Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution - Episode #113

Sam.

You'Re spotlighted in the circle drumming today.

Yeah. This is cool.

Yeah.

New features with Streamyard, our simulcast tool. Right?

I guess so, yeah.

What else can you do? Can you put a beer, full beard on me, clean shave?

Yeah, probably. But I need some AI for that. Need to do some AI images, so. So put hair on me and beard on you.

I, I was. We'll talk about this more, I'm sure. I was. Been traveling a lot and I was at Eventless earlier this week with our, in fact, and last weekend, this week with our friends at Affiliated Distributors in Chicago. And we have some, some, you know, postcards that promote the podcast each week. And we had them in our booth and I passed some out and so forth and saw people looking at it, trying to figure out, you know, I've got this. Facial hair for me is a new thing and not a normal thing. So I had some people looking at the picture of both of us on the podcast with me clean shaven, and the picture is probably 18 months old or so. And so it clarified that what my lovely wife Darlene has said that she said if you grow facial hair that's, that's gray and white that you don't have on your head, people are going to think you're older. And people, a couple people made the comment, wow, this is a much younger picture. So there we go. Yeah, it'll come off before long. So how are you today, my friend?

I'm good. I'm good. So we got a lot to cover. Let's. Let's get into it.

Let's dive in. Well, let's, let's get started here. So my name is Kevin Brown. This is my lifelong friend and business partner with me, Tom Burton. And we get together every Friday morning. And barring, what did we say, hospital stays, vacations, or if someone's on an airplane and can't stream, we try and get together each week and discuss the news of the week in mergers and acquisition, sales and marketing, AI technology, E commerce, the economy, supply chain, and all the news that we see throughout the week, both here in the US and internationally. But what we try and do is we try and boil that down to the things that matter to wholesale distributors and manufacturers as it relates to our whole global supply chain and getting one product from a factory all the way through distribution to a user. So we do this each week by the means of a newsletter that we send out. We review that newsletter and we do that. That newsletter goes out on Friday mornings. It's also called around the Horn. And Wholesale distribution goes out to 10,000 plus people. If you don't get that email and you would like to review that. In fact, we had some signups this week at the show I was at. You can just send us a simple email@helloadsmartech.com Lead Smart is the sponsor of our show. And again, hello atLead smart tech.com we'll get you added to the list. Or we have a website for this podcast and live Stream. It's at www.aroundthehornpod.com and you can sign up there as well as click the buttons for some of the other podcast channels that you might want to listen to. We're live today. We're on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live and Facebook Live. Today is Friday, October 25th and we are going to dive into the news today. But before we go, we have to do a couple of things here. One, we have to thank Lead Smart for the sponsorship of the show. There's costs that go on behind the scenes. We have two different people that work behind the scenes, Lily and John, that work on the show each week now. And those costs get covered by Lead Smart. Lead Smart is a smart CRM and AI enabled customer intelligence solution that helps wholesale distributors and manufacturers get deep insights into their customers, their teams and their overall business to make smart decisions to accelerate growth and serve their customers better. So if you're in wholesale distribution or manufacturing, you're trying to expand your business, accelerate the growth of your company and serve your customers better, we would love to have a conversation with you. Just reach out anytime. Finally, if you like what we're doing each week, we would love nothing more than if you're on YouTube, just click that subscribe button and you'll get notified when we go live. If you're on LinkedIn or Facebook Live, click the Follow button on the Lead Smart Technologies page. You'll know each week when we're doing the show. You can watch it there. If you're listening later in the day on the podcast. Two things to go with that. One, please subscribe and ideally leave a review and share with your friends. That would help us get this message out to others. But secondly, with that, you will not be seeing the handsome Tom Burton or Kevin Brown, you or the newsletter. Most importantly, you'll be listening. So again, if you'd like that newsletter, just reach out to us and we will have to be happy to get that out to you. So, Tom, that's it. Let's dive in, huh?

Yeah. I want to say good morning to Bob. Welcome. And if you're listening online. Please jump in, let us know you're here, where you're from. Jump in and give your opinion because it makes it a lot fun rather than just your opinion.

Very, very good. Well, again, we love it when folks share some comments. I did run into somebody the other day and I, in fact, I was talking to him while I was in Chicago this week. He was a regular listener on the show and he shared some colorful thoughts on his, I'll just say, not colorful, but strong opinions on some of the ways that some things are going on with private equity right now. And as he was typing those away, he, in his mind, he was just thinking that this was just those that were live, that were in the, in the chat, not that it goes live to the platform. And so thank you, Marty. Marty just said, I'm going to take this as me, Tom, because I'm the only one that looks.

I think it's me and my circle. He is much happier to see me. Spotlight.

So our friend Marty says redefining handsome. So I'm going, I'm going with the, my new facial hair has. I'm gonna, regardless, I'm gonna take it. Take the win. But, but yeah, your comments do go into the live stream on, on LinkedIn live and YouTube live and so forth. So we love comments. They're important. But don't say something that you don't want other people to hear. So he said there were some repercussions from one of his comments.

Oh, really? Interesting.

Yeah. So that's strong opinion.

Okay.

You know, but you know what, strong opinions are good. That's, you know. Yeah, I'm not short on them.

All right, well, let's get into some opinions on the news here.

Yeah. So weakening manufacturing, Japan clouds, clouds economic outlook from CFO Dive magazine. This similar information was out there in Reuters and a few others. Any particular thoughts that hit you with that, you know, besides the next rate cut in a few weeks?

Yeah. Which again, not, I mean it wasn't a whole lot of, you know, as even it said here is like it was kind of a small decline. It was not a large decline. It's really hard to kind of know any one thing that comes out of it. But I think at the end of the day, same stuff we've been talking about. Right. Things are growing. Things seem to be moving along. Unfortunately. Yes, I think we will get the rate cut next. Next. Is it next week or the week after? I guess the week after.

I think the meeting is the fifth and the sixth.

Right. So it'd be the week after.

Yep, yep.

But you know, there's certainly, it's interesting that, you know, bond yields and, and everything like that continue to go up, which is not a normal thing when you're cutting rates. So clearly there is some people out there that don't believe that we're out of the woods as it relates to inflation and price increase. I know we're going to talk more about this on tariffs here in a minute, but there's still a lot of things out there that potentially could impact inflation. And I know that the worst thing the Fed could do is go, oh crap, just kidding. Now we need to go back and start raising again.

Well, that's the risk with all of this, right? I think that's the, the challenge that comes with all of this. Right. Is the balancing act of this. Because I mean that's one of the things that it said here. One of the quotes was, I thought was kind of interesting was that the concerns have shifted from recession to re acceleration and we don't want to go too fast either. Right. So this is a, this is a balancing act, you know, and I, I think, you know, you look at, look at the Fed. I mean, nobody's talking about the, the head of the Chicago Fed or the head of this or the head of that. They're talking about Powell. And this is some defining moments right now. But I, I did want to mention, you know, being on Central Time for the last couple weeks and rolling in the morning, I've been watching, you know, from the hotel room. I spent 10 nights in the High Regency on Wacker Drive in Chicago just getting home last night for a couple of days. But I've been paying a little more attention working in the hotel room to CNBC and, and some Bloomberg stuff. And I, but I heard multiple times earlier this week in a couple of interviews that there should be some. And these were just opinions, right. But they were either, you know, senior investment type folks, not from the reporters, but senior investment type folks and some economists talking about that. You know, we're seeing this, this, this, this time that we've been battling inflation, that we have seen a different set of economic factors. Right. The market factors have been, you were just talking a moment about the bond market and so forth. Those things are reacting differently than they have historically. And what we're seeing is we didn't really need to get to 2, 2%.

Right.

It's probably 2 and a half, 3. And I'm not going to say this vindicates my thought because it's A factor. But you know, I've been saying for a year now probably that we're using. Not that we are because I'm certainly not an economist. But the question is, were we using the right metrics still based upon the economy that we're in, in the world that we live in with electronic trading and the things that are going on with that, Are we using these right metrics still? And I thought it was interesting that them saying that, hey, you know what, we could be in a place where maybe the number becomes two and a half.

Yeah. I don't know. I think there's a ramification of that. Right. You end up with is. And Bob's right. Right. When you have a $36 trillion. I think I mentioned this last week, deficit or debt, things get, get really weird.

Weird is the right, right point. Right.

But you know, you can easily say, oh, make it two and a half percent. But there's a downstream ramification of that interest rates will remain higher then no matter what. Inflation will remain higher no matter what. You may say, well, what's a half a point? It starts to add up after a while. Right?

Yeah.

So you. A lot of models and a lot of things are built around that 2%, whether it's the right number or not. There's a lot of other things that are built around that philosophy, if you want to call it that. Yeah. So a lot, it's a lot more to it than saying, well, let's just make it two and a half.

Yeah.

Or whatever on any given day.

And I wish I would have, I wish I would have saved this. Yesterday I sent you a, a link to an interview with Paul Tudor Jones that had fun Hedge fund guy.

I saw that. Yeah.

And he was making some interesting points and I just, I probably shouldn't even bring it up because I don't have the numbers. But he was talking about the deficit and that was to Bob's point here. Right. You know, as we're thinking about the, the, I mean country is not going to be able to make debt payments on, on, on the interest payments on the debt in the near future. But he was talking about what Japan's doing right now and the balancing act of interest rates and the stimulus that'll do. And using that to pay down the debt, I thought was quite interesting. We'll have to, I'll tough to try and find that maybe we can use it next week because that was intriguing to me. So anyways, interesting timing right now. We'll see. I, it's. I didn't Put this in this article in just to talk about, you know, the next rate cut in my stake or anything like that. But there was some, some good points in this one about talking about the balancing act. And I think that's what everything is right now. And maybe that's the, maybe that's the title for today's show when it goes on to the podcast platforms, is the balancing act between the economy, geopolitics and supply chain. Because all of these things right now and I, this is while it's the craziest time of the year for me travel wise, I, I think I'm, I think I'm gone five of seven weeks or six of eight weeks. It's nuts right now. But I get, instead of phone calls, I'm face to face or as our friend Mike Mark says, belly to belly with wholesale distributors every day, all day. And it's just great to have these, these discussions and, and I'm asking the questions about supply chain and some of this stuff. And people are looking at their businesses differently now than they had before. So it's good stuff. All right, you want to jump ahead? Next article from Global Trade Supply chain management in 2025. We're talking about some trends.

You skipping the tariff one?

Oh, I skipped the tariffs. I didn't mean to do that. Thanks for keeping me honest. We had talked about that one before. So CNBC article again, when we look at the picture here, it shows us the source of the news, but US China trade tariffs escalating said would be costly for everybody. The International Monetary Fund deputy director says, do you want to start on that one?

Well, it's, you know, it's like, I call it the ping pong of tariffs. Right, the ping pong ball of tariffs. What they were talking about, if you read the article, is not so much that, oh, if we, if we, you know, levy tariffs on China, it's going to be inflationary. What they were talking about is, well, who, who levies terries on who, tough tariffs on who. Yeah. And the ping ball effect. Pin God, I can't talk ping pong effect. That can occur as they're moving around and who's going to tariff who on any given day and all this kind of stuff. And ultimately, yes, it will be inflationary. Right. Because there's prices that are being raised. So it'll be a global inflationary point along the way as well.

Yeah. So a couple things hit me on this, right? There's, there's this, this, I mean, the core of the article is about China, right? And, and the reference, if you looked at the picture on the article, right. Is in the quote of the article and you can kind of see the bend. Right. And this is the, I think the sad state of the media in this country is, you know, I've said this in the past, I wish we could go back to the news days of Walter Cronite. You know, just, you feel like there's somebody in that you can maybe trust a little bit more because it just depends on where you want to get your news of where the bend is. But you know, this is talking about Trump tariffs, but the core of this article is not about Trump tariffs. It's about tariffs in general. And the EU is slapping some really major tariffs on China right now. And the core of this article was talking about the geopolitical issues that go along with all of this. And so you know, China, to your point about the ping pong, Right. Okay, well, US has tariffs on steel and, and so forth. And then, well, we're going to, you know, change our pricing or a certain amount of allowances of products coming in from the US and but the EU is playing a big factor in this as well that I hadn't been thinking about before reading this article. In fact, it says the US And China are, let's see, that was the US And China are trading with one another less and some parts of their trades is being rerouted to other countries. And I want to talk about that more. But that's the exact same thing happening in the eu. So there's some same. If we were to probably look at today's news in Germany or Italy or France or any other EU country, we're probably seeing the same discussion with the US as the secondary component of this China issue.

Right.

So in this article here, it's for us as those other countries, but I think it's important to see that it's not just the US it's just not just one political party in this country that's doing right, wrong or indifferent in that setting. And it's more of a global pressure. So let's see a Bob's comment there real quick about tariffs.

Well, he's saying talking about tariffs in a vacuum. Right. Tariffs combined with increased onshore manufacture, labor, domestic energy production makes it production. You know, the energy thing, which we haven't talked a lot about, I don't think is a big issue. I mean, China is investing in energy, alternative energy production at a much faster pace than we're, we're doing here. And so it's real great to talk about reshoring all of this manufacturing and all of that. But we're not necessarily set up for it infrastructure wise or, or energy wise.

It's going to take us. They're, they're doing it even more of it now in the energy part of it as well and the ev parts of it and all of that. We're, we're probably again trying to catch up.

Yeah.

In this country. So interesting piece though of this is I, I think it was one of our guests or a couple of our guests that we've had have said over and over again, watch Mexico, watch Mexico, watch Mexico. Wait, that was me. Watch Mexico, watch Mexico, watch Mexico. Because this is talking about these geopolitical pressures and that China is now moving around and rerouting things because of this to other countries. So you want to see raw materials or plastic parts or so forth that, you know, we're slapping tariffs on now. They're, they've got to get them from somewhere. And when you do, you were just talking about infrastructure set up. And if we're going to try and nearshore as much as we should probably be near shoring in this country and really US Canada should be near shoring, so much of that's gonna, if it's not onshore, it's going to be near shored. And so much of that's going to come from Mexico and Latin America. And what Mexico chooses to do is all of a sudden China starts throwing a whole lot of money at them and benefits and so forth and pricing reductions and so forth is if we've got tariffs, they'll push it through another way. And this article is talking about them already doing that. So we'll, we'll see what comes of that. It talks about quite a few things in this article, but it goes back to, and again, all things coming back to our core audience, which is manufacturers and wholesale distributors, is the days of, you know, checking in monthly or quarterly with your key vendors to see how things are going or waiting for your, your rep to stop by or an email announcement is if I'm in the wholesale distribution game, I'm having almost daily discussions about supply chain. So good.

Which then takes us to this next article about supply chain management in 2025. Trends, challenges and key statistics. So.

Yep.

What are some of the trends?

Well, they were talking here. I think they will hit a few of them right. That from a trend standpoint they talked a little bit about trends and challenges. So the first one that they talked about was the rise of artificial intelligence. They said that by 2030 the market for AI and supply chains is expected to reach $41 billion.

I might be low.

Yeah, well let you know, I'm going to hit pause for a second if I can here, Tom. And the I was talking to a large distributor. So I was at the Affiliated Distributors Industrial and Safety Division meeting earlier this week in Chicago and I was talking to a distributor that had mentioned that in one of his. And he wasn't sharing this about bashing anybody or anything, he was just sharing that with one of the breakout sessions that he was in that somebody was. A couple of people were commenting that they've invested a little bit in AI and they're really frustrated because they're not seeing a return on their investment yet. And, and he was pontificating maybe a little bit, but at the same time is he wasn't really looking at it from the standpoint of the lens where we really need to be going and just laughing as we are at a comment says oh AI again and again. It's funny but the, the idea in the comment was and, and what I my chat with him was about if you're thinking about AI today as hey, I just put a couple of bucks into something and I bought a, a tool over here that maybe is going to give me some visualizations or I bought 20 people in my business a subscription to chat GPT or whatever it is and I'm not seeing a, a return on investment yet. I told him, I said you just could not be more off base with your view. Right. Because if you're looking for a return on investment today, maybe you can pop that full screen for us here. Tom, we'll go back to those Go Go points. Okay, yeah, in a moment. But the, that the core of this and I think when we look at all of these and specifically talking about artificial intelligence is this is a road map for the future and components of AI that are going to come into the overall growth of my company. It is not did I buy a tool? And now I'm not seeing enough results right away. So I probably not going to continue invest in AI. And I was sharing with this gentleman, he runs a, you know, close to quarter billion dollar a year company. It wasn't his company that was doing this, but my comment to him was if you're looking for immediate return on investment from a true AI solution that you're bringing into supply chain or manufacturing or warehousing, you've got to be thinking full term, long term, big, big game plan versus what you might see today. So that number here with, you know, $41 billion is pretty dramatic in looking at that. And you said you think it might be low, but when you start looking at that and, and the efficiencies that managing complic complex logistics operations it talks about, it said that supply chains equipped with AI have shown to be over 67% more effective than traditional systems in terms of risk reduction and optimization. One of the things we're looking at doing is the case studies that we'll be able to do next year with our customers that talk about how AI enabled smart CRM and customer intelligence can drive revenue acceleration within a business. And we're already starting to see from some of our customers as we've introduced some of these tools, a rapid revenue growth. But again, I would say even from somebody who makes AI enabled technology is don't look at our solution as a single point and say, this is my AI.

Right.

The focus has to be, is where are we going?

Yeah, it's so, so certainly it's not an event, it's definitely a journey and it's a, it's a long term journey and it's a journey that is going to have quite a bit of changes and adjustments along the way.

Yeah, right.

And it's not, you know, I, again, I don't know quite who the conversation you had or who it was with, but it's not a function of AI is more a philosophical and a mindset strategy as much as it is a technological strategy. And if I just look at it from a technological strategy, but I'm not looking at the mindset or the philosophy and how that's going to be incorporated and we're going to talk some more about this later on. Yeah, you'll struggle and you'll struggle seeing ROI and certainly on the short term. So.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think the simplest way to look at this, Tom, is look we had in the, in the 80s and early 90s it was, we're moving from walking through our warehouse with a ledger to putting it into a big box that's plugged into the wall that's got little green type on it.

Right.

And then later in that decade, all of a sudden there was this thing called the Internet and we then had a big shift to the Internet. This is going to be, I mean, everybody that you talk to, whether it's futurists or economists or whoever it is, talk about this being the very much the far bigger shift than those two. So that's the, that's the key to that one. So Tom, this, this doesn't go in order with the list that we have. So there's no. Remember, we weren't going to share that one, so. Yep. So we'll just hit these other ones real quick. So data analytics and supply chain intelligence are key. We talked about that briefly. Sustainability will kind of go. We don't tend to talk about that a lot or know a lot about it. Cyber security and risk management, we talk about that every week. And then number five was the shift towards digital twins and hyper personalization. Had some great conversations this week with some people about, you know, what's the difference between an agent and a co pilot. And then we start talking about digital twins and had a great discussion with a distributor in Florida and she was kind of trying to figure out the whole idea about digital twins and, and agents and so forth. And at one of the receptions I was at this week, we Talked for like 20 minutes about, you know, what that would mean to her role as a CEO and it was really exciting and fun to talk about that. So number six was investment in skills and workforce development. So as we look at what's going to be going on from a supply chain standpoint, as we do more with technology and AI and digital twins, we need to train our people how to use those. And then as we talked about earlier reshoring and near, near shoring and then they talked about key statistics and market projections a little bit Global supply chain management application market or tools for that will be a 31 billion dollar market. So the technology side is going to be growing even more. And then they talk a little bit as their final point about remote work in transforming supply chain management. So that's going to be a little interesting thing too. Right. We've got some people that are working more and more remote app post pandemic still. And you've got a warehouse that they've got to manage or supply chain that they've got to manage. And, and that remote thing versus in house is going to be interesting to see. So I like these points. They were really good things to think about. Again, I think this is a good point for us, Tom, to, to mention that if you're listening to the podcast versus with us live on YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn, you're not seeing the newsletter that we're sharing. And this article was from Global Trade Supply chain management in 2025 and it talks about risks, challenges and statistics. I thought the statistics in this were great. It really had some good research done and kudos to the, the people that did that. Research. But if you don't get the newsletter that we're reviewing here as I mentioned and you would like to just reach out to us@helloadsmartech.com and or go to the podcast website which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. so let's bump into our manufacturing distribution segment that we talk about each week tomorrow. We talked last week about the bankruptcy of True Value Hardware and you know we're going to talk about that in two different spots today a little bit. And I think the importance actually Bob just made a funny comment there that 68.3% of all statistics are inaccurate. But actually Bob, it's 68.375% I think.

So depending upon if you're using AI or not.

Yeah, right in your decimal place use. But the. We talked a little bit about True Value last week and somebody might say hey Kevin, you know, you and Tom get together to talk about wholesale distribution each week and, and isn't isn't True Value retail? Well, it depends on where you live, right. And this article from hba, HBS dealer, which is a hardware related magazine, it talks about they interviewed a guy in Killingsworth or Killingworth True Value owner Tom Cost in central Connecticut. So I looked up Killingworth True Value Killing Work is a little town in Connecticut with 6, 000 people. So there is an extremely high likelihood that they're probably 30 minutes minimum to an hour away from a Home Depot or a building material wholesale building material yard or a Granger location or whoever it might be. And so what we see in so many parts of this country in more rural areas, you know, I have True Value Ace Do It Best. There's multiples of those within a few miles of my home along with I go 5 mile, 3 miles either direction and I'm at a Home Depot, you know where I live. But in a lot of areas, your lumber yard, your building materials, your home hardware, all of that is all your local Do It Best True Value location. So this was talking about, this article was talking about what has really gone on there. And he said that he had experienced some inventory discrepancies and out of stocks for the last couple of years. But the extent of the company's financial problems came as a surprise and he said if the level of debt that is in the court filings is true, he can't believe that they've been able to keep it quiet for so long. Now I'm sure that a lot of their vendors knew they were in a bad spot because they weren't getting Paid on time, but the rest of their members or dealer network was not aware of this. And this is pretty big stuff into some smaller towns and so forth that's impacting them. And these are small businesses. I think with Ace Hardware, they have one. In fact, I think Ace actually bought them now. But there was one in the Midwest group in the Midwest that had like 15 locations, but for the most part it's single store owners or maybe they have two or three. It's not a big, big organization. So this bankruptcy sale that looks like is going to go to Do It Best is impacting people quite a bit in this setting. The challenge right now is that what Do It Best has said with all of this is that what and the bankruptcy filing is saying is that they've got. I'm trying to remember what the number was exactly. They've got between $500 million, 500 million and a billion in liabilities and debts and assets of somewhere between 100 and 500 million. So that's mostly what's sitting in a warehouse somewhere right now. But the big challenge that that is those vendors, right. That have that inventory sitting in that warehouse now that the bankruptcy has been filing, they can't get paid on that.

Yeah.

Right. So they need to decide are they going to trust Do It Best paying those bills or True Value or. Or really probably would be, is Do It Best backstopping True Values, ability to pay anything moving forward and starting to ship again. So it's a really unique time there.

And what is the time frame for. For Do It Best to. Isn't it out for bid? So that was the conversation.

There's an opening to it. It's. So when you go through these and, you know, I'm trying to remember the numbers there, we talked about them last week. It's within. It's before the end of the year. It wasn't in this article, but it was before the end of the year. And basically Do It Best, as said, they called it, the. The term is stalking horse that we talked about last week. So that's registered with the bankruptcy court that's saying it's our intention to do this deal, but now it's open for other folks to pop in. You know. Right. Because of the discussions that we have on an ongoing, consistent basis around here, there are, I don't want to say countless, but I'm going to say dozens of private equity firms and our hedge funds right now that are looking at this and saying, well, wait a minute, you know, could we do this and do a Roll up over here. So there's a lot going on with that. And I will tell you, there is a piece of this, Tom, that tells suggests to me that there's risk in this deal coming to fruition. And I think that potential risk comes with that. True Value notified the Department of Labor, they call it, I'm just looking at my notes here. They called it the WARN Act. It says the high stakes nature of the process is evidenced by a string of war notices that True Value has delivered to departments of labor in various states. And that's the WARN stands for Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification. So they're looking at distribution center shutdowns, they're looking at other layoffs and so forth that could come out of this. So certain, many states have. If you're going to lay off a certain percentage of people that you have to notify them and register that. And that would suggest that there's some, some risk and as the article says, high stakes to this getting done.

Yeah, no, I mean I, I, I don't feel like I'm certainly in depth knowledge of this, but just looking at it from the outside in, it certainly seems a bit fragile.

Well, and I, you know, I think, you know, that's why you have me here. But the, but you did some work, right? We I, when you were in your consulting days and I was doing some consulting, you did a lot of work with a, a company, an Australian company that made point of sale software for this exact market. And I know you've been to quite a few shows. So you've met, you've met many of the types of people that I'm describing.

Right.

You get, you get into some small towns and it's just, you know, dad and mom and maybe a couple of their kids.

We installed point of sale applications in these stores and they were definitely mom and pop hardware stores.

Yeah. So a lot of cases. But, but mom pop grocery store hardware stores that are a cog in a very large economic.

They had, they had a big impact and it's an important part of the community.

Let's do this. Tom, since we're on this later in one of our articles on the M A segment, we do have another article that's related to this do it best thing. Let me just hit a couple of points and we'll skip that one. Right.

Okay.

That what's happening now with all of this is now you've got a couple of much smaller players or Gil and another group called. What was their name? I hadn't heard of them before. I had to go look them up. I can't remember what it was, but it was there. It's another co op type group and their number of members, when I looked at their map, you know, there, there's more, there's more True value stores within 10 miles of your house than this network has in California. So it's not even. And then Orgill is another one that's, you know, much bigger than that one, but, you know, smaller than a True Value. These guys are out basically talking to every one of the True Value members right now and saying, well, wow, that looks really risky. Why don't you just come over for us with us? We've got the inventory, we've got everything you need. And so that's the big jockeying that's right now going on, which is a big detriment if you're now on the do it Best and True Value side because you need to. And, and the True Value or the do it Best CEO put out a FAQ notice to all of the True Value dealers as well as his own about what's going on and what people can expect. So this is a, you know, it's risky time. It's a unique time. We're going to continue to watch it here on the show and, and share more as we go, so. Very good. Evidently there's a strike at Boeing, huh?

Still.

Yeah, not going anywhere.

I mean, I think they had expected that there was a decent chance that the, that the new proposal would have been ratified, which was a tentative agreement beginning of the week, and it wasn't. And now Boeing is losing $100 million a day as a result of that strike. And this is what just to me is mind boggling if you look at, right. A, a stalwart blue chip company that, you know, has certainly been from the, from the stock and the market perspective for so many years is now in a situation where they have balance sheet problems and could lose their credit rating and their. I mean, there's a lot of junk bond now, right?

It's a junk bond.

Yeah, yeah. It's just hard to fathom.

Yeah.

And you know, Boeing has been a darling of Wall street for many, many years for all kinds of reasons that may not have been good. Right. As we've all heard about, about, you know, stopping and focus. Less focus on engineering and more focus on profits and some of the problems they've had. But man, I mean, that's $100 million a day and very quickly that becomes a problem.

I was when the told you this earlier I was on a Boeing plane last night coming home from Chicago back here to California and had sitting in an exit row window seat and tightened my seatbelt up a little bit more and was looking at the connections on the door. But you know, they're, we just had a comment coming in that they've kind of lost sight of their competencies and I think that's, you know, could very much be the case. But they're just a different company. And I've got a, a friend that from college with different schools but nearby each other and became friends through a mutual friend that you and I have. And he retired four or five years ago from Boeing. He literally left Cal State Long beach and went to work for Boeing, still McDonnell Douglas. And then your dad used to work and came came across to Boeing and he retired. I don't remember the title when you're. He was either the top guy or the second to the top in their defense division at Boeing. So. And he's living in Long beach on the water and got a house in the mountains on the lake. And, and I was just texting him and I was like, you got to go back to work and start fixing some of this stuff because this company is not the company. And things have just gotten worse. But you know, let's, let's talk about this. And this article is from Axios News. And I love when, when we get. And it's, it's what we try to do. Right. Is this distilling things? This article is why does it matter.

Right.

You commented Tom, about, so they broke down a little bit about what's going on here. Do you mind if I recap a little bit of that? Yep, let's do it real quick. So it said why does it matter? You mentioned earlier 100 million lost every day based upon the stoppage. The clock is ticking on the company's deteriorating balance sheet. You said that quick catch UP. They offer 64. 64 of union members voted against ratifying the new contract that had been announced. That's better than the 95% rejection of the company's earlier offer. So they're making progress. I guess the bigger picture. Boeing shares have already fallen off 40% this year from all of the other problems they've been having. And they shed 2% yesterday after those news. That news and it says looming larger now is the possibility of the company losing its crucial investment grade credit rating. And they said if you zoom on that in a little bit more, it says they fall into junk bond category. They call it junk bond territory. Category bonds that have a higher risk of default. And they says that would be an ominous signal as a highly symbolic fall from grace. It would carry practical consequences because it would be harder to get money. And it says Boeing is in, is in the plane making business. And the longer the strike goes on, the fewer planes it can deliver. And while it has all of these other divisions, I would say airliner business, probably followed by defense, which is, so much of that is aircraft as well. It's a, it's a big risk. And you know, I, there's no way, Eric. I mean, certainly there's no way the government's going to let Boeing go away.

Right.

But the, the downturn of this is, is impactful. The last piece we'll talk about this and you can add into this is, and why we're really talking about this is the trickle down effect. We're here to talk about manufacturing, wholesale distribution. Boeing's a manufacturer. But people that I was talking to this week, I talked to somebody that has, he goes in the Pacific Northwest, because the big part of this is that they're ever at Washington facility, which is where they're, you know, their biggest production facility. And if you ever have a chance, I've toured it a number of times. You ever have a chance, it's pretty amazing. Their company has lost a million dollars of revenue already just through this strike. Right. And, and then you start looking at it, right? And whether it's, it's the janitorial distributor that's putting toilet paper and mop buckets in because nobody's there, they don't need as much, or you're selling hard hats or you're selling rivets, right? It doesn't matter. It's trickle down and then that trickles down into the neighboring economies and so forth. So labor stuff right now in this country, there's, there's some big challenges with what we've seen with the port strikes. Automakers last year, Boeing this year, it's. It's a challenge. So something we'll keep an eye on and keep talking about.

Yep.

All right. We're going to shift into our E commerce and marketing segment, B2B marketplaces, from niche to mainstream. Tom, why don't you kick us off on that one?

Yeah. So B2B marketplaces are looking to surpass or they're going to surpass a thousand within the next few years. I think I told you when I read this article, I was like, this seems like an absurd amount of marketplaces. There's got to be a lot of specialization and verticalization going on. And it turns out that's what the article was really getting into is that the growth in these marketplaces are going to be while it says from niche to mainstream, but as it goes to the mainstream it's going to be a lot of vertical specific marketplaces and specialty marketplaces, which, you know, makes a lot of sense.

Yep. Well, I think there's a great comment on this. So let's just talk that talk about, you know, marketplaces. So the, the first thing that comes in everybody's mind of course is Amazon. But where we go further with this is when we talk about in wholesale distribution it's just, it's the opportunity to just place online orders. Right. It doesn't mean that you're in a shopping cart and you know, prime day or those types of things. Right. It's just I've got an ability to get lots of data. I can see what my business is like and what I'm doing with that company in general in here as well. I can build orders that I can send across to ask them to do a special quote for me. I can tie them to jobs. There's the back end of that. We could go on and on about with companies like, you know, we're partnered with Optimizely that does this type of work as well, that Leadsmart connects into and other systems. But yeah, now what we're talking about is this trade. But what we're starting to see with this is to your point about verticals is there are marketplace for paint additives, there are marketplaces for specialty gases, there are marketplaces for fasteners and we're going to continue to see that. But the unique thing and the most important I think part of this article and this overall discussion and I think this is going to continue as things move ahead with for us here is the number of companies that are tying their growth to what they're doing in E commerce within their businesses. Whether they're a marketplace or whether they're just E commerce is astounding. This article talks about companies like Cisco, which is I think the largest food service distributor, Advanced Spirits, which is a whiskey distillery, Wabash freight trailers, and then they say the Science Exchange which is laboratory supplies have all tied their ongoing growth, their growth strategies to industry specific B2B marketplaces that cater directly to buyer, their buyers and sellers. Because what some of these larger ones are doing is they're allowing smaller niche players to also either post their items there, much like an Amazon would, or even be bundling My products with somebody else's and them selling in my marketplaces.

Yeah. So what do you think about this? Bob's question here. Marketplaces can be a race to the bottom due to price wars. How do you drive demand if you don't have synchronous conversations with customers?

Well, first let me say that I appreciate Bob's comments and that he comes to the show regularly. Yeah, we start with that. I think part of me wants to push back on Bob and I'm not going to because I think the jury's out. I think we don't know enough yet. And so let me hit time out there for a second. Philosophically, Bob could not be more correct. Everything about marketplaces would point to we're driving costs down. I think the jury is out on this from a standpoint of, of the very vertical marketplaces. And if anybody has any statistics that's with us or knows differently or maybe even Bob. Happy to, happy to hear on this. But I think there is a little bit different and there's two sides this. Right. Marketplaces versus E commerce sites that a wholesale distributor or large distributor we're talking about here, talking about apples and oranges there. Right. Because it's not that case at all in an E commerce site for someone. Right. Because they're just managing their pricing with their customers. In a marketplace though, you can also bring your customers into a marketplace and use your pricing and so forth. So I think it depends on, to Bob's point, I think it depends on the marketplace. It depends on how it's managed and I think it depends, it ties to the vertical as well. So I think there's, you will see some that, you know, would there be compressed margins perhaps yet? Yes. But I don't think it's a marketplace takes all like Amazon. Right. And to Bob's point, I think that all of our heads, it's just by, you know, human nature right now, all of our heads go straight to what's going on at Amazon. That is a compressed marketplace. Price is driven down. The main winner is Amazon and you might be a little bit of a winner if you're a seller there. So I wouldn't argue with Bob. I think the jury is out on some of these vertical specific ones still.

And I think there's depending upon the products that you're selling and the industry that you're in, there's a land and expand opportunity. You can get some of your more commoditized products on a marketplace, introduce, get introduced to customers that you wouldn't normally get introduced before. And that opens the door to an expansion strategy that could include much more, you know, live conversation, sales and so forth. Good points. To me, it's a way, another way to just get visibility where maybe you wouldn't get visibility before.

Yeah, that's, that's good. I like that. All right, we're running short on time, so let's get moving, my friend. I've been talking too much. Forester customer obsession. This is from Digital Commerce360. Forester Customer obsession is key to B2B revenue and profits.

Yeah, we don't need to spend a lot of time on this, but I think it actually ties in. Yeah.

What we.

Right. Is you know, the article here was basically saying take a customer obsessed philosophy in the business.

Right.

And it is true. If you think about it, if you think even related to sales, the world of sales has always been more, well, what can I get from you versus what can I give to you?

Yep.

And you start to switch that around. And what they were talking about in here is that customers that are def. Or companies that are more customer focused and quote unquote, customer obsessed are seeing much higher revenue and much higher growth. I think that's going to continue. And I think AI. One of the big benefits of AI is the ability for you to take that to another level with your customer and understanding them. But I don't think it has to be entirely face to face. Right. Customer obsession can carry over into E Commerce, it can carry into marketplace. But if that's your true north, then everything else starts to emanate out from that.

Well, there's part of this that ties well to what we do at Lead Smart and how our technology lets you gain deep insights into customers. And what I liked about this, I'm just going to hit a couple of bullet points here. It talks about the emphasis is on consistently increasing your ability to understand your customer and have an obsession about your customer. Not it's the flavor of the month or whatever it might be. And so they talk here about customer obsessed. Companies realize substantial advantage over those that aren't customer obsessed in several performance area including 28% faster revenue growth, 33% higher profit growth, 43% higher customer retention, 44 better employee engagement. Right. It says, Forrester says customer obsession is a perpetual business strategy. I love this. I just. This is, this is. We're saving this and gonna use some of these statistics internally with some of our discussions with our agencies. Tom. But it says the report advises B2B companies to incorporate the following customer obsession strategies because I think that's the biggest thing for me.

Right.

If we just left right now after saying, hey, there's some cool things about what you might achieve, but is this is saying how to get started or how to work with it? It says accept change, view change as part of the process of improving and maintaining a focus on the customer. Use the right tools, combine people, process and data with the right technologies. Lead with courage and humility, adhere to strong convictions, but have the self awareness to avoid rigidity. The fourth one here, you'll love this. Eliminate silos, enable and reward cross functional and cross regional collaboration. I'll add to that, that says eliminate data silos as well in your business. Because when you eliminate data silos in your business, you know, here's my lead. Smart commercial for the day. Right. If you eliminate data silos in your business by bringing ERP and marketing automation and E commerce and all those silo data pieces into a single platform and location to understand your customer better, you're going to serve your customer better. So they talked about this as being a win win for the customer and the company. And I think what's interesting is when you take a strategy of being customer obsessed and one of the statistics talked about employee engagement, employee satisfaction, everybody wins in that setting because the partnership can grow. Right. It's not how much can I shove into your warehouse, it's how do I understand what's going on with you and what your issues are and your needs are. And when I'm servicing you versus selling you and supporting you and understanding you, everything grows. Yeah, good. All right. Technology, cyber security and AI. Honeywell and Google to accelerate autonomous operations with AI agents. Tom. AI agents. Familiar with those.

I've heard the term. I've heard the term. This was a bit of a technical article. I don't know how deep we want to go on this right now, but.

Well, it was, they put it was. It was from industrial distribution, which is going to all of our potential listeners of wholesale distributors. So let's give them an overview of it.

Yeah. So basically Honeywell is partnering with Google Cloud and the Google, not just Google Cloud, but their AI platform and so forth to build a what appears to be some form of like a turnkey or somewhat out of the box structure for autonomous operations with AI with AI agents. I think the real winner out of this will be the accentures and the PWCs and the people that would have to come in and implement this.

Yeah.

Stuff at this point.

Yep.

But again, I think we talked about AI agents last week. What they are and think of them as a little computer program, but a little computer program. But it's all based around AI aspects and AI programming and AIs versus the traditional sort of deterministic programming. Right. That we have out there. So anyway, it certainly sounds like a very aggressive and I think it sounds like a very. And I think again over time I think it will have a lot of value. I just think we talked about early adopters and we talked about what was earlier about getting ROI on stuff like that. There's quite a Runway to accomplish some of the things that we talked about.

Let me recap a little bit about what this says. Right. Honeywell and Google will co innovate solutions around purpose built AI agents, enhanced cyber security and on the edge advances. They talk about with it as well, which is going to tie to Internet of things and so forth. So what they're going to do is Honeywell and combined with, with Google will use Google's large language models or LLMs, which is going to help technicians, it'll help maintenance, it'll help machinery processing different video images that they can use about what's going on on the plant floor. And then there's a big component of it with cyber security. So think about building these agents that are using Google's LLM.

Right.

Gemini. Is that right, Tom? Yeah, using Gemini and other things that they're doing basically to analyze videos and, and text and sensors and all of those things that are using that model to make, using those to make engineering tasks, maintenance tasks and so forth better around a plant and then enhance their Iot. And I just noticed it here, it's the Gemini nano model and that will work in with to enhance workflows and so forth as well, as well as cyber security. So you know what, back to what we talked about 40 minutes or so ago was it's not a flip of a switch and return on investment. It's an investment in the future of your organization and your operations. So good. All right. Four ways AI could impact employees workflows. Any quick points on that?

The biggest one that jumped out on me there was the organization getting flatter. A flat organization. I completely agree. And we have another article I think coming up here about manage it and the hierarchies that exist in organizations will be very flattened through AI. And they were talking about that here your organization hierarchy will be more around your AI and your AI agents and the roles that they have versus people. So I thought that was an interesting one. One of them that jumped out the most to me on There.

Yeah. So I think that's good. There's upside, there's downside. Right. With this. It Talked about by 2027, 70% of employee contracts will include licensing and fair usage clauses for AI representations of their Personas.

Yeah, that, that, that's. I'm glad you brought that up. I, I struggle with that because if you look at work for hire agreements, which you have on both, you know, mostly employees and 1099 contractors, right? When you're working there and you're paying them, they, you own everything, right? You own any IP they build. If they do build a patent. If you have a bright idea and I patent it. Right. You don't have the rights to any of that. So why would this be a lot different?

I don't know.

It's an interesting, I would like, I'd be interested to see if this, how this really plays out in practice and if companies really would agree to something like that.

Well, let's pay close attention to this as we move forward because we're going to see more about that. It makes me think of, you know, the big, the both the writers and the actors strike in Hollywood. Was it last year, right? That was a big part of this. And it's the same thing. It's like, well, I'm, I'm paying you to do this, right? This is, there's a, there's a, a reward for what you're being asked to do and that includes this. So I liked your point though, about, you know, it's, it's common that, you know, you, you can, you're employed here. I pay you and as an engineer and I pay you your benefits and I pay you your vacation. I pay you all of these things and I pay you to go develop these things, right? Which is, then I own the outcome and the patent from that because I, I already compensated you for that. So it'll be interesting to see the, the kicker in this for me was, and you know, we're not a big enough company for this to matter too much, but it did get the hair to stand up on the back of my neck. It said number four was by 2029, one in 10 global boards will use AI guidance to challenge material executive decisions. Right? So imagine, I mean, think about that, right? You, you send out your, your agenda and all of the notes and all the financials for. I mean, I, I didn't even thought of this. I mean, you could already build a GPT in, in chat GPT or whatever source that you LLM that you use. You'd Already do that and, and say, hey, I want to connect into, you know, this company that I'm on the board, into their financials in general. And then I get my board meeting packet and I load that PDF right into that GPT and it comes back to me with all my questions for that CEO and I don't like that you want to be CEO of Lead Smart.

Well, I think let's back it up. Right. I think the, if you're waiting for the board to do that to you.

Yeah, great point.

Right. So as, yeah. As a CEO and executive, we should be doing that with yourself. Great point. Right. Yeah. And so, and you see this more and more is, you know, how do you get better at anything? Right. Whether you're an athlete or, or a professional. I think we're going to talk about sales professionals here. Minute how you get better is you practice and you perfect your trade and one of the ways you perfect your trade is to get criticisms and to get evaluations and, and look at how you can improve that and what you're doing. Well, you have that opportunity literally right now to do a lot of this stuff.

So. Tom, that's a great man. It's almost like I teed you up for that because that was, because those were, I mean that was a real concern when I first thought about it that way.

Right.

I mean not so much for me, but the people in general.

Right.

But you just, you, you brought it 360 degrees, you know, or 200 or 180 degrees. I should just. The opposite, opposite view of that is that. Wait a minute. It's actually a way to go have much better in that case board meetings. But whatever your outcome that you're looking for is to go prepare yourself with what am I missing versus getting caught with something. Right.

Great, great.

You can come back next week.

Okay, good.

Yeah, that was really good.

Yep.

So let's jump ahead into our sales and M and A section. You just brought this up. Great, great article. This was published in Industrial Distribution. Talked about the path to sales professionalism and we won't spend a lot of time on that, but I, I thought it was great. The, the simple quick analysis is, you know, if you get the newsletter, take a look at this. If you're in the sales world and, and, or anything related to that. Again, if you don't get our newsletter that we're reviewing here today, just reach out to us@helloadsmartech.com or the website for the podcast around the hornpod.com and we'll get that to you, but this talked about comparing a salesperson, a professional athlete. Now, you know, I've been on the sales and business development side of things my most of my career. So you've seen this before. But you know what? Every day I talk to people who. A big part of their. A big part of their sales team, not all of them. A big part of them put on a pair of boots, they get in their SUV or they get in their truck and they go to job sites or they go to the. The office for a little bit and they go to a factory, whatever it might be that they. The category or vertical that they sell into and they're just busy. Right. Joe called and needs a quote on this and Ralph needed me to drop off this box at a job site. And. And we call ourselves sometimes salespeople, but there's a risk in distribution sales that we can and truly, even with manufacturing and even, you know, I spent 10 years as a manufacturer's rep as well. It's really easy to get yourself to become a. I'll call it logistician. Right. You're just making sure somebody's getting some samples or you're running around getting stuff done versus saying I'm a professional salesperson that's using my time in a very particular way to get very specific things that I need to get done done which are going to benefit my customer, myself and my customer and my company that I work for. So this was a nice article touching on quite a few of those types of points.

Well, I had a call right before we came on here with one of our customers who's a manufacturer with a couple of their sales reps. This was the actual people on the people with the boots, as you like to say. Right. And they were asking me questions about how they could do some certain things with lead Smart. But it wasn't about. It was all about how they could be. Provide a better service to their customer.

Right.

If they're going, you know, they're on the road a lot. So if they're going to visit an area, how do I best do the research that I need to do? So I'm not just bringing donuts into the customer and saying hi and. And all. It was really refreshing to hear that. And I think we're seeing, I'm seeing more and more of that. I'm seeing more and more where how are we going to be more proactive? How are we going to be. And I, and I think that will all start, that culture will all start from the interview process down in these companies on how you hire for. It's not just who's you in your Rolodex or who do you know, it's what is your mentality to doing that? And it's pleasantly surprised because I'm seeing more and more of it all the time.

No, it's. Well, and what's, what's happening is, you know, people like us are out banging the drum that we got. We have to change. Right. And people are seeing it as. Well. And, and now we have some of the tools and the technologies that are able to help them do that. So. Good. Let's dive into. As we wind down today into our People in Leadership segment, how to progress in your career. I don't without becoming a manager. And then we had another article. 3, 3 ways to supercharge employee reviews. Let's kind of maybe recap a few of these things versus diving too deep into those. Any thoughts you had on that?

I mean, being a manager is a pain in the butt. Right? I mean, it's. Right, it's. I mean, there are people that are really good at it, but there's. It's. It's not an easy job. It's not an easy thing to do. As we just talked about, though, the world is going to become more flat, so.

Right.

Or the, or the organization.

Organization, sure. Yeah.

What this was talking about is there are a couple points in here. You know, they were talking about work, life, balance, some of the things we've hit on before. But really fewer and fewer people are wanting to be a manager. Well, the reason a lot of people wanted to be a manager is because they. A manager is a promotion. Right. It's a raise, it's more money. But I think there's a lot of other ways that you can make more money and get promoted and have more responsibility, especially as we move forward other than managing people.

Yep.

And anyway, this was kind of talking about some of those angles and articles on there.

Yeah. Well, the. I, I thought it was interesting. And this, this was a poll. It didn't say what type. This Yahoo Finance was a poll of a thousand employees. It suddenly 38 said they were interested in becoming a people manager at their current company and 44 of men were interested in becoming managers and only 32% of women. So out of that, that larger group, among the reasons they cited were increased stress and pressure, taking on a managerial role. So there's two, there's two components that I see that hit me out of this. And they're kind of tied into a little Bit of what you're saying. Part of this I think is generational two is you mentioned work life balance. I think people are looking for different things, younger generations. I, I need to put a chart up about what's Gen Z, what's boomers, Gen Z, Gen X, Gen Y, whatever it is. So I, I know what to refer to correctly in the shows. Maybe, maybe we have a static chart that we put up when we have these discussions in this show. But the younger workers, they're tying, you know, work life balance. Work is a part of their life. It's not a focus of their life in so many people.

Right.

And so yeah, why would I do that? That you go do that. I'm going to do this over here and if you won't pay me enough that I want to make, I'll do a side hustle while I'm working for you. Even potentially. Right. With that we see a little bit of that. But the other side of it is and I think it's more important part and I won't belabor this too much, but I've watched this my whole career is good. Salesperson as an example does not make good sales manager.

Right.

And historically people will say, you know, oh man, this guy's awesome. Let's promote him to sales manager because he's an accomplished salesperson. Well, there's a whole nother skill set you need to be a manager. So that's great. I think that's something to be paying attention to. All right, let's, let's dive ahead. Industry scuttlebutt. We've got some info there. MSC company posted an 8% drop in Q4 sales. That obviously is on their calendar year not or their fiscal year, not the calendar year. And the revenues were off by 4.7%. So on the full year. So interesting times. Saw some of the folks from Turner Supply we mentioned here. They did an acquisition in Alabama of another company there. Good folks at Turner. And then Rexell, the large electrical distributor posted their third quarter quarter results. We have sales results. We have posted there as well. But you know what, as we wind down, I wanted to spend a minute. We have a section in the newsletter every week. It's called a good. I call it a good read and then end listens because sometimes we will throw a great podcast in there. And I wanted to acknowledge that coming up. I can't remember the date. Let me go look. I have it here. 30th, 30th this month. Our friends at Distribution Strategy Group, Jonathan vine and Ian Heller who are the founders of that organization and distribution strategy group. If you don't follow them, just go to distributionstrategygroup.com webinars, podcasts, research surveys. You know, they're one of, you know, a handful of organizations that are really, really pushing and driving the data and the details to, to help people across the board in wholesale distribution. And I think a big part of their audience is manufacturers listening as well. They're having the 100th episode of, of the series that they do. We quote information from them all the time. Jonathan's been on the podcast, Ian's been on two of our. The two times we've done special episodes. When we did it in January, that the 2024, three in review and what's coming in 2024. And Ian was one of the panelists on that. And then our 100th anniversary show that we did in July, Ian was one of the. The panel panelists with us or guests that we had. So congratulations to them. I will be listening to that. And we encourage you to go to their website, distributionstrategygroup.com and sign up for that webinar as well. So. Good stuff. Hey, you're. You're actually gonna get on an airplane on, on Sunday and head out on the road, aren't you?

They're gonna let me out of the office. Yeah.

So I know it's not your favorite thing to do, but I appreciate you going out. We're. I'm heading out tomorrow to San Antonio for our great friends at Netplus Alliance. They're a buying group for the industrial safety and construction industry. Great human beings. People that run that organization like to. Happy to call them friends. I have an opportunity to speak on a panel discussion on technology with them on Sunday. You'll be in later in the day to take advantage of the beautiful buffet that they put out at their reception. So I know that will be fun for you. I'm going to move on to another event which will be my third week in a row of being with our friends at Affiliated Distributors. We love both of those buying groups, great human beings there. The running organization trying to help. Help wholesale distribution get to the next level. So it's. It's that time of year, right? We got you. You went most of the year without having to travel much. And then you went to see a good, great customer the other day and, or the other day a couple of weeks ago. And you're at this event and then we're off to see a, a large company that we're trying to support with their digital digital roadmap and digital roadmap and digital transition as well. So you've got what, three, three trips in what, month and a half?

Yeah. Don't know what to do.

It's going to be like your young days.

I know, I know. Right?

Well, that gets. That gives us a chance because we're two and a half, three hours apart. Gives us a chance to spend some time together. I won't see you this weekend, but I'll see you in a couple weeks. So. Thanks, Tom. This was a good day. Good articles, great comments. Appreciate those of you that have been with us as we wind down the day. If you like what we do each week, click the follow button. If you're listening to us Live on YouTube Live. I'm sorry, on Facebook Live or LinkedIn Live, click the Follow the Lead Smart Technologies page. You'll get the updates. If you're listening or watching on YouTube, hit that follow button and you'll get the updates. If you're on the podcast, please subscribe. If you liked what you heard, leave us a review even more so. The more reviews there are, the more people get to know about what we're doing. That would be greatly appreciated and share what we're doing with our friends. So, Tom, thank you for today, everybody. Be kind, be safe, and do good things.

Have a good weekend. Sweet.