Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution, Episode 104

Sa. Sam, is that drumming or dancing or a hybrid or what is it?

It's dancing. It's dancing. It's my hybrid. It's.

That's perfect.

It's a hybrid.

It's a hybrid.

I just enjoy a little great piano music, jazz and, you know. So we get our Friday going and introing around the horn, it just makes me feel good.

Okay, all right.

Feel good. So you need more music in your life, Tom?

I guess so, yeah.

You know, there's more to life than 80s on satellite. 80s radio on satellite TV. You gotta mix it up more. So.

Okay.

All right. Radio. I should say so. Anyways, how are you, my friend?

Doing good, very good.

Your week's been all right?

Been good.

You've been busy?

Been good.

Well, let's dive on in. My name's Kevin Brown. I'm here with my lifelong friend and business partner, Tom Burton. We get together every Friday morning here on around the Horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing. We try and pull together the news of the week, mostly North American news, a little bit international news as well as it impacts wholesale distribution, manufacturing. And we put that together in a newsletter by the same title. That newsletter goes out to about 10,000 plus people each week. And we unpack that news here on our live stream and our podcast. So we're here this morning. You might be listening to us on or watching with us on LinkedIn Live. Could be Facebook Live or YouTube Live, but if you're listening, that would be on one of the podcast formats. Our great producer and editor, John Taylor pulls all this together later in the day for us to get it up on Apple and Spotify and Odyssey and all the top podcast platforms. So if you're listening in though, you would not be seeing the newsletter. And we're going to be posting that newsletter here that we walk through each day. So if you would like to get the newsletter, as so many do, just send us a note. You can do that@helloadsmartech.com and hello again@leadsmartech.com and then you could also go to the website that we have for our live show and podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod. we're able to be here every week because the company that Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies, covers the costs of all of this and sponsors the show. Lead Smart is a AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence solution that's been built specifically for wholesale distributions and manufacturers. We have versions for both to help accelerate growth. And the reason it does that is because it gives never before seen insights into customers and what you're doing with your customers. What are you selling? Are you selling the right products? What should you be selling? What's going on with your quotes? And we use AI tools with that to get a look at that data that's coming from ERP systems and marketing automation and E commerce. So if you ever have an interest in learning more about that, please reach out to us as well. Tom, before we dive in, I looked at just some of the invites that go out. You know, the. The folks that have clicked the. That they're coming invite to the show each week, I think typically represents somewhere between 5 and 10% of the people that come on live that have clicked an invitation that they've received. But I saw, I think, three or four different countries people were coming from today. So if you're listening in, whether you're in, you know, Paducah or you're in Miami or you're in another country, let us know where you're from and let us know that you're here. If you're listening in while you're eating lunch or whatever between bites, throw a little comment in as well, because it gets a little spicier and a little more fun when we hear from you.

Yeah, hopefully that works. We've had weirdness this week that with LinkedIn, so hopefully that's. Yeah.

You were on another podcast earlier, so that's good.

All right. Good morning, Brian.

There we go. Well, that we can start the show because Poppy's here, so Very, very good. Yeah, you know, you. Another podcast that you were on, you guys were celebrating a milestone and earlier in the week and that I was trying to comment and trying to be supportive because I can't make it to that podcast very often because somebody has to drive the ship while you're there. And you know that you couldn't see my comments, so.

No, a lot of them. But anyway, looks like we're good. We're on our way. Brian in the Queen City from Charlotte, so.

Right.

Welcome.

Yep. Eating lunch. Right. Very good.

Well, Tom, that sounds good. What are you having? I'm kind of hungry.

I was messaging with Duncan earlier in this week. Gonna look forward to seeing him in October in Chicago, so. Hey, Tom.

Yes, sir?

You want to talk about what happened this morning on the. In the. In Jackson Hole?

Oh, you mean about the Powell briefing. Yeah, but, you know, you have to read the. James. James is in the house from Atlanta. One of our outstanding lead smart customers.

That's right.

If you need office supplies, James is your man in Atlanta. For sure.

That's right.

Public stuff. Okay. Anyway, I've lost my train of thought. I'm thinking about that Publix.

It took me a second. Publix is the grocery store.

That's right.

Okay. Well, Mrs. Gilman will. Will want to tell her about that.

Yeah. So. Yeah. Anyway, I haven't seen all the data, but what I did see is Pal, obviously was speaking in Jackson Hole at the economic summit, said that, you know, rate cuts are on the horizon. They're coming. They're coming. But from what I understand. And again, I haven't seen all the details. He didn't say when, and he didn't say for how much or for. Yeah, for what. You know, what the rate cuts would be. I. I looked at the market earlier. It looked like the market was pleased with whatever he said. I think they just validated what they probably already thought. But, yeah, I guess something's coming. Well, as I said last week. Right. I think September is a foregone conclusion at this point.

His word, Tom. His words were, the time has come for policy to adjust.

Yeah. Yeah.

So is that. Is. Is. Are you hoping that it's not September or.

No, I'm not. I don't. Well, I don't. I. I just. Look, it's. I think it's fine if it's September. Frankly. I personally, I don't. Stake aside, I think doing a cut in September is fine. I. I think, though, that there's. There's a lot of. A lot of tentacles with all of this. Right. If they start cutting too fast, you can spook the market. Yeah. Business. You can. If they cut. You know, it's. So I don't know how it's. What the right answer is as far as the speed or how much. It would be great if they just did one this year and then they waited till January to do the rest of them. That way I could enjoy my steak. But, you know, we'll see.

Well, you know, our. Our wager aside, I think the markets are screaming that what has to happen. The Dow is up. I'm sorry, The New York Stock Exchange is up 1.06%, S P500 is up a half a percent, and the dow is up 0.6. So Nasdaq is 0.83. And I have actually. And Microsoft's down, so. Kind of funny, but what has been interesting is treasury yields fell on Friday this morning, which is an article that I looked at quickly. The benchmark.

That would make sense. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Right.

Which.

Which, I mean, I think that just Reinforces right. The. The big thing is there was. And what he had to say this morning is I grabbed a recap online real quick and said he covered what, four or five different areas policy. He says the time has come to for policy to adjust. The direction of the travel is clear and the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook and the balance. And then he said related to inflation, my confidence has grown that inflation is on a sustainable path back to 2%. Again I just. The 2% thing, when you look at the history of where that came from with a passing comment by a politician in New Zealand that the world bounces around that 2% is the number just still astounds me. But okay. He talked about employment. He said it seems unlikely that the labor market will be a source of elevated inflationary pressures anytime soon. We do not seek or welcome further cooling and labor market conditions. To me that's a little spark of I gotta do something quick here then the balance of risks. He said but inflation and labor market data show an evolving situation. The upside risks to inflation have diminished and the downside risks to employment have increased. And then finally his emphasis point was we'll do everything we can to support a strong labor market as we further progress towards price stability. There was all kinds of. In one of the articles that I read from Reuters this morning, they probably had 10 different well known economists with their take on it all. My view of it is I hope that they don't do up a half a point at the. On the first cut. I think. And again let's completely forget whether it's what your thoughts are about one cut or my thought about two cuts or more is it's about what's best here is we can, we can figure out who buys the stakes. But I think progressively quarter point, you know, quarter pointer, 25 basis point cuts is the way to go because the markets are going to get spooked regardless, you know, if, if they do too much.

Yeah, no, there's a lot of. And you could argue, right, you could, you could put up a legitimate argument for one cut this year, three cuts this year over, you know, a half a point or more per cut. I mean you could argue probably legitimately for all kinds of different scenarios here. Yeah, it'll just be interesting to see how they play it out. And I do think they have a little bit of a tightrope to fought walk here and you know, hey, let's not everyone's going to be happy about everything all the time, right. The Stock market is definitely, let's just say a bit overbought at the moment and I believe is looking for a reason to correct itself a little bit over the next, you know, course of the next 90 to 120 days. So anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this all plays out, but.

Well, a lot happening.

Anything is possible.

Yeah. Well, you know, if you just think back to the fourth quarter of last year, this fourth quarter is going to be much more interesting than the fourth quarter of last year. Good. All right, let's kind of move ahead here and talk a little bit further. We had, we posted a number of articles about this morning. Even, you know, we do this, we post starting to get our newsletter ready on Friday evenings, so. Or Thursday evenings, I should say. So as we talk about our segment today, which we're in right now, economy and supply chain in the newsletter again, if you don't get that and you would like to get the newsletter, let us know. Publish an article about business activity edges, lower pricing powers ebb a little bit further. Had posted another article about jobless claims. But the big article that was kind of here was, and you had commented on this when we were talking earlier is this new jobs data show growth has been far weaker than initially reported. There was a quite a big undertaker underestimate there, right.

I guess the largest and maybe forever or in a long, long time. I mean, grossly underestimated or overestimated the job growth. And I don't know, I'd like to understand the story behind the story behind that a little bit more about how that happens. And that's not even the final number. The final number of all of this doesn't come out until February.

So the title is the title of the article. This one was from cnn, but it was a lot of other places was that new data shows us job growth has been far weaker than initially reported and 818,000 fewer jobs in March than were initially reported. So you know what? It's, it kind of, I just, oh, my friend, I, it just makes me go back to thinking, you know, and, and since we've been doing this show coming up on a couple of years, I just think so much more about economic factors than I probably did previously.

Right.

I pay closer attention a lot of these things and it's just kind of one more view that. And I'm sure there's people that, that are out there in academia that are looking at these things, but I just kind of go back to the 2% number and how that kind of randomly came around and then, you know, the PCI and the tools, it's maybe it's time that with the data that's available and you know, we talk so much and we will be today about AI and so forth, maybe we're time in, you know, a time in history where it's a good place to review. Let's put some more firm things in place and some more firm numbers that we're looking at and, and how we're gathering those data. Because if you could be that wrong. Right. Of 818,000 fewer jobs in the U.S. if you can be that off in one of these settings, there's problems with that data. Right?

I would suspect, yeah. I'm sure it's not easy data to get anyway, but.

No, but maybe our data points that they make decisions off of first, things that are as important as we think about related to, you know, our, our economy in the US and the largest economy in the world. Right. Maybe the factors that go into how that's decided and how these decisions are made, maybe we need to rethink those data points based upon the fact that, I mean, just as simple as we have AI and we have, you know, much more relevant pieces out there that we could probably be looking at rather than the stuff that's 20, 30 years old. So.

Well, the three lake. Right. The three legs of the stool right now economically, that most everybody tends to look at is growth, gdp, gross domestic product, that kind of stuff. They look at the job market and then they look at the stock market.

There's in consumer pricing. And all of these things are big.

Factors in this, but those all factor into the growth is what's happening with the growth. And then you have the Fed with the inflation aspect of it kind of in the middle and the inflation aspect of all of those things that are there as well. But there's not. All of those things are not entirely dependent on each other. There's a lot of interdependencies, but there's a lot of things that are independent within each of those as well. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know the right answer to it, but yes, maybe there is a amazing new AI system that can do a better job of it.

Just. It just seems like maybe it's time to look at those things. And you know, we've got both got. I'm not sure. I'm not confident either presidential candidate even really understands all of this stuff, but one of them is saying he'd like to have an impact on what the Fed does. So we'll see what plays out with all of that. So you know what as we talk about in this segment that we're in today is, is our segment on supply chain and, and the economy. So big rail strike started yesterday in Canada. The good news is the, you know, it's, it's interesting if as we talk about this we've talked about labor, you know, earlier in the year with some strikes and last year with some things with the automakers and so forth. Boy in Canada that the federal government wasn't, wasn't leery about jumping right in the mix of all of this and, and having expectations of what, what should happen next. And so I thought it was kind of interesting because that happened right away. They got both sides of the table pretty quickly. Now it's still going to take them, I think the article said that it was only a one day strike basically, but it's going to take them a series of days to get in fact was I had a note about that up to a week to catch up on shipments after a one day strike. So kind of a big deal. But they got the labor minister in Canada got them. You know, and we've got Duncan with us here, that's in Canada if he has any thoughts. I don't want to interrupt his lunch, but if you had any thoughts on that. Well, it was kind of nice to see somebody get people back to the table because we'll see, you know, in the US sometimes we'll see strikes go on for weeks before the government will jump in and try and put a little pressure on things. So it's good, good to see that.

So do you have any take on why that was much maybe more efficient? Is it just the culture that exists there or what do you what I don't know.

I'd like to, it would be, you know, not quite guessing, but educated guessing I think to think on that. I think my belief would be the government's just willing to take a stronger, put a stronger pressure on that. I don't know if Canadian unions are stronger than, you know, US unions. They're both Teamsters in this, in this case. So I'm not aware enough about that. Maybe someone could share with us if they know or have thoughts on it. But, but they sure acted quicker, you know. And I don't know if there's more power available in that. The reason that's important to keep an eye on is it's more just we think about, you and I are both here in California. We think about some of these Things is we're trying to keep an eye on supply chain issues globally. So we talk regularly about issues in the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal or shipping delays out of Shanghai or whatever it might be because it impacts wholesale distribution globally as well as manufacturing and getting the parts in. So the amount of things, you know, there's. I can't remember where the article quoted this, but the amount of barrels of oil that come across the border every day on rail lines from the oil sands in northern Canada to other drilling spots in the US Was actually surprised me. I wish I remember the number, but the amount of goods and service or goods that are coming across the border each day in the US Is substantial. Going to manufacturers. So this, this is a. Could have been a significant supply. Basically what they're saying now is it just puts the supply chain behind it, you know, a week in that setting. So I will make. Before we jump on that, Tom, I, I did think something, something caught my eye that was interesting in this article and it's, it's pretty cool phenomena of, of the technology and the day and the world where we live in the world. It just, it makes me think back, you know, the Paul Revere riding his horse with his lantern that the British are coming, was getting information out just, you know, a little over two, 200 years ago. And now the, the Teamsters posted on Twitter or X about their, their update about the picket lines coming down. The amount of, you know, you think about what was that, what was it called in the Middle east when all the something summer a few years back, probably four or five years ago when all. When things were getting news sources were getting shut down. I believe it was in Israel and everything that was going on, the news that was getting out of the, out of the Middle east for the most part was getting out on social media, mostly on Twitter. So pretty interesting to see that that source and obviously there's all kinds of the, the political resources that are out there now as well.

Right. So what's the most effective channel to get the news out? That's.

And speed. Yep, speed. So good. Let's roll into our manufacturing distributions segment here.

What.

What's the first one we got there? No excuses. Manufacturers much, much digitize now.

Yeah, this was a great article from chief executive. Really, really, I thought really well done article. I, I hope and I know you may have them up in front of you. I'd like to go through those four or five things that they talked about in there about why manufacturers and I assume this would apply to wholesale distributors as well are not transforming digitally transforming at the pace that certainly all of us service providers, vendors and and you know, media. I mean there's just so much talk right. If you go to any show it's all about hey, you need to transform, you need to transform, you need to transform. And yet the market doesn't move at that pace. And I just thought it was some really good insights. Do you want to hit on those real quick?

I will. It's kind of interesting. Brian's with us from this morning from joined us from Distribution Strategy Group. They've got had a big AI event. They've got another big profit summit coming up. They've had some good shows recently on their podcasts and and you know we've talked about this. I'm going to play into the AI game on this from a before I go into those these specific points about this but I just wanted to make a comment that the article starts out with. It says despite widespread long standing industry understanding of the need for change, far too many companies have hesitated far too long. This now threatens their very existence. Maybe their very existence might be might be a little exaggerated in that. But I think you know, the reality of it is and I talk to you, work with your team at Lead Smart, mostly with our customers. Jump in once in a while and talking to industry folks. I'm on the phone every day with people across globally in industry, mostly in men in distribution and some in manufacturing. You know a simple example is we've come up with a number that it's anecdotal but 70 plus probably 75% plus of the companies that we interact which, which is thousands of them on our mailing lists. Well over a thousand, close to 2000 in fact over 2000 within some of the buying groups that we're partnered with. 70 plus percent of these companies have never even put a foundational tool in their business like CRM. Right. They have an erp. Oftentimes it's antiquated erp. It's too tentacled out into other systems in their business to easily replace and they buy these what we call spot software products that you know are nice to haves but they're way behind on foundational systems within their business I. E. And we're going to have an article here shortly as well. The, the foundational tools are quickly becoming not just ERP and CRM but now we're going to start looking at E Commerce is going to become foundational.

Right.

We've got marketing automation should probably become foundational to this as well and now we're really getting to this point and this article talked about, it's about manufacturers but I would just say, you know, for our audience it's equal with distributors as well. It's, it's crazy, you know and you talk about. Naw would say that National Association Wholesalers would tell you that I think it's 2/3 of the US GDP goes through wholesale distribution and this is talk article talks about 3/4 of global GDP or $75 trillion comes from manufacturing. So you know, now is the time for this. And the article talks about navigating some roadblocks and I think that was the key points that you were talking about. They talk about lack of urgency from boards and investors to drive long term transformation. CEOs nearing retirement who are unwilling to embark on multi year change efforts. Scarcity of digital talent and expertise within manufacturing organizations. Again, add just distribution where you see manufacturing high perceived cost and unclear ROI of large scale digital digitization initiatives. And perhaps most important, manufacturers slash distributors are reluctant to disrupt or cannibalize existing profitable analog businesses. And I would throw out to you my friend, I'm going to read that one again because unless you tell me different, this is, this is probably what we see the most. Manufacturers and distributors are reluctant to disrupt or cannibalize existing profitable analog business. It's not broken yet.

Yeah, no. I mean I, I, I thought that summary was like right on the money. I mean that's everything that we hear and talk about all the every day.

Yep.

And you could argue hey if you're a family owned business or you know, you could, or in a profitable business you could probably argue that those are legitimate reasons not to take some of these things on. I think the point though if you keep reading the article. Right. Is the longer that you wait for this to start looking at these things, the farther and farther you're going to be behind and you are going to be in a situation I would say in the last two weeks the amount of conversations I've had about the urgency of AI. Not just a conversation of AI but more of an urgency of how do we start incorporating that into the, into the business is picking up.

Yeah, right.

And these are people that obviously are taking the effort to do the transformation. So the longer you wait and the more you're in the analog world as they, as they describe their. The, the farther you're going to have the, and the farther behind you're going to be. And as AI really does permeate. Right. Which it hasn't permeated but really permeates the business and the business. And I think they even talk a little bit about this in the article. You're going to be just that much farther behind. So. And it went on to go like how do you deal with it? And I mean there's some, I thought really good, you know.

No, this is, this was solid. Yeah. But I mean it's, it's things we, we pretty much talk about, you know, related to this every week. And, and it's interesting. We talked a couple weeks ago, we had some data, you know, we, we talked about, you know, kind of the Gartner hype cycle. Right. There has been no, I mean I think, I think we're getting past the, the hype of AI and there's been quite a few people talking about that, that now it's time to get past this. Okay, let me go figure out what it's about. And now we need to figure it out in our business. But you know, my, my view of this and, and obviously it's a little bit biased from the standpoint of the product that, you know, the company that you and I founded make. But there are so many tools out there right now that are popping up that are one off tools and it's AI driven. But the, the, for the most part the manufacturers and distributors that we talk to consistently, again, I'm at show after show. I've got, I think I have seven or eight events in the next 90 days that I'll be at. In fact less than, far less than 90 days. And the vast majority of the people that we talk to are well intended, they've gone out and bought. I'll just, I don't want to name any of them, but they're one off products that are supposed to help other point products, point products that, that, that people don't. And point products is probably in our technology world a little more used. But it's just, you know, a solution for a singular smaller issue. Then address the big issue of digitizing their organization with. Having a long term AI is a component of all of this, but they're, they're missing foundational tools in their business. Not just CRM but, but updating and upgrading ERP that are going to hold their companies behind. And because it doesn't, when you choose an industry specific customer intelligence and CRM platform that has AI built into it like the one that we make, you're ahead of the game with a foundational tool. So you're 90 and 120 days later you're starting to see relevant results from that in your business as you're continuing to expand that a tool like ours. But when you start thinking about the impact of upgrading and updating your erp, which a whole lot of people do need, that's a multi year project typically. Right. But, but to your point earlier, what this article is talking about is you know what the people that are doing it and we mentioned earlier that, you know, DSG folks and MDM is doing events and lots of folks out there are trying to educate people, not just vendors like us, to move to that direction. Because to your point earlier Tom, is the people that are doing it are going to start eating your lunch. Right? They're going to be more efficient and, and it's not you're going to be trying to hire. I was talking to manufacturer recently and they're too busy to work on bringing a tool in like Lead Smart Channel cloud within their business that would make their people exponentially more efficient. And they have hundreds of employees around the world. They're too busy hiring because they've got all these open spots and I put the case to them that says, you know what if you could slow down on your hiring because people you have were exponentially more efficient through technology. Can't get that through their head. Right. And we're seeing that and I thought this article did a nice job of kind of putting the, the risks out there and they talked about, you know, some things in there about at five points about trying to help put a plan together. So good article. Again, if you don't get our newsletter and you would like to, it's called around the Horn and wholesale distribution goes out every Friday morning to thousands of people. Love to have you get it as well. Just send us a note@helloadsmartech.com and we will get that out to you. Or you could go to the podcast website which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and we will get that to you as well. So.

So I think we struck a little bit of a chord here on a couple of the couple people is I think Brian brings up a good point. Right, we see. I mean I'm sure this is the world, right? The DSG Digital Strategy group talks all the time, but the next generation is becoming way more digital, which we've talked a lot about along the way. Bob's in the house. Good to see Bob. As Bob says, a trick with the tech is to first think about how you would do it without being plugged into the wall or connected to a battery. Then think how you would augment and amplify it with the tech. So in other words, I think what he's basically saying there is, okay, well what are you trying to do from the analog world and then how can you amplify that from the digital side? And Kelly also, who I know works a lot in the industry and works with a lot of companies in the industry saying, you know, same thing. Right. Don't know where to start. They don't have the one to do the work. AI will transfer this eventually, but you know, so forth and so forth. So yep, I think we all are running into this. But there are, you know, you might believe 75 or 80 of the company don't have foundational tech, but the 20 that do. I mean just this week I know we need to move on, so I'll try and keep this short. But this, just this week, you know, we have a number, a lot of our customers using Eclipse as their erp. Right.

And Epicore product.

Yeah, epicore product. And we worked out a kind of a taxonomy with Eclipse on what are the key data items that are going to be used to drive AI when you're using Eclipse data and the sales world in the sales process and which data points are not. And as we started to look through that data taxonomy of, and a taxonomy, kind of like a hierarchy or the structure of that data, the power that we started to see of how that data can be really used from an AI perspective to drive sales was, I mean people, you know, some of the conversations were like, holy crap, I had no idea. Right, right. Some of these things are possible. And I think we keep waiting for the killer app. It hasn't quite happened, but it's going to happen. And you know, we're even seeing it in our world.

No, absolutely. And that, that ties back to extracting siloed data from within an organization and getting the right view of your data.

Right.

And, and you know, and I don't want to belabor this too long, but there are way too many companies out there who are, have been hugely successful, you know, maybe multi generational hundreds of millions, if not close to a billion dollars, you know, probably the hundreds of millions range that are just hugely successful. And the idea of moving out of an analog world to a digital world and, and I, I don't even want to say it's analog to digital. It's, I'll, I'll call it, instead of analog, I'll call it antiquated digital or, or rudimentary digital versus foundational digital with a long term execution plan on how it's going to grow the organization that that's going to be the kicker for people, you know, and it just, it's going to take people. There are people that it's just going to take when they look back and go, wait a minute, you know, we missed our numbers two years in a row and we gave up market share to XYZ company and we lost five people to XYZ company And they're doing these things because they're in the same trade association or buying group and I can see what they're doing. It's unfortunate. It takes some of that.

Yep.

Good. All right, let's jump ahead here. You know, they posted an article here as well. This came from mdm, but it was in the news. In General, Toyota recalls 34,000 cars due to distributors inaccurate stickers. So here's a gig. We won't spend much time on this. The only reason that's here is there are a lot of wholesale distributors out there. Specific in a handful of markets. But you really see this a lot in the hose and fitting world and so forth where they do kitting as it's oftentimes termed. Or, or they'll build, build assemblies of multiple manufacturers products into a singular product, maybe change a fitting on something or doing things. All I this article is here for is the reminder that says, hey, you know what, be cautious with labeling and so forth. This article was about Toyota had to recall 34,000 cars because one of their distributors who did some additions to the car made a mistake with the labeling and weights and so forth. And it wasn't that when nobody got hurt, it wasn't a safety issue, it was a labeling and compliance issue that went with it. So because so much of that happens with people repackaging things or kitting things and so forth. Great reminder. You know, make sure you're, you're meeting all of the standards and the requirements. You're insured properly and you're in alignment with the manufacturer, all of the manufacturers that you're working with if you're in that case. So. Well, good reminder there.

Pretty costly recall though for a sticker.

Yeah, but, but there it is. Right. So good. All right, let's jump into our E Commerce and marketing segment. Digital Commerce360 article here. E Commerce is now part of the B2B operating standard. Tom, want to throw some thoughts out on that one. What we are, it kind of ties into our digitalization.

Yeah, no, I think it fits right within your discussion of the foundational products. Right?

Yep.

And I'll even go a little bit, kind of a little bit more abstract. Right. What do you need to be able to be thinking about? Well, E commerce, right. Is how do you allow your customers or your prospects to purchase in a self serve or not even necessarily purchase but start to shop and go through the process of research and whatever online. Right. That's a foundational element of any business is the ability for that self serve perspective, just as you said. Right. A foundational element of ERP is I've got to be able to run my transactions and my orders and my quotes. And the foundational element of a CRM is how do I make my salespeople more efficient and enable the team to sell more and, and grow and so forth. So yeah, I think, you know, this is what talking about is that it's. And I guess there's still a lot of companies that have not embraced E commerce. Oh yeah. Or not embrace self serve. But again, I agree with you. It's just one, one of those same foundational elements that are going to be part of any sort of, any sort of modern futurized business. And this was a good article again kind of summarizing that and some of the stats.

Yep. Well, one of the interesting, they, they surveyed 400 companies each with more than 20 employees and revenues above 20 million and it said that 70% of B2B sellers have an E commerce site or an online portal. Additionally, it said that they provide, let's see, where was I at there? It said in the landscape where customers expect convenience and flexibility as standard, the 23% of B2B organizations not yet embracing E commerce risk getting left behind while the remainder capitalize on their competitive advantage. I think if that study was, and the research that they did there was 4, 000 companies, I think they would probably find that 70% that do have something falls to probably 40 or 50% at the most.

Okay.

Because we just, we see a lot of people that are just getting started and the other side of that is what level of quality. And this is, this is something that's, I don't want to say not fair because Cap the, you know, capitalism is capitalism. Right. But the challenge is, and we, I mean it doesn't seem like a week goes by that we don't talk about this. At some level is that buyers now are their, their business life and we're going to talk about this in a, in our people and leadership segment later, but their digital life and their business life are merging. Right. So I always use the example, you know, the guy that's, you know, the 60 plus percent of B2B buyers are millennials. So that's the guy that, you know, used Apple Pay when he went to the movies with his girlfriend the day before or took an Uber and used an app and buys all of his groceries through Uber Eat, UberEats or Amazon, you know, fresh. And when he gets to work, he wants that same experience and is looking for that. And that's a challenge for smaller wholesale distributors that haven't fully embraced digitization in their business yet. Because just because I have E commerce does not mean I have E commerce at a level that people are expecting. There are some very generic tools out there. You can find, find them, some of them through your trade associations and buying groups that don't give that high level of experience yet. So it's kind of an interesting factor when you kind of put that not just do I have anything but do I have something that's relevant?

That's why I don't like to just say you have E Commerce. Do you have CRM? You have erp? That's not the right, that's not the right way to look at it. It's foundationally. Do you have an experience that allows your customer to shop and make purchases and do things on a self serve manner?

I'm sorry Tom, go ahead.

Do you have an experience that enables your sales team to be more effective and more and more efficient and more again providing a better. Do you have an experience? All of those things are, there's a, there's a specific outcome for them versus just saying E commerce, CRM, erp, marketing automation and so forth.

Yeah.

So look, I'm not saying that it's easy and I want to touch on a couple of these comments here. Yeah.

Before you jump though, Tom, I think the important point of that is, and I do want to hit some of these, got a couple of good comments that just came into that. I think the important part of this is we talk about those foundational pieces, we've talked about point products and so forth that are challenges out there. The other side of this that I think is critical is, is all of this part of a digital roadmap as opposed to I'm just going to buy things, right. And, and, and that's the key that I think we really want to talk about is, and that's where I think the consultants of the world that are working with these folks need to be really narrowly focused on, pinpointed focus on is what's the digital roadmap for the Organization as opposed to what do I do?

I.

Okay, I need to buy E Commerce now. Okay, well, where does E commerce fall in my digital roadmap? Because if you buy E commerce and we've got a comment we'll talk about here in just a minute that's not able to easily connect in with the ERP system or I don't have a foundational tool like an AI enabled CRM that can track E commerce data, ERP data, marketing automation data, and show a customer journey across the board. I'm missing the digital roadmap by just buying something singular. So let's jump to those comments.

Yeah, well, I'll hit Belinda's comment here first. Right. What she's saying is E Commerce requires integration with the erp. Absolutely right. And there is complexity to that. And she's saying, you know, starting this direction is critical for our organizations. Smaller business need to look at this seriously as is no longer an option to be in the market competitively. Look, I don't. I am not going to sit here and say that this is necessarily easy or a magic wand. No, no. But I, you know, I mean, Kevin, you've been in this industry way longer than I have. It wasn't easy for these companies to build the businesses that they had. Right. Nothing's easy. Right. So it's just now a matter of going through the process. And I agree with the roadmap perspective. I also want to hit Bob's comment because there's also an organizational aspect to things as well, like who has it. And you know, he says the problem with B2B E Comm is who owns it. Marketing owns it, Sales owns it. It owns it. But Sale, you know, there's a lot of different stakeholders that need to go into the mix here. Again, not saying this is easy. These are just things that are.

All.

Kind of have to be taken into account on that bigger picture we seem to be today about this. So.

Well, it's. This is important stuff. Right? This is, this is where things are headed. And you made an interesting point a few minutes ago that I'm appreciative. And by the way, thank you everybody for your comments. The, the more the better. Comments just make the show better. Right. And Belinda, thank you for you. I love hearing that.

I love hearing the viewpoints. Right.

It's good. And, and you know what, by the way, don't hesitate to disagree with us as well because Tom and I disagree with each other here and there also. So the Mrs. Brown thinks that the more I disagree or, or argue with Tom, the less I'll, I'll cause her headaches. So. Works good that way.

But you know me, so that's, you.

Know, she usually agrees with you. That's funny. Yeah. Yes, thank you for that. That's. That's just what I need. Threw me off there. The. You made it. You made a good comment earlier. I'm appreciative of it. Not just one mini, but in particular you made a comment about how the hard work that went into some of these companies getting there, whether you're a manufacturer, you're a distributor and I think about that a lot. Specifically, you know, we, we meet wholesale distributors every day and I, I had a great meeting at the Affiliated Distributors Bearing Power Transmission national meeting a couple of weeks ago, I guess it was last week. Just great people, right? Just good human beings. And I was meeting with a gentleman and his. Was there with his daughter and won't mention the company. Don't know their ages. I'm going to say he's late 60s and she's probably mid-40s. And she had never thought she wanted to work in the family business and now she's going to come in and take over and run the company and they're figuring out their digital roadmap. But you know, when I asked him how he started the business, I think there are 14 or 15 branches and his comment was such and such a company looked like they were going to fire me. So I went out and figured I could do it on my own and the work that went into building that company. Now you think about that when we talk about companies that are third and fourth generation we see all the time. So let's just say, let's just say they're a 100 million dollar a year company with five branches. What took you say 50 years to get from zero to five or from one to five branches and $100 million with the right digital roadmap ahead for your organization, that's well planned. Going from $100 million to $2 million is probably $200 million. Could probably be five years for organizations versus 50 years. So the exponential growth opportunity that's there from these investments. But it's not from just saying I just went and bought something. It's from having that plan and the roadmap ahead of how we're going to get there.

Yeah, no, I agree completely and I think that it's a good point. Right. Because there's a lot of blood, sweat and tears that have taken place to get to the point where these companies are at.

Yeah.

And yes, they can go to a whole, not just a whole nother level of growth, but a whole nother level of, of experience, customer experience. A lot of comments in here about the importance of customer experience and just, you know, a lot of companies are concerned about succession planning and all of that. It just opens up the door to that being having less friction and more opportunity.

Two great comments here. We don't need to highlight them or whatever. I'll hit them really quickly though that, that align. Right. Bob was talking about companies. When companies adapt to tech, sometimes they lose touch with the core competencies that give them a competitive advantage. And he's talking about that tech needs to adapt to the company. And Valinda was saying something similar about delivering fast revenue results. That's something for people to really be thinking about is when you buy off the shelf software, whether it's an ERP system or CRM or customer intelligence solution, it should be either already prepared or out of the box ready to work in your industry or it should be. In our case we'll give a good example is we talk about lead Smart channel cloud is 70% ready for most distributors right out of the box. But that last 30% is when we hit. What Valinda and Bob were just talking about is that now we bring core competencies of the company and sales processes and, and I've, I've never met yet and Tom, you, you work closer on this than I do. But I have yet to meet a company that uses our software that has not refined and enhanced and or developed new processes for how they manage leads, how they work with quotes and so forth. When you, when you have a plan and a roadmap in place to adopt technology and, and you're working with the right partners, whether it's us or somebody else on a related product is the understanding of your business so that your business isn't trying to get stuck with having to change everything because of the technology. But the technology aligns and meshes and integrates with your business to make it better is key.

So yeah. And I also want to just quickly touch on Kelly's comment here. In particular, what she says we want is a buyer experience, a pirate.

Today this is.

What we want is a buying experience, not a transactional one.

Yeah.

Right. And I think we talked a lot about these point products or these. Again, you, there's no way you can really create an experience without having that road map in that structure that's, that's there along the way. I'm very intrigued with the amount of you can Tell there's a lot of emotion behind this.

Yeah, it's passion.

We have it that's out there. And you probably see this even in the shows that you're going to where you may meet people within the company that are frustrated that they haven't been able to push more modernization and technology forward. And there certainly seems to be a lot of emotion in the subject in the area.

No, no, they're absolutely. And I think what I think where you see that the challenge here is, you know, and we've got some folks that are with us today that are distributors themselves. I think the challenge happens is I, I know I need to do this. I don't know where to start. I'm going to the I, I, I go to the AI event for distribution. I go to the this, I go to my buying groups. Whatever it might be is the I, I, I do all these things and I go get educated on it. But I'm stuck, right. I'm stuck with where to start. I, maybe I don't have the budgets yet, whatever it might be. And I think that's the issue here is get started with something but have a plan of how you're going to move down the path.

All right. We're like way behind here. So where do you want to go here so we don't make this a three hour event.

Let's see. Well, the next article we were talking about was why AI and B2B marketing is essential for survival and success. Talked about AI quite a bit already. Why don't we jump ahead real quick?

If we don't, we can, we can.

If you want to make a couple comments, then let's jump.

Comments. We can move on. Right? Because they use the word right. One of the biggest and most significant benefit this is from the article. One of the most Significant benefits of AI in B2B marketing is increased level of personalization allows business to create highly targeted and personalized content, improve customer engagement and con in conversion. I just wanted to touch on that word personalization because it's come up a lot actually or fairly frequently in conversations I've had. Personalization isn't like hey, just hi Kevin, I put your name in the email or think on those lines. Personalization comes from really knowing who it is that you're talking to and then having the most relevant conversation that you can with that person based on or that company based on their needs. And I do agree. I see it all the time and I see it every day in some of the stuff that even we're doing. Is AI really makes it a whole heck of a lot easier to do that research and to understand things about your customer and their business and what's going on with them, which then provides the foundation for that personalization. So I just wanted to clarify that because that word personalization has come up quite a bit in conversation and it's way more than, hey, I put your, your, your name and your company name in the email. Yeah, so. Or it's, it's personalized.

That's good.

All right, good.

So we've been, we've been trying to expand a little bit more on some more marketing tools and so forth with that. So we're going to continue to add to that. And I've expanded where we get some of our data from recently too. So this marketingprofs.com or marketing professionals has got some pretty solid data. There's another article that we're going to jump over today in the newsletter again, if you'd like to get the newsletter, just let us know. AI Business strategies, five ways brands and agencies can properly use tech. That comes from AdAge.com, which is good one as well. But jumping into our technology, cybersecurity and AI segment, 47% of US firms suffer data breaches resulting in severe financial loss. Any quick takeaways from that one, Tom?

Well, you know, and it's, this isn't directly associated with the article, but we were chatting about this earlier as you, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, the silo data and that we need to consolidate data and all of that. Well, ironically, right. Silo data is actually more difficult from a security standpoint for or more difficult for hackers and other people to really get into because everything's siloed. Right. You have this over here and that over here. As you start consolidating your data and consolidating your systems into more integrated systems, it in some ways opens the door to, opens the door to making it easier for more sophisticated hacks, ransomware and so forth. The reason I bring that up is consolidation is not going to go away or holistic data model or, you know, are not going to go away. And this article is pointing out is that and even both these articles, right, is you really can't ignore the cyber or the security aspect of that. And to me that just factors right into the roadmap that you were talking about is okay, as I start to put these things together, what are the things that I have to be again, aware of or be thinking about anyway, from a security perspective to make sure I'm doing the best possible way of preventing those attacks. And because that's, you know, half companies and I guess it's even higher because a lot of people don't report that they've had these things. Right. Not everybody talks about what they've had happen in those areas. Yep.

Yeah, the, I think it's important, you know, when it's interesting we kind of think about this, I think most people do is that's big company stuff, right? That's going to happen to Microsoft or that's going to happen to, you know, a pharmaceutical company or whatever it might be. But the reality of it is, and I, my takeaway kind of was this is they said from this research that was done, said the global average cost of a breach has hit nearly $4.9 million this year. Well, okay, that's great. But you know, when you think about that, okay, 4.9 million, you know, that's a huge number. It can, it can impact companies. In part, the article said this as well, said if you're, if you're focused on growth in your company and you get hit with a 4.9 million dollar, you know, hit to your company, that changes what a board meeting looks like pretty quickly. Right? Not just about the breach, it's about the cost. But I think what's interesting about that is if you think about that $4.9 million, if I'm a distributor, you know, the average size family owned distributor or employee owned distributor out there, you know, and probably, you know, just as well if I'm PE owned, the same thing. PEs are looking to drive those dollars and profits out of those opportunities or those organizations is I think about that big number is well, XYZ Pharmaceutical company, their overall cost, not just what they paid out but their costs related to it were billions of dollars. And this happening more and more every day, that 4.9 million being the average, it's going to keep going up. And so now if I'm thinking about I'm a small potatoes distributor, but I get hit with it, Maybe I'm a $20 million or $15 million a year distributor. That number, when it climbs on the average, it's going to impact my business as well and it's going to go along with that. So now all of a sudden maybe it only impacts my business by a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but what does that couple of hundred thousand dollars mean to me and the time away and, and so forth? So you know, the time of the importance of taking advantage of the tools that are available to protect our data is key. So it's, it's crazy. And the last thing I'll hit on this from this article is that said 30% of respondents to this survey had data that could not be recovered after a successful ransomware attack. So just because you know whether you pay the ransomware or not, the costs that go with that and the challenges that happen in your business are. Are important so.

Well, and it's not just the cost of the ransomware. Right. There's a lot of other costs that go along with this. That's the tip of the ICE remediation that you have to. I mean there's just a lot of things that. That have to have to go. Yeah. So.

Well, let's jump into this next article because it ties together really well.

Yeah, it's the same. This is an interesting one is that after wave of attack Snowflakes. So I guess from what I understand is that there was a wave of attacks, security attacks into Snowflake. Snowflake is a data warehouse, data lake environment a lot of companies use, especially in the tech world and a lot of Fortune 500 companies.

And we have some customers that have been using it.

Yeah, we have some. Yeah. That have used Snowflake and so. But they just happened to attack the Snowflake repository. Again, Snowflake is a. Is a tool for integrating data into a central source. Like I was saying saying earlier Snowflake to agree looks like they were blamed a lot for this. But it doesn't look like it really was so much a Snowflake problem as it was more of a. The fact that the customers that were using Snowflake didn't have the proper security infrastructure in place to support that.

Yep.

Again, I just want to reiterate on this is that as you, as you're. As you. And we're putting a lot of emphasis on this and we do work a lot, you know, on our platform is how to make sure that when you start to be with these foundational technology pieces in there that are consolidating data and are going to be things that are going to bring things together is that it's a constant, I guess vigilance on that platform and what are the security protocols that can be put in place with that platform and what is the risk of it? You know, I think Bob said, I think a couple minutes ago. Right. Assume a breach will occur. Then, then look at how long can I survive without that data before. Without access to being there. Just assume that it's going to occur and Then do everything you can to prevent that. And I think that's all that happened here is that it didn't quite get prevented as well. And so you know, the common denominator was using through Snowflake but it wasn't necessarily there.

Well, it goes, it goes back and we were talking before we went live today, you know that back to we use that term foundational tools, right. And I think when we, we talk about a lot of distributors and this could be your private equity owned, you're independently owned, it doesn't matter who you are. Is that in that setting is that I'm just going to buy some software and make an assumption that this company's safe. Right. And I, I tell people all the time that you know, especially if you're looking for that term you used earlier Tom being point software or your kind of one off tools that are getting bought by department. So a good, you know, good example is I might be the CEO of a, of hey, you know, we just got the highlight comment of the day, Tom. You should probably hit that. So there we go.

Joanne says you're looking good. Right? So I don't know who Joanne is.

But that's Joanne, it's Scott's wife. And Scott is a former business part of mine, partner of mine in a project we did years ago and before that he was a customer. And you know, you and Scott need to meet because he's probably one of the smartest guys I know and his golf game matches his intellect as well. But that's funny. So I'll take the compliment. Thanks Joanne. But Tom, back to my point is we think about this again and we have the privilege I think it is to be in the inner workings of companies every day, right. Of distributors and manufacturers both. We, we know their leadership team, we might even break bread with them and so forth as well. But the issue that comes from all of this is if I'm a CEO, I don't, it doesn't matter if you're a $10 million a year company or you're a three quarter of a billion dollar a year company. I'm going to start having responsibility for all of this one because it's happening under my, in my organization, under my watch to it's. There's huge impacts to the financials of the company with when we start thinking about cybersecurity. But I've got a marketing department that found an AI tool that seems interesting or I have my finance people found another or you know, or my procurement people found another tool that works Great. Related to supply chain issues or I'm found this hot newfangled CRM solution, whatever it is. Right. I tell people this in the events that I'm at all the time is you need to ask about the safety of your data. You need to understand what platform that is built on and what does that mean to your company. You need to understand how will they support you and help you if there was an issue. Because whether it's a company like ours or somebody else's, you know when you look at this Snowflake issue, they didn't. It wasn't necessarily. Since Snowflake is saying this wasn't my fault, this was your organization's fault and now you want me to solve it because we were part of what was addressed or accessed here. So important questions. People got to be on top of things. So no.

And as I said before, I'm not by no means saying any of this is easy but it can become easier with the right roadmap and we certainly spend a lot of time helping people make it easier. Yeah. It doesn't have to be maybe as hard as overwhelming as it looks when at first glance so but plat but.

Platform and security is important I think.

Is the top here.

Right. So Tom, we'll move along a little bit here and as we move into our sales and M and a segment that we do each week, there's a really solid article here from Industrial Distribution magazine about understanding what a good retention rate looks like in your industry. You know we talk about, you know NRR net revenue retention and it's a, you know, as a SaaS software company that's a major technology and SaaS metric that people look at. But you know, this just breaks down quite a bit for us the importance of that in you know, belly to belly as Mike Marks calls it, selling out there.

Right.

What we're doing and what are we doing to keep our existing customers grow our wallet share with our existing customers. So if you get a chance, take a look at that again. It's called understanding what a good retention rate looks like in your industry. And from Industrial Distribution magazine I thought it was super to. It was and they referenced the how they do this in the technology world and what we need to be thinking about when we're in the distribution world.

It's pretty funny. I, I yesterday I just set up with one of our customers helped them set up a system that is this uses our genius feed to automatically identify customers that are at showing potential evidence of going away Some signals. Yeah signals of, of Potentially their, their risk and then setting up a system so that as quickly as possible the sales team can go and find out if there truly is a risk and what needs to be done to actually retain that customer. And we just did some back of the envelope math and this isn't the hugest company in the world, but they're decent size, just some minor improvements, are going to have major results to their bottom line and to what they're doing with their sales teams and even the, you know, the money that the sales teams are going to be able to make through commissions and otherwise just by not losing customers along the way. So retention is a big, big deal.

Yeah. And you know, this article talks about, you know, customer acquisition is typically what we talk about first. But, but retention, right. Keeping them first and then expanding wallet share, you know, or white space there is important as well. So.

But in this industry, right, and this is what we talked a lot about is, you know, they've already gone through the effort of doing their credit checks. A lot of them have good credit lines, a lot of them. Right. It's like all that work which you have to do with a new customer, you're not doing here. You already know a little bit of their AR history, you know, all of those things. So putting more emphasis on that retention from a profitability standpoint is probably even more important than the acquisition side or at least is equally important.

Yeah, very good. All right, so dropping down into our people in leadership segment. This was, this was something from HRDive.com half of workers have considered or taken a quiet vacation. I had never heard the term before. So did you thought about it or heard that term before?

You know, I'd heard the term. What, what was interesting here. It wasn't like people were just like taking off two weeks or something and. No, no, it's like taking a day off here, a day off there and not telling obviously. This is probably with remote work, obviously. And not telling their managers or anybody else that they were actually gone. I think they actually, the high, if you depend upon what you define as a quiet vacation, whether that's a half day, a whole day or whatever, my guess is those are happening more often even than what's in there. Especially with remote work.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think this is a little different too than, than the idea of. I, I'm, I'm take, I'm leaving for the holiday weekend at, at noon on Friday and no one will know versus, you know, this. It says just a couple of stats, right. They call, they describe it as a secret vacation time without use of paid time off. 14% have lied to their managers about their whereabouts during this time. It says why do workers do it? 26% worked remotely and didn't think it mattered. 20% were overwhelmed and needed a break. 15% didn't want to lose out on pay by officially taking a PTO and 11% didn't think their managers would notice.

I think those numbers are like the job market that the job numbers, they're underestimated.

No, I think you're probably right. But you know, a lot of this is like literally people are, you know, well, well, I'm doing my work so it doesn't matter where I am. Which, you know and I think this is a big deal in. We'll probably talk about this more over time because at least for me, as I look at this, especially as our organization is growing, we're just hiring more people. Is. Is. You know, we did some work before Lead Smart per se or just as we were kind of starting the work. You and I did some consulting work with an organization and you know they had key keyboard trackers. They had all the different, I want to call it spyware Employer employer spyware of productivity. And you know where your browser was going and one of the tools took the screenshot of your browser and you know all of that stuff and it's like that's just not who I want to be in an organization, you know, nor do I want people to think that's who we are. But at the same time, you know, when you look at the productivity loss to a company that's paying somebody through some of this, it's astounding. Right when it comes together. So anyways, get your work done. People and guys like me don't have to worry about if we're monitoring you or not because I don't like the big brother idea. So next next article here. We won't spend a lot of time on this, but this is a good article. This is also from HR Dive how to Train New Leaders in Ethical Decision Making. And I, I thought this one was important. Tom and I wish we had more time but it was great. The, the time we spent on those other topics with the, the participation of the audience today was just made me feel really good and we spent extra time there but you know, I've spent, you commented on earlier. I've spent 30 plus years of my career in manufacturing and wholesale distribution and the vast majority of sales leaders just. I'll use as an example are he sold good. So let's make him the manager, right? He ran his territory well, so let's make him a, give him a branch that's not building leaders. And the beauty of it is the trade associations out there, Asa Hardy, you know, there's countless of them. I can't mention enough of them. ISA and the buying groups out there, these guys are all working on, you know, programs for emerging leaders. You know, if you're listening to us today, check in with your buying group, your trade association, if you don't have a formal program for training new leaders and especially for helping them with ethics and understanding what it means to be a leader. So any thoughts on that before we jump?

No, I think, you know, there's, right. And it's interesting. It kind of goes arm in arm with the previous conversation. The fact that people are doing secret vacations and all that stuff. It's not so much ethical, but it's just, it's all kind of leadership, right? There's something, there's some issue with the leadership that would cause that to occur. And I mean, heck, it's hard. Again, it's not an easy thing necessarily to do, but they both go kind of arm and arm.

Yeah, well, the, it's a challenge, right, for everybody. I, I, it's, it's funny, I read those articles and I'm like, I, I'm the reverse of that. I think any entrepreneur or certainly anybody in a, in an executive leadership role finds themselves sometimes and this is that, you know, you're the reverse is like I've said, I'm on vacation, but I'm really at work.

Right?

It's the opposite, you know. So the, my, my wife and I were talking yesterday about Starbucks new CEO. He lives 20 minutes from us and he's going to be, Starbucks is, is giving him full use and access to one of the jets so he can commute from here, Southern California to, to Seattle. And, and Darlene and I were talking about that yesterday and I said, you know, that guy is, he's on 247 in that role, right? He's, he could be, he could be in the French Riviera, but he's on the phone with his lieutenants all day. So jump into our industry scuttlebutt wall before we head out for the day. Just some good news for Ferguson closed the year, their fiscal year with 10 acquisitions. BSC, an article here from Distribution Strategy Group. BSC industry acquires Warren Pike. That's two folks in the bearings and power transmission world. And then our friends at DSG Dakota Supply Group have Brought in a new chief supply officer or chief supply chain Officer Dan Kleepack. Congrats to Paul Kennedy and your team there. You guys are Just for the hiring that they're doing to for growth there is phenomenal. So good, good for our friends there.

I like their new logo too.

Yeah, no, they've done, they've rebranded, new website, all kinds of stuff going on. I was text messaging last week with their chief digital officer and chicken with his head cut off is an understatement for Stefan there. So good. Well, we have a good, good reads every week. Good example there. Olympic gold medalist Kristin Faulkner. Another example of people embracing the Navy SEAL 40% rule. That's doing the best I can with what I've got going on right now. I think that was kind of cool. So any thoughts on the these things before we jump for the day, Tom? We kind of behind schedule like you mentioned.

I think we're good there.

Great comments today, huh?

Yeah, good comments, really good conversation and yeah, hopefully we get more and more companies thinking about transformation as we in the year here.

Yep. Well, we're here to help. Your trade associations are here to help, buying groups are here to help and peer network groups are and you know, we talked about and I probably focus a lot on, you know, how many people we talk to that aren't doing well. But there's a whole lot of companies that are doing great stuff. And you know, we've met a number of companies recently we, you know, working with. I'll mention these folks that are a new customer of ours at APR Supply and Pennsylvania. They are, they are doing the stuff at APR that we have been talking about today. They've got a digital roadmap. They've just moved from one of the most well known CRM platforms globally, probably the market leader globally, to our platform because some things we can do in partnership. But there are people out there that are really, really great stuff. We just need to pull everybody together. So everybody's doing it because it's, you know, rising tide lifts all boats. Right. Never been more valuable than that.

Let's wrap it.

That's it. What's we got another meeting to be to in 15 minutes. We do need to wrap huh? All right. Well, I'm Kevin Brown, that's my friend Tom Burton. We do this every Friday. If you like what you heard today, whether you're listening on the podcast or you've been with us live today, the the favor that you could do for us is hit the subscribe button. If you're listening with us on LinkedIn. The smartest thing you can do to get this every week would be to follow Lead Smart technologies. You'll see that every week and you'll get an alert that we're going live on. So follow them on LinkedIn. Hit the subscribe button if you're on YouTube and if you're on the podcast formats, please leave a review and hit the subscribe button as well. That doesn't help Tom and I. What that does is it helps the marketplace see that there's another place that they can get information, information at every week. So thanks for being with us, Tom. Thank you. Appreciate you, everybody. Be kind, have fun, be safe, do good things, have a good weekend.