kind of moving on to our, our technology and cybersecurity segment. This first article talks about the E. Hughes new AI rules. We've talked about that a few times on the show previously. This is an article from Reuters. But this is according to these articles. And Max, I really wanted your feedback on this. This is starting to, you know, come into place now and, and we're seeing more about it. Are you hearing a lot of buzz about that in your.

Yes, but frankly speaking, I think it's more important to really use AI than to be 100 perfect or 100 perfect. But that's not very German. So I was gonna say.

Wait a minute, that didn't sound very German.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds Italian.

I think transparency is okay, but we have a big problem in the, in the EU with the GDPR and how we talk about data security and all this stuff because I think for the US it's great because everybody supports Amazon, Microsoft and so on, but I think for smaller companies it always makes a lot of work. So I think regulate as less as possible and just go ahead. Transparency is important. You should report And I also think that copyright is very important and this will be a big topic but I think AI could be the solution for the loss of workforce all over the world. And I think it is so important that the EU could should not risk to really use this chance and opportunity. Very important.

Well, it's interesting Tom, I'll come make a quick comment and they'll come back to you. Is I, I think there's a lot of discussion about, you know, in that regular regulations that they're putting out. Right. Which is very different. Right. We had a presidential order with in the US Here which has kind of no teeth behind it because you can't enforce that. But with this becoming a regulatory issue in the eu, it's very different. And I think, you know, part of the discussion that they had early on was, you know, wanting to help this to help foster growth of AI driven companies within the eu. But the other side of it is if the transparency on how they built their model and all these things that they're asking about has to really be there. It's I wonder if the small guy can really go compete with the big guys in that setting. It should be interesting to watch. Tom, you had some thoughts?

Well, it's same thoughts, Max. I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm in favor of regulation based around the, the premise or the purpose of it. Right. Is to kind of provide some protection and some guardrails. What I'm not in favor of, I think. Right. I think we're way too early to be regulating. The things that we're regulating now are going to be irrelevant in six months or there's going to be something else that are going to be. We're in like so early and so what we end up doing is creating things that just aren't practical. Right. The regulations are not practical. People are confused. It slows down innovation, it's, it causes. So that's my concern with regulatory regulation is worked way too early. Let's give, let's let this play out a little bit. Let's see how the, how the market actually polices itself a bit more. How does the, you know, there's a lot of things that we can do to, I mean we're so early to be able to be putting regulation in place. It's just, to me it's just impractical. And you know, Europe, I think with gdpr, as you said, they way over stepped. It wasn't, it's not practical. It's, you know, and it's created a lot of noise honestly versus a lot of results of which they were trying.

To accomplish and it's not helping. So.

Right.

It's not a success. I don't think so. Yeah.

Right.

So yeah, I'm appreciative of the, of the comparison Max with GDPR with that because it's not, nothing's really coming from it.

Right.

So that's, that's the key.

GDPR was even a bit more black and white and it's what it was about. This is not black and white. There's all kinds of shades of gray which is going to make it even that much more, less practical or much more. Anyway, don't get me started.

Sounds like some more bureaucrats that have new titles and new jobs. So we'll go from that.

Good.

Well, as we're continuing the newsletter and I usually make this comment about 20 minutes go in the show, but what we're gathered together today on our live broadcast here. If you're with us, we're looking at the newsletter that we send out every week. It's around the horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing that goes out to about 10,000 people each week. If you're listening on the podcast, you wouldn't be able to see what we're referencing here. But if you would like that newsletter, you can reach out to us@helloadsmartech.com and we'd be happy to provide you, get you on that list with about 10,000 others to get the newsletter. Or you can go to the website for the podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and get access to it that way as well. So as we're kind of, we're going to kind of move a little bit quicker so we can have some conversation as we wind down today. But the following article is about three reasons Granger prioritizes AI. There was the distribution strategy group had their big event week before last in or last week I guess in in Chicago. And one of the Granger executives responsible for AI there talked about three things. He talked about one, AI accelerates digital transformation. So they're doing so much across the board with product cross referencing, pricing, search, publishing within their organization that AI is helping with. And they talked about in this article, a takeaway is that AI is a competitive advantage for learning your customer behavior inside and outside ties. Well with what we were discussing earlier today, second one was that no one size fits all software. So they're building out their tech stack. They've consolidated a thousand software applications that they have running with an organization. Talk about a tech stack. It's tech stack. So key takeaways is internal resources and technology. It takes the right people and the right processes to manage AI. And then third is why they're making it a priority. They see three pillars and that's the only thing I wanted to mention today really was process technology and people. So I really like that piece. When you're looking at AI in your organization, we have an article coming up about AI and cyber security process technology and people so you can have one and not have the others and not be successful. But I think when you pull those together, it's a powerful mix. Okay, Tom? No. No rebuttal? No retort? No.

Well, I have a number of comments.

That I thought you were going to run wild with that. Those three pieces of people processes in tech.

No. Well, I mean that's, that's common, right. In most projects and tech projects, you look at the people process and the technology that are there. I do think there is some underlying tone here that I think is relevant to be thinking about though, about the one size fits all. I think the concept of buying off the shelf software and just trying, you know, if you look at when I started my career, enterprise software was a lot of customization and then it moved from, hey, we're moving to the cloud, we're moving to SaaS and we got to scale and all that stuff and everything's got to look the same for everybody. I think when we now move back into this more AI world, it's going to be a bit more tailored. Maybe not customized, but tailored. And I think that, you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers really looking at how do we tailor our solution to what they're doing. It takes more work, it takes more time, but I don't know that you can do it. I don't think you can have a cookie cutter, especially when you start incorporating the data and all the stuff we talked about earlier. I think that's an important point that we should, as companies, you should be thinking about is, hey, trying to just buy an off the shelf solution and plugging it in blindly into the organization probably not going to be a good fit as we, as we go forward. So. And it sounds like certainly, Max, you guys have really taken that to the whole next level by all the stuff that you've done with your own internal team.

Yeah. And I really think that the software should be as small as possible. So if I don't need Photoshop because I only have to crop images, then maybe we should use the smallest software that we can find. And I think tailored is a good way for many companies. For us, we really try to customize or really build the software by ourselves, but that's maybe the result of 10 years of building software. So now we are some kind of geeks.

Right. But as a vendor, I think that we, and we will look at this all the time is obviously we want to have a baseline of products that we can support and scale and go across multiple people, but we have to look at the tailor part of it and how do we do that in a way that can meet both objectives? And I think we've swung, you know, I've been in the software world my whole career. I've seen it swing from one extreme to the other. I think we're now coming back to a little bit more of a middle ground. And that was the point in there.

Good jumping ahead. How to craft a responsible generative AI strategy. We could probably spend an hour on this, but any quick takeaways from that?

I think it's a good summary of a lot of the things we've been talking about and that we've hit on today. There was nothing in there that was earth shattering. It was really more kind of combining a lot of the things that we've talked about.

Yeah, I included that this week just because of the fact that we've got on a pretty consistent basis, we're talking day in and day out to companies that are ready to go. Right. And we're talking with, you know, small distributors and very large distributors that are trying to figure out the whole AI thing and how is it going to impact their business and what are the risks and the things that might be problematic with that and so forth. And so having a program in place where we've got, you know, back to our, you know, people processes and technology is part of the processes. We have a cybersecurity, a piece of that. We have a, you know, Maxim even made the comment earlier about, you know, people he may not even know in his organization and what are they sharing outside the organization. I always use the example. You know, I, I had a big max. I do a lot of volunteer work in my faith and I had a security document about. It came from the world headquarters of my, my faith. And it was about how to keep, you know, your local congregation safe. And I was wanting to compare it with a previous document that had been sent and I almost loaded them both into ChatGPT for the comparison. And I was like, that's not something I want to put out there. Right. That's an important document. And so having these pieces in place is the key. Right. That you know, and people know what to do and not to do within the organization. What gets shared, how we use AI is it becomes very important. So good piece that goes with that. Good. All right, so I'm going to just kind of hit really quickly on this. It's just we're in our sales and M and A segment. We'll go, if you guys don't mind, I'll just kind of hit on this. This is QXO announced a billion dollar investment and a new leadership team. This is Brad Jacobs. Brad, I think was one of the founders of United Rentals, which was one of the biggest equipment rental companies in the US And I think he's been on, either started or been involved with or on the board of, I think the article said seven different companies that were over a billion dollars in sales in the mostly building material space. So he just put this kind of, you know, Olympics type team together, put a lot of his own money in and now what their acquisitions that will be coming out of this will be pretty interesting. I want to watch it closely because it's a, it's a big deal because this is not just a private equity fund that's dipping their beak in the water here and there with some building material companies and, and they'll probably go outside of building materials, but this is all about distribution acquisition. So it'll be interesting article here as well. Last thing we'll talk about in that segment is sales management. Don't leave this at the office, Max. I'll ask you for a comment after I make a comment here, see how this might apply into your organization. The idea was don't leave the office without this. And the article was written by a sales coach from Engaged Selling. And the concept was, hey, get your sales manager out there, your director level person, even a CEO out there on a more regular basis because you might not think you need their help, but you probably do. And on top of that, more importantly, you may not think about it, but it makes the customer feel better when you bring executives to visit them. So any thoughts on that, Max, about how you guys do that at Ludwig Meister?

Actually I have customers meetings every week. I think it's very important. Usually I try to make them here in our headquarter because I can demonstrate all our strategy and what we want to do and where we are going and how we can add value. It's. It's much easier to show it here in my premises in the logistics and something like this. But I also go to the customer. So I always say I'm not afraid of the customer. I think it's important. You have to learn and you always have to adapt the strategy because you cannot make a strategy that works in the ivory tower doesn't work. So I think it's important to talk to the people that really try to use your value.

That's great. Good. Any thoughts on that, Tom, before we jump ahead? No, let's go ahead quickly through Our People in Leadership segment. Gen Z, the role in shaping the future of the workforce.

Yeah, this was an interesting one about, they were talking about a lot of younger people are foregoing college and going to trade schools and vocational schools or whatever due to the high price of college and even just the overall value. Right. That you receive from college. It's funny, I was having this conversation with a friend of mine's son a couple weeks ago is he was asking me, you know, if you were to go to go to college again, where would you go and what would you do? And I said I probably wouldn't. And you know, I mean there was a lot of fun in college but if you just look at it from the, what I got out of it, I could have easily gotten that out of other sources a lot easier and a lot faster than four years of college. So I think this is becoming, you know, that this is becoming more and more of a trend is how do I get the skills that I need? You know, and, and I have a friend who's a professor at the university that I'm at here. I was asking him the other day, are you doing anything with AI and engineering? And they're not there yet. Right. So the curriculum gets so far behind in a lot of schools that you're behind the curve anyway. So there's just, anyway I thought it was an interesting article that yeah, a lot of people are, are definitely taking different routes. Yep.

I think you look at, we've got one of our lead developers in, in the organization and you know, 24 years old, never, never went to college and could run circles around most developers. Right. That may have a, a master's degree in elect, you know, electrical engineering or.

And he, you and he learned on YouTube and, and you know, Udemy or whatever.

Yeah.

So, but, but, but it's the same with us. So we, we have many great young people and they are very fast and I think it's a big chance you, you really have to find jobs for them where they really can earn trust very fast. And then they, they do a great job. So some of them, I, I always call them Swiss army knives because they, they really learn fast. And you were talking about college. So at the moment I do not know what I should recommend to my kids, what, what they should do because, because it's difficult. So I, I, I feel the, the pressure for the young people, but I think a big chance we, so, so we need the most creative people and I think there are a couple of them outside. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, even, even Some of the big tech companies here in California, Facebook, Google, all of that, a lot of them have removed their requirement of a college degree in order to apply. And a lot of them almost always had. You had to have, you know, degrees and all that stuff even to submit an application. A lot of that has gone away.

Yep. You know, it takes me back, Tom. I remember when I, I went to. I went to what max we have here in the US Called a community college or two year college before transferring to university. And I, Tom and I went to high school together. He was a little, not a little bit, but a lot smarter at the time. So he went straight to the university that was tough to get into. And I had to stay in town for two years to get my grades up. But when I transferred, I transferred into the business school at the university I went to. And I remember the dean of the business school was the parents Day, and my parents were with me. And he was talking about, you know, welcoming us to the business school. And his comment was really, it ties onto this. Well, because it makes me think about it a lot is he said, you know, he said, and he was very successful entrepreneur and businessman himself, who was also an educator. And which is part of the reason I picked this university because almost all the professors also had business careers. And so he said, he said, I would like to encourage all of you to consider just getting up right now and going down the hall because two doors down in the next big auditorium is the English department. And he said, I can't teach you to write and communicate well in the business school. And he said, you need to learn that. And he said, if you're not a great communicator, go down and get an English degree because I can teach you business and accounting when I hire you in the job, because I don't need you to have, you know, a bachelor's degree or master's degree in business. I can teach you all that on the job. And this was 30, whatever years ago. Right. And so I think now. And you laugh at. We sometimes laugh, but there are a whole lot of people that are just learning their skills and their careers on YouTube.

That is right. But I don't know how much time we have, but we can talk as.

Long as we want.

The reason why I think college is still a great thing is because you can learn from other people and you can connect. And that is, for example, one reason, because I will. My plan is to go to Harvard in two years and make a special course for business owners and presidents and head Managers, of course. I, I think it's nine weeks in total for, for two years. And this is because I want to, to learn from the best, not only from YouTube but I want to learn from interesting people and talk to them. And I think yes, you can learn a lot from YouTube and I do this every day. So how to build a custom GPT, very easy. But building a business that is maybe, maybe winning I think still takes some other disciplines. Like you said, communicating very important.

Well, I think in kind of wrapping all this up, I couldn't agree with you more. And I think one of the other takeaways, and this is something that came from my father in all of this was, you know, especially if you go away to school. I look at my, my youngest son went to college out of state with local college for two years and was out of state for two years. And the change in what he learned about being a human being, being a three, two and a half or three hour plane flight away from home and having to solve issues on his own. And you know, I went to school, you know, an hour away from home, not even an hour away from home, but I still had to get myself up each day and get moving. And YouTube doesn't teach that, nor does it teach what you were describing. You know Max, about the interpersonal skills with it. And even if you look at, you know, there's a big, big push here in the US because you know, the plum, there's not, there's not enough welders, there's not enough of skilled trades people out there. And that's a big push that we're seeing in this country now because I mean plumbers are making a hundred or more dollars an hour. Right. Because there's not enough of them.

Yeah.

So anyways, I think this is a good thing to watch.

I think there's one last comment as we move here. I, I completely agree with both of your points about is we have to teach, you know, we have to learn how to survive and thrive. Right. In the business world. I'm just wondering if there's a more efficient way to do that than four years of college and $250,000 of student debt. Right, Right. When you finish. But I completely agree with what you're saying Max. Is there are, you know, I learned how to manage my time in college. I, I really, that was. But did I. Do I need to spend 250 000? Is there a more efficient and more practical way to accomplish those things? I think that's what we have to be Thinking about.

No, I, I would. I think that's great. And as you say that. Right. I think what we're going to find. And it makes me kind of laugh because I have a. I guess it's.

Yeah.

A cousin in. In kind of a removed cousin in. In Germany. And he finished high school and spent the next eight years, whatever it was, till he got a PhD and went straight into academia. He's never worked in a factory or applied. I think he actually did for about six months. I think he worked for Caterpillar or John Deere for a bit but he went straight into teaching. Right. So the real world experience outside of that, even staying in the educational world that long removes you from being a rounded person or and having a lot of background of different things in your career. So.

And I think Paul's comment is really good here. Right. Paul says exposure experiences and curiosity, those are very important. Right. There's no doubt about that. The question is, is can those, can we get those in different way? I mean think about four years that we spend minimally in school. I mean God, the world changes so fast in four years. Is there a more efficient way to accomplish this?

I don't know.

I think it's an interesting.

What's funny to me about all of this is where an hour and 14 minutes into this and Paul drops in at the very end. It's like you know, four words that are so valuable to this discussion.

He wants his mic drop moment. That's fine.

He's. That's. Well, he deserves it. Last week he was talking about you and fishing worms.

That's right.

So thanks Paul for being with us. Max. I don't know if you've ever met Paul before. He's a lot of the events that you might when you're in the U.S. if you get a chance to. He's the president and CEO of a Dakota supply group or DSG which is a 5057 location. I think they're at now growing organization Paul leads that he's also on the executive board of Affiliated Distributors as well as national association of Electrical Distributors. And I could go on and on but we always appreciate his comments. So hey, cool article. As we wind this down the people segment about Martin Industrial Supply multi generation family business much like Max's about some of the things they're doing and managing within their company. So the. The Ruggles family runs that organization. Good guys, Doug. Doug and David. And so congratulations to them. Each week we have our industry scuttlebutt segment. The only thing out of that I was gonna comment on is our friends at naw, we back visiting them a couple of months ago. The national association of Wholesalers, their prior CEO who was kind of the trigger in growing and moving that organization passed away. So we're condolences and thoughts to all of them. And then Tom, if you kind of scroll down on the newsletter as we wind that down each week we talk about the. We call it a good reads. This week we modified it to goodreads and listen and we added there's a company in, in the Atlanta, basically Atlanta area Mingledorfs and they're a very, very large H vac and plumbing distributor and they've started internally their own podcast for their customers and their people and their vendors. So the gals there that are running that, Jenny and Team Caffeine and coils they call it. So we put a little link in there and we will now kind of include some podcasts. The reason I shared that was for other distributors kind of take a look at. That's how they're using another resource in marketing to touch their customers. But they're not just touching their customers. Touching their customers, their employees and their vendors through their podcast. So.

Like Max's strategy.

Yeah, yeah, that's that multimodal approach. So the last thing on our newsletter today before we chat a little bit and wind down is modern distribution management through their. And you know now part of Naw, there's a link to their top 24 or 2024 top distributor list. Great list of people, the US based companies. Max, is there anybody that you have resources like MDM or distribution strategy group like that in the EU or Europe or Germany?

No, I don't think so. And sometimes I think Tom should have opened a branch in Germany.

Okay.

Because I also want to be on the top distributors list. That's what on my bucket list. So maybe you can tell them that they should make a European edition.

Yeah.

What I think what is unique with MDM is the content that they created already years ago where nobody had a podcast or stuff like this.

Right.

They wrote great issues and very interesting topics and also the combination with MDM analytics and both of this would be great to have it in here in Germany. I think you can learn a lot of it.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's good news to hear the.

In.

In Germany or throughout the eu. Are there buying groups like we have here?

Yes, we have buying groups and we also have some kind of unions and stuff like this.

A trade association type things.

Yes, but we participate in a European one. But also in a German one. But I don't think you can compare it. You can compare it to. To stuff like MDM here. My cockpit is giving us a comment. I think it's. It's a different. If you have a buying organization, then there are usually many competitors within this buying corporation. And then it's difficult to really create content that stands out and educates everybody. That's my take on it. So that's why I'm MDM subscriber for, I would guess, 10 years. Yeah.

Good. I don't know if you know Max Vino, Mike Hockett, executive editor at mdm. Mike's good friend. He's been on the show a few times. So Mike, where. Where in Europe would you like to head that up and we'll throw that out to? Yeah, where. Where. Where would you like to be, Mike? We'll throw that out to Eric Copland and. And the guys at. At. Naw. And. And Tom as well.

So my, my. Sorry, my blinders went down, so it was quite dark in my room.

That's just fine. Good. Well, Mike's got. Mike's going to carry the torch for you to get modern distribution management coming to Germany and the eu. So that'll be good. I was hoping, as we were talking about that, I was hoping. I think Mike was going to be here. Oh, Amsterdam.

Switzerland. I lived in Switzerland for three years. It was great. Central to everything.

Yeah.

You know, lots of, Lots of languages.

You lived in Switzerland with a per diem.

I did.

Right.

So it was great.

He. That wasn't your. Your meals and all that wasn't out of your pocket. But I remember when you were a young businessman there. That was great. So for me, I think it would be. Would be somewhere like not just in particular, Garmish park and Kieran not far from Max, but somewhere like that. The cool, quaint little town in the mountains. But 40 minutes to the Innsbruck airport, 40 minutes to the Munich airport and off you go. So. All right, let's.

All right, let's wrap up.

Yeah, let's wind down. Appreciate everybody being here this weekend or this idea. We're going to talk about the weekend. Max, thank you so much for joining us. It's really, really beneficial to us to kind of get your take not just on the EU but on your view from Germany of the US market and seeing what you're doing there. So thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. Very interesting.

Good.

Well, I'm going to reach out, Max, and share with you some of the AI things We're working on. I love your opinion on some of them.

Yeah, that would be very interesting. It would be fun to get Max and maybe some of his people on a call and kind of some of this stuff. I think you might be interested in some of the tools that Tom and his team are working on. In fact, we have a call in 10 minutes where I get my weekly update on what the development guys have done. So. Fantastic. Max, you're off to go see some football tonight, huh?

Right. I'm looking forward to it.

Will that be at the Allianz stadium?

Yeah, it's 10 miles from here in that direction.

Very good. I've driven by that a number of times. I've not been there. I will be visiting with you less than a year from now on my visit to Munich. So we'll look forward to spending some time in person. One favor, Max. Can I ask you.

Yeah.

Will you come join us again sometimes?

If you're interested. I'm happy to join you and it's been great.

Yep.

Thank you.

Yep. So, Tom, any big weekend plans?

No, keep moving. Keep packing my house up.

So, yeah, Tom's moving shortly and my son is getting married this weekend, so.

I'm gonna have more fun than I am. I guess I may crash the party.

My. My role is to keep Mrs. Brown from exploding with all the lists that she has about what's going on this weekend are astounding. But it should be a good time. All the kids are going to be in town, so it'll be good. So, hey, thank you again, both of you, Tom. I sure appreciate it. Today was number 95. We're five away from our 100th episode. There's going to be a party for that one. It's coming together. We've got John working on that, our editor and. And producer. So more. More info on that to come shortly. So as we close out, I'm Kevin Brown. We have Max Meister from Ludwig Meister in Dachau, Germany, and my good friend and lifelong friend and business partner, Tom Burton. We'll say thanks to everybody. Be kind, be safe, and do good things.

Have a good weekend.

Stay safe. All the best.