Around the Horn In Wholesale Distribution, Episode 81 #supplychain

Sam.

Mike, that is the example of we are all dancing that he was talking about earlier.

Hey, guys. Yeah, yeah, just a little. Yeah, the Caddyshack Shack. Gopher, you know, whatever it might be. Come on, you guys. It's beautiful. Intro music.

It's Friday. Why not Friday?

So I didn't realize, you know, Vince Guaraldi, I've always known him as the Charlie Brown guy. Right. Back in the late 60s, he was quite the, you know, top musician and I believe the same, the same producer that produced a lot of Vincent Guaraldi's Vince Guaraldi stuff were the producers for Clear Credence Clearwater Revival back in the day, which I found very interesting. So, yeah, anyway, trivia for the day.

Great show. Have you guys with us. We'll see you next week. Yeah, that's great. Good. Well, good morning everybody. Mike, great to have you with us. We've got Tom Burton here and Mike Mortensen with ARG Industrial. Mike, are you in Anchorage today?

I am.

Awesome. I know you have a, you know, a residence there, but you seem to be constantly all over the place.

Yeah.

As the company has grown and we, you know, got our hands on so much stuff, I'm all over the place lately.

No, that's.

That's great. So, Mike, we're happy to have you with us. We'll chat a little bit about ARG in just a minute before we get rolling. But we'll dive into kind of doing a little bit of our housekeeping that we do every week. So I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with Tom Burton. As we mentioned, Mike and Tom and I are lifelong friends and the co founders of Lead Smart Technologies. And Lead Smart is a AI enabled customer intelligence and CRM solution that enables wholesale distributors and manufacturers to get deep insights into their business that they've never had before. To see what's going on both at the customer and within their company, across their organization and across their customers use tools to accelerate growth by those deep insights. So we get together every week, we chat about what we describe as around the Horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing. And what we do is we put out a newsletter every week. And that newsletter again is called around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution. And if you don't get it and you would like to get that newsletter, simple way to do that. You can put a note in the comments here today. If you're live with us on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live or Facebook Live, you can send an email to helloadsmartech.com and we'll get you on that list. Or you can go to the website for the podcast, which is www.aroundthehorn podcast, and sign up there and see previous episodes. So if you are listening on the podcast on Apple or Spotify or any of the other popular podcast formats and you are not seeing us on the live broadcast that we're doing today or recording of that, you won't be seeing the newsletter when it's the newsletter that we review each week and we bring guests in like Mike to talk about what's going on and the economy and technology and sales and marketing and M and A and all the things that impact both manufacturing and wholesale distribution, which is the markets that Tom and I work closely with. So we're ready to dive in today. But before we dive into the news, Mike, fill us in a little bit about you arg, your growth, where you guys are headed, some of the cool stuff going on there.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Kevin. So ARG Industrial is a distribution company, 100% employee owned, based out of Anchorage, Alaska. We have 12 locations across Alaska, Washington, Oregon and we are opening our 13th location in a new state in Idaho in a town called Hayden, which is just north of north of Coeur d'. Alene. So that whole area is just really growing and filling in. And so that's our newest location. You heard it here first.

I was just gonna say you heard it here first. Very good.

The official press release is going out. So I hope my director of Martin today. So I hope my director of marketing is not mad at me for some. Yep.

Well, as long as they make sure we get that announcement, we'll post that as well with the newsletter.

Yeah, but we're focused in the hose and fitting space. We also have a significant portion of our business that's in the lifting and rigging space. And so we, we sell and service all the products in those verticals and do tons and tons of assembly across our company. We are fully invested in the digital transformation and over the last four years have been working on a digital twin of our business online, our B2B E commerce platform. And we're actively engaged in rolling out technology tools to service our customers and bring what we do closer to them. So We've got about 200 employees across our company and excited about growth.

That's awesome. Well, you know, one of the reasons that we're here is you were with us, I think middle of last year and if people don't aren't connected with you that are listening, I would highly recommend reaching out on LinkedIn you are actively involved not just in ARG, but in the overall growth of distribution with your involvement with NAHAD and idco, buying group and trade associations. And you put a lot of time giving back into the industry versus taking it. We're at some of the same conferences on an ongoing basis. I'm sure I'll see you again middle and latter part of the year in a few. And so it's folks like you that are not just driving their business every day, but are giving back to the industry and looking at a digital transformation within your organization that we like to have with us as we go through and talk about the news.

So absolutely.

Thanks, Tom. I've made it almost seven minutes without you being able to say anything. You ready to dive in?

Another day at the office.

All right, why don't we fire off on the news here? Again, we're going to review some of the key articles from this week's newsletter around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution newsletter. So again, if you don't get that and you'd like to, please let us know. The one thing I missed. You know what? Our audience is growing each week, both in the podcast and the live. But if you enjoy what you see and part of the discussion we have and folks like Mike, join us, whatever format you're listening on, leave us a review, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button wherever you can, and then share this with your colleagues so we can continue to bring you this, this information each week. So that's it. Tom, what's the first one we want to talk about?

Well, I guess we're going to start as usual with economy and you know, Mike, we were chatting a little bit about this before we went on Wholesale inventories are down, revised down in January. I think this was, you know, not surprising to you in what we are, what you were seeing.

No, not at all. In fact, I think when, when we look at what's happened over the last couple of years, especially for distributors, we, we had such a hard time sourcing products and your inventory is really the lifeblood of your business and distribution. That's what we do. And if we don't have anything to sell, it makes it pretty tough. And so we spent a lot of time sourcing products, alternative suppliers of products and stockpiling products when we could because we didn't know how long this disruption was going to happen. And so I think when I am out speaking broadly in the industry and talking to other distributors, most of us are sitting on mountains of inventory, which, you know, in one way you could look at that and say, oh boy, you got too much, you've got too much capital tied up. But it really was a security blanket, you know, going through the last couple years. And I think it's being felt at the manufacturer level now that they're starting to catch up and working through their backlog of orders. Many of us distributors are starting to.

Right.

Size our inventory. And that's going to take some time based on some of the things I've heard from colleagues in the industry.

Yep. So, Mike, let me throw a question at you to kind of go with that. You know, a lot of times we think about some of the big hits in, during the pandemic, right. Came to, you know, some of the industrial folks, but a lot of the safety distributors and folks like that that were, you know, trying to get their arms around PPE and, and get the difficulty that they had in getting those products. But my assumption would be that, yes, while that happened, the same impact, though, was happening to your business. Even though you might not focus on latex gloves and, and face masks and things like that because of the shipping issues and the shutdown of the factories and so forth. Is that, is that accurate?

For sure. And in our industry, in the vertical that, that we operate in, assembly is huge. So we're taking a variety of different products and putting them together to make something holy, a wholly new product. And you only have to be short one of those components to be dead in the water. Right. And so you, you've gotta, you gotta be able to pivot. And, and when you're doing assembly work, especially in the hose and fitting space, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat. But when it gets down to, you know, you've got to have a piece of hose and you got to have a fitting on both ends, otherwise you don't have a product. Right. And so, you know, we, we tend to be really averse to being short of, of one of those items. And so we just, we, we added a ton. You brought up shipping, right. The, the transportation costs went through the roof and times slowed down and, you know, so all, all of those factors went into our decision to really invest our money in, you know, in extra inventory. And fortunately, our products don't really have a shelf life, so they're not going to go bad. So it seemed like a safe play and I think, I think a lot of people went there.

So quick question before we leave here, Mike. Do you think with what you're seeing, right, hey, we're just not buying anything and Everything that we can get our hands on. Are you think that is going to result in maybe a deflation in pricing with manufacturers prices dropping because the demand isn't so big as we look through the rest of the year?

Well, you know, that's, that's kind of been what's happened in cycles in the past, at least in my experience is manufacturers always, always overshoot the curve, right? They're, they're building, building, building, building products. And then, you know, distributors are a little bit, you know, like more close to the action. And so we go, okay, let's, let's turn off the orders. And, and manufacturers still keep going. And then at some point they're like, hey, let's make a deal. We've got all this inventory that we're sitting on that we're not so much comfortable with. Let's, let's move that. And so us as distributors, we kind of play this game like, okay, if the manufacturers are going to overshoot, the costs are going to come down, we're going to be able to capture that, increase our margins. I'm not seeing that yet. Little pockets, but, you know, we're still seeing price increases come down the line. So, you know, maybe that's part of this soft landing that everybody's shooting for, but I'm not, I'm not seeing it yet.

Still.

Still some of that, but not yet.

And we're hearing some of that as well from, from other folks that are in your same spot and in other verticals as well that, you know, the end user is trying to drive and demand lower prices, right. They're looking for those cuts and, or bids that they're putting out. But at the manufacturer, they're not seeing that yet. They saw the increases and what you just mentioned about continuing to see increases, that's intriguing as well.

Yeah.

And I, and I, and I think over the last couple years, distributors, if they were playing their game, right, really benefited, right? It was because, because it was a especially independent distribution, right, that, you know, integrated supply. And some of these, you know, publicly traded companies that are in our space, they demand much higher turns out of their inventory than somebody like us. But, you know, we're distributors that played their inventory right, really benefited. Now we're in a situation where there's lots of product in the market and the buyer is going to be back in the driver's seat a little bit. We're going to have to, we're going to have to manage that.

Like, what's the, I know, different verticals within wholesale distribution. You know, are different. But what do you see across the board and with your peers in, in your arena? And you know, you go to a lot of events that are, you know, folks in your executive level from other verticals as well. What's, what's the goal or target for the best, best inventory turn rate?

Well, that's a tough question, Kevin. I mean, if you're in, if you're in the electrical sector, you know, or, or maybe the Jansan sector, they're looking for 8 to 10 turns. You talk to Integrated Supply and they want 12 turns on inventory no matter what vertical they're in. And I think that that's why they struggle. And independent distributors that are willing to live on two and a half or three times turns because we know we want to have, you know, like I said, if we've got a hose in one fitting, we don't have a product. Right. So we're, we're able to live on much lower turns and fortunately capture more margin to support that. But I think, I think that's, that's a twofold, you know, answer. It depends on what, what business strategy you have, the size of your business and what vertical you're in.

I guess it ties a lot then to that, the configuration component. Right. So you're living on shorter terms, much higher mark, much higher inventory levels than a guy that's selling a box of fasteners or something. Right?

For sure. For sure.

Cool. Well, let's bounce ahead. Next article kind of talks to that as well. This was a something that we, you know, we've been talking about this for quite some time and the articles from a Reuters article talks about risk reigns in ocean shipping industry and economic experts are talking about this. So big conference earlier this week in, in Long beach about the container shipping business. But what's now been happening, you know, we started talking about this early last year. We talked regularly about the issues the Panama canal. And then Q4, we started talking about the issues tying to the Suez Canal. And now you start pulling those things together. And this article is really interesting. It, it was quoting some things from former U.S. defense Secretary Robert Gates and really talking about what he described as risk is the new normal for ocean shipping industry that handles 80% of global trade. The geopolitical tensions, the protectionism ideas that are going on, climate change issues and just pricing. And now we're seeing with this whole scenario going on in the Suez Canal, I think it was earlier this week for the first time, a ship was actually sunk by these Houthi rebels. Now we're adding what, a million plus dollars in each direction of fuel costs when they're going around the Cape of Good Hope. A lot of changes going on in this that are going to, you know, it looks like this particular article is kind of reinforcing what we've been trying to talk about here consistently is we got to be paying attention to this.

It seems to me, and Mike definitely want your take on this. It seems to me that what was maybe perceived as maybe an acute inconvenience has turned into a chronic issue and isn't necessarily going to go away. Right. It's not like, oh, it's just something like a strike, right. And the strike goes away or whatever and now we're back, back to normal. I mean, what does this do to the whole, you know, shipping and everything long term and where you source from and all of that? I mean, it seems like there's definitely some long term ramifications to this and that it's not, again, an acute sort of inconvenience that's just going to go away one day and we're going to be back, quote, unquote, back to normal.

Yeah, I think, I think shipping issues have been, you know, and risk around. Shipping has been around since, since people started sailing boats from continent to continent.

Right.

I mean, you look at what's going on now and it's probably, it's definitely different than what we've experienced over the last couple decades where we didn't have some of these issues, like you said, with the Panama Canal and that becoming less and less of a viable choice and people, you know, sinking ships with missiles. We have. Shipping is the lifeblood of our business here in Alaska. Nothing really comes over the road. It all comes out of the Port of Tacoma or Port of Seattle and comes to Alaska. Thank goodness we don't have people in Canada launching missiles at our ships and sinking them, you know, out there. But it's, it's easy to think, well, all these problems are happening a world away. How does it really affect me? But I look at it kind of like the shoplifting effect, right? If, if a store allows shoplifting to a certain extent, the prices that they charge for their product have to come up and we all pay for that same thing here. You know, insurance companies are looking at this and, and shipping companies in Mass are looking at this and saying we have to hedge our bets and we're all gonna pay more for that in our cost of transportation and that's gonna flow through to the cost of goods that we have to provide to our customers. So this is an emerging thing that we all need to keep our eye on.

I think you're spot on with that and that's one of the reasons that we've been consistently talking about this. And I think the manufacturer's gonna feel this first. Right. So unless you're a wholesale distributor and you're doing some private label work or bringing some things in directly, but container costs have gone through the roof in the last couple months. Right. That's going to trickle down as the manufacturers are feeling that. And I think back to our earlier discussion, right. When we were talking about inventory turns. If you're in a high inventory turn market, this can be really have an impact on you if you're trying to do kind of just in time type inventory versus a company like yours that might have more stable, you know, higher levels of inventory. So this is, I think, a time where wholesale distributors. And we've got an article we're going to talk about later about partnering with your manufacturers. In fact, it's, you know, a couple articles down the road here about the financial impact of manufacturers is having a really good partnership and understanding, I think, how your key manufacturing partners are managing these issues. Right. Because if you've got a old school company that's not even really paying attention, I don't know how you could not be paying attention. But not doing some things proactively thinking about, hey, wait a minute, we've got geopolitical tensions in China, Russia, but the Chinese part of it is probably much more impactful. If I'm on the east coast of the US or I'm in Europe, I've got the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal issues, I probably need more than just a junior person managing my supply chain.

Yeah.

And I, and I think that the latest, you know, episode here that we're seeing in shipping drama is just the latest episode. I think the last couple years has warmed us up to the fact that if you're not having conversations with your manufacturing partners about how they're sourcing their raw materials and how that affects their ability to supply you, you're missing the mark. Almost all the manufacturers that I'm talking to in our space are talking about reshoring in some way and moving their investments back to the United States or closer to home where these overseas shipping complications aren't affecting their ability to serve.

Yeah, I think that's great. And it's, it's critical that we be watching that a consistent basis because it's the lifeblood of what we all do.

Right.

At the end of the day, it's with us being a technology company, it's your companies like yours are the lifeblood of companies like ours. Right. And, and how that trickles down is going to be critical for us all to be, to be watching. I just, I think what the core point of this article was. It's different than it's. There's always been and I agree with, totally with your point. Right. Since you know, ships started leaving Europe and Asia and, and moving goods around the, around the world by boat, this has been an issue. But I think what now what we're interesting, what really intrigues me and before we go on, I'll just throw this out to both of you guys. We've got a lot to cover today, so we'll move on quickly. But you know what intrigues me about this is, and we're going to talk a little bit today about AI and technology and there's so much in technology out there right now that can help smaller companies act and function and serve their customers like big companies. Right. So we see that in the technology world Lead Smart Technologies happens to be one of that, those companies that can do a lot with a little. Well, guess what? Those Houthi rebels are doing a lot with the little.

Right.

I don't know the exact numbers, but I've seen this on the news multiple times.

Right.

You've got this faction offshoot group that's firing like something like $10,000 drones are, are attacking ships and the military is using $2 million warheads to knock the ten thousand dollar drones out of the air. Right. You've got a little group that's doing a lot to impact large organizations and large and countries. So it's kind of interesting to watch that play out. It's just similar to the tech world. Right?

It's economical.

Exactly. Right, Right.

Yeah.

It doesn't always, it doesn't always take something super expensive and, and, and you know, gigantic to get the, get the results that you want on.

Yep. So good. All right, Tom, let's dive ahead. There's. Why don't you take us to the next article, buddy?

Yeah. So next article, why AI can boost the economy faster than past technologies. You know, I thought it was an interesting article. I have a couple of different viewpoints on this. So what they were talking about is the different ways, the different ways that AI can, could be used in an organization to make it more efficient to remove jobs that are mundane, tedious, whatever, all of that kind of stuff and that it can happen much faster. Than maybe other technologies. Right? Other technologies take a while to have an impact, maybe years. What they're saying in the article here is that AI can have a much faster impact in the workplace and a much faster impact on, on efficiencies, which I agree with, I think, and this isn't really necessarily covered in the article, but this is just something that I'm seeing is you're seeing a lot of layoffs recently that are quote unquote attributed to AI. And I think a lot of companies are getting ahead of their skis here a bit. I think they're thinking we can lay off and we can remove people, but yet they still don't really have a good understanding of what they're going to do with AI to replace those jobs or to augment the rest of the team to make them effective with using AI to basically be able to accomplish what was being done by those workers. So I think that I agree with this article, but I also think that we're seeing a lot of companies getting ahead of themselves and using this as a reason. They believe they can just cut costs, but then they really don't know exactly what they're going to do with AI at this point to actually, you know, make that result. So I think we're getting ahead of ourself. But I do agree there's a lot of opportunity there. Mike, thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think this is like the next industrial revolution. And if you follow, and I think the article spoke to that a little bit, if you follow industrial revolutions of history, they, they created jobs rather than eliminated them. But there is a lot of job, you know, transition and people are going to have to learn how to do different things, which is probably going to be the barometer on how fast we adopt some of this technology. Technology is here way before people can adopt it. And usually it takes that adaptation and people's ability to start utilizing it before you really get the full effect of that technology. And I think that story is being written right now. So. So small little use cases are what we're looking at. And rather than using it to replace people, it's really how do we get the slingshot effect, not only the extra increase in productivity from the AI, but then what do we unleash these people that were shackled by computer tasking that wasn't human related, how do we unleash those people in our business model to get that second step up?

I think that's a great, great point, Mike. And what I love about this is, and this is what I believe we're going to see, right, is the companies that are doing this correctly, they're not going to eliminate jobs, they're going to shorten their hiring curve of how many people they need to add because they're so much more efficient. Right. And if you look at that, you're still going to have attrition of retirement or people that decide they want to start a new career. For the people coming in, I think this will be net gains and it's what we've always seen in history. I think it's important we point out in this particular article this was the Federal Reserve. And so in our newsletter that we're discussing here, we have it broke out into sections about the economy and supply chain. We're still in our first section today that we talk about. But I put this AI related article in here because with the Federal Reserve is where this discussion was happening right from this article. So they made basically said, you know, top Federal Reserve official and other thinkers at the High pro, this so called high profile conference are talking about higher growth, rising incomes, less inflation within the marketplace. And then they said there's no technology that they were aware of. This is quoting Mary Daly from the San Francisco Fed. There's no technology I'm aware of that ever reduced employment on the net. But these type of things significantly impact the potential of growth. She said this significantly disrupts the allocation of that employment and who wins and who loses from the new technologies, which is I think really great. And it just brings to my mind, you know, I was having a discussion a while back with a, a company in, in the UK that is doing some really consistent hiring and globally. Right. Global company. And my comments, one of their executives, you know, had been, you're doing so much hiring, but what if you could take the existing team that you have and raise their efficiencies by 10 or 15%. How many fewer people do you need to hire? And it's less about the idea of hiring the fewer people. It's more about the drain that all of that energy and costs and onboarding and all of those things are. We'll get to the digital twin thing, but what if we could just use the right technology? Even with pre AI technology, Right.

It's already becoming a force multiplier in our businesses. If you're. And it doesn't even need to be generative AI that you're engaging with just the technology that we have today, if you're using it correctly, it's a force multiplier for the employee pool that you have now just imagine if we all stopped using email and decided to start handwriting note. I mean like just, just think about that. What a drag that would be on your business and how many more people would you have to have communicating for your company. You know, technology, it shouldn't replace people. It should augment how we, how we work, make us more efficient, get greater job satisfaction. And I don't really see this technology as being any different than some of the other technologies we've had in the past in that way. Definitely different in other ways.

No, I think you're spot on and kind of wrapping this up. What I think is interesting again why we put this in the slot that it's in is this is talking about the economic impact of these things versus just the things we can do in our business. And the comment was made again from this San Francisco Fed president was that they said the typical process by which new technologies are incorporated into business operations and generate productivity gains is first by replacing the mundane tasks done by humans, then by augmenting the work of humans, then leading to new types of jobs entirely. Here's the difference though, and I love this comment. She says rather than this happening sequentially like it historically has right now, what we're seeing is all of those things are happening simultaneously, which that was their point about the impact on the economy that this is going to have in a positive note. So kind of a cool article.

Yeah, it's definitely got a different viewpoint on it, which I thought was good as you said, from the economic perspective.

Yep. Yeah, we usually look at it and we're going to talk a little bit more about AI. So let's jump into our manufacturing and distribution article. Smaller suppliers finances have deteriorated since pre pandemic. It's from Supply Chain Dive magazine. Interesting thoughts. We kind of talked about this a little bit when we were talking about, you know, the shipping issues earlier. Right now we're talking about some of the, the financial impacts that mid range suppliers have. And Mike, I, I kind of want to throw this a little bit to you. I don't want to put you on the spot, but what kind of makes me think is, you know, when you look at the statistics from this article about what has happened with kind of that mid tier and most of this is related to manufacturers, significant changes right in their EBITDA declining and so forth. I would guess a company like yours probably has a broad mix of very large, maybe multinational manufacturers that you partner with, but you probably have some very strategic people that are maybe, I don't want to say ma and pa but maybe they're 30, 50, 100 million dollar company versus a multi billion dollar company. Is that a reasonable statement?

For sure? Yeah. We deal with thousands of different manufacturing partners. Sometimes it makes my eyes cross, but yeah. And they run the gamut from like you said, global, global companies to regional manufacturers.

Yeah. So you know, this article was really talking with this about just some of the examples they talked about. This was from a research piece that had been done. They Talked about from 2019 through 2022 EBITDA decline by over 20% at middle market companies. While for large public companies they had the exact reverse with a growth in that setting. And it just, it kind of makes me think about. And the reason that I shared this article and wanted us to chat about it briefly is, you know, how do you, when you look at this, it surprised me. One, the data surprised me. But secondly is when you talk about, let's just say you had 500 suppliers, how do you pay attention to the viability of your suppliers? And if people aren't, they probably should be.

You know, for us, I think the last couple years really pulled back the curtain on just how capable our manufacturers businesses were outside of the quality of the product that they were producing. I mean this really did, was a stress test on everybody's business. And so while some of these large companies that had processes in place and they had a diversified, you know, raw material supply chain and they had mechanisms to pass costs on to distributors or their customers, they saw, they saw their, their ability to increase their profits because prices were growing up. So they were getting, you know, if they, if they had a good margin on their product, the margin dollars were growing. Whereas some of the smaller companies that you know, may not have diversified supply, they may not have technology baked into their company to be able to communicate with their, their customers better do, do business in the way that we wanted to or the mechanism to proactively pass on costs to their, their customers. They suffered. And, and we saw that and you saw people go away or, or get acquired. Right. And so lot, lots of change happening there.

That's good. I found this article interesting. It kind of closed out with a comment in the, from the research, coming out of the research that they had done and they said there are companies that have managed their suppliers at arm's lengths and very transactionally and they're the ones that don't have resilient supply chains because there's no bond built. Talking about a partnership. So it talks about collaboration between corporate entities is key to having sustained Critical relationships.

Right.

And I think we probably saw some of this through the pandemic is there were people who had developed relationships and partnerships with manufacturers who were getting goods when they were being allocated because they knew they were partners versus the guys who were always grinding and trying to get every nickel out of a manufacturer and, and a difficult vendor or difficult customer for the manufacturers. Right. There's different levels of relationship. I've been on the manufacturing and the distribution side in my career and most recently before, you know, Tom and I founded Lead Smart, was on the manufacturing side as a principal in a manufacturing company. And there were people that we just had better relationships with, you know, and you've got, you've got relationships even as a small manufacturer that we were. You have a relationship with global distributors that you kind of have to take care of or else. But then when you look at that next level, it's like, who are our partners versus people that place purchase orders? And I was appreciative of this article talking about the collaboration because if you're not doing that, and it even talked in there about, you know, partnership where a distributor might even front load some inventory to help cash flow at a manufacturer, different things that they can do in partnership to help each other. So I thought it was a good article today.

Yeah, I love that. I think when, when you look at the customer supplier relationship, you can either be seen as a customer, a partner or a channel. And wow, bravo.

Say that again, will you?

When you're talking about that relationship, whether it's with a distributor to a customer or a manufacturer to a distributor, you can either be seen as a customer, a partner or a channel and you know the channel is the highest. You want to be seen by that manufacturer as like, look, this is our viable channel to market or next best. This is our partner. And so when you start talking about allocation of resources, which in over the last couple years look like inventory, where, where are we going to send our limited inventory? Which are we going to send it to a customer, a partner or a channel? And that's how, that's how they were, you know, operating. And to be honest with you, that's how many of us in the distribute distribution level were operating as well. You've got those customers that are always squeezing you over a nickel on price and you have limited inventory. We were, we were moving our product to customers who saw that as a partnership and they understanded that we were providing a service with inventory and product and expertise and they were going to pay us for that. And we were Able to, we were able to grow those margins.

Yep, yep. I love that. You know, it's funny, it makes me think about one of the tools we have built into to lead Smart is our revenue expander where you can literally quickly look at an account and see all the categories that they buy from you. Right? And in that conversation where you're trying to decide where you're going to allocate, that's a quick, easy way that you can do with if you have the right technology to say not only what are they buying from a dollar amount, but what are they buying from me? Full on. Right. Because sometimes you have what looks like, and this is very strategic within distribution companies, right. You can have your SalesPeople and your ERP reports that are saying, yeah, this customer's up, but they're up in a category versus are they a partner and buying full line from us. And the manufacturers can look at things the same way, right? Because you're probably not going to get that inventory allocation when times are tight from a manufacturer. If you go to them for a SKU and you're buying from 27 SKUs, from their competitors, 100%.

And so many manufacturers, quality manufacturers during the last couple of years have put programs in place that are literally grading their distributors on that level. And they're deciding not only from a price perspective, you know, what they're willing to provide, but also from an inventory allocation perspective. And you know, it's important we talk about technology and everything else that's coming down the pipe. Personal relationships with your manufacturing partners are critical, right? Because if they don't know who you are and why you're important to them, you're not going to get their full attention.

It's great. Good.

Mike, what were those three buckets again? You said partner, customer, customer, partner.

And then channel and channel means I see those in ascending order. A channel is where they're looking at you as the ability to really capture market share on a large, you know, out of a large area. Right. You become a channel for them to move their, their product to, to the market. Partner, obviously is the next best thing. They see the relationship as mutually beneficial and they want to, they want to give you support. A customer is like, okay, you know, like that's the, that's the, the guy that buys the buys stuff, cherry picks our line. We do appreciate the business, but we're really looking for somebody that's going to really support us all the way.

So it's kind of the rock pebble, you know, Boulder rock and sand. So to speak. But having that. And maybe this actually is a good way to lead into this next section here about where we're going to talk about a couple E Commerce and E Commerce and marketing section. And you know, this first article here, I think, Kevin, we can just talk about these together.

Sure.

Because they're interrelated. There's two articles here. Both of them are related to marketing. The first one's mastering B2B marketing strategies in a Digital Age. Our marketers relying on AI and automation at the high cost of isolating customers. And then the second one, B2B influencer marketing. 82% of business decision makers consider B2B monotonous, creating an opportunity to redefine the category. So I don't know, we can. I'll start with the first one here. The mastering B2B marketing strategies and the digital A's. And are we isolating customers? And they talk about in the article here. Right. Is that people are using AI more and more to generate content. But as we probably have seen, as you start to see AI content that's not well curated and well thought through, it's a B. It's just kind of noise. It's not really. It doesn't really have a communication. It doesn't impact. It doesn't. And unfortunately, I think sometimes people look at quantity way over the quality and the quantity just turns into noise. Right. And that then ties into the second article about B2B being monotonous and boring and not really valuable to customers because we, we've inherently created a lot of noise and we don't really create a lot of value in our messaging on marketing here. So it's really interesting on how do you use AI to create higher quality messaging communication value that actually is relevant to whoever it is. And then I think, Mike, going back to what you just talked about, knowing your customer, your partner, your channel, you can adjust that and personalize that messaging based on who it is that you're actually talking to. So I think it gives you another really interesting opportunity.

Yeah, I think you're right, Tom. There's a lot of noise and not a lot of clarity in what we're seeing around. There's a rush to the door to create this content and they're blasting it out without that second step, which is customer segmentation and what value are they really looking to provide to the customer? So I think that that's going to. That's going to hone in over time. But we're in early days.

I think that's good. There's I want to. There's a few things in these articles I wanted to trigger on, but I was going to ask you guys both the question because all three of us here today are, I'll just say, prolific on, on LinkedIn on an ongoing basis. Here's what I'm seeing. I'm seeing a lot of people who were regularly posting that. Now I'm seeing four and five paragraph articles coming from them. That to me is, you know, and, and I'm the talker here in the group.

Right.

But less is more. And, and I'm just seeing this. I don't know if you guys are seeing it or feeling it. I'm just looking at these huge pieces of content that are coming out. I'm like, you could have got to the point quicker. And because I'm not used to seeing that from you, I assume that that's some big AI driven pieces of it. And my posts tend to be shorter because I'm not doing much of that. I might help generate some ideas, but I'm doing my content still. There's a balancing act there. I'm not suggesting for one second that using AI isn't valuable in developing content.

I.

What I'm just seeing is this big amount of bulk content with smiley faces and shamrocks and whatever it is next to it that I just didn't see before. Yeah.

And do you read it and does it make any sense to you? It's like, it's just noise, right? It's just noise. It's more noise into the equation here.

Yeah, yeah. And so I think that just. Mike, are you kind of seeing the.

Same thing for sure. And it's showing up in my inbox as well. I mean, I spend a lot of time of the day unfollowing or blocking or unsubscribing. Right. Because I'm just getting this massive influx of AI generated and it's easy to spot, you know, which is, which is sad because it's not, it's not targeted at me. You can tell they don't know me or my company. They're just blasting. Right. And so I think that that's unfortunate and it's gonna have to, it's gonna have to reign in if, if people are going to be able to start trusting this and finding value in some of the communication that's going to come out.

Well, I love that for me, as you commented about all the emails. Right. I just laugh. It's like, I'll see these emails come through and there'll be like a tagline from our website that just got scraped.

Right.

Or. And once in a while, they'll have something like an odd feature within the technology that we've developed at Lead Smart that'll be like from a obscure page on the website that's like, there is no. Put it this way. If you spent your own time to go research that deep, you got to use your time better. So it's just a bot, right. That's pulling data in and scraping data. And to your point, Mike, is you can see those so easy. And, and that does really kind of tie to that article in those two articles that we've mentioned here, one's called Mastering B2B Marketing Strategies in a Digital Age. And that comes from CMS Wire. And the other was in B2B Influencer Marketing. It's not rocket science from Adweek. And really what they're talking about here is, and this is just such a valuable point, they talk about there's a better way to balance the art and science of marketing in a digital first world. And they talk about focusing maniacally, maniacally on customer. On the customer by bespoke experiences, even across different Personas and different market segments. So to Tom's point earlier, you know about understanding the customer. They talk about embracing technology, but only if it fills gaps. Right. What is it going to do to enhance your customer experience? They talk about, and they say keep an eye on the competition, but both ears open to customers. And this is my big takeaway from all of this. Nobody articulates your company's value more than your customers do.

Right.

I made a little video when I was in the Northeast last week traveling, and I was out seeing prospects and customers and multiple buying groups and associations that were partnered with and. And got to listen so much to what they're seeing and what they're hearing. We try and do that here each week, really understanding that less about the competitors. And then the other key piece that I really liked about this is, and we talk a lot about here, about having a revenue department versus sales and marketing. And they talked about building a bridge between those two groups of people within an organization. So, you know, marketing should really understand the voice of the customer and how they're touching that customer and articulating that across to sales. So sales can really help take that message to the customer. So very good.

Yeah. I want to hit a couple comments before we move on here. So Mike Tyler says you've really nailed it in the last 10 to 15 minutes. So before that, before that, I'm not so sure but the last.

Let's see what happens next, huh?

I have peaks and valleys just like that.

Very well spoken and knowledgeable. I agree. Thank you Tyler and I wanted to hit a couple comments here. Bob, I think brought up a good one related to marketing here is you know, the problem is what he says is that Markerly typically owns Econ but they are not permit proficient at one to min or one to one communication. They do one to many and these articles talked about this is right. If you're going to cut through the noise, you're going to have to do more one to one almost and one at least one more personalized communication versus spray and pray with a bunch of noise that we're all getting inundated with.

Yeah, I agree Tom. I mean I think you can have a finely, you know, well thought out crafted marketing strategy that's looking to fill your bucket with opportunities. But in the end of the day the technology and some of that does not replace people in your business that are willing to talk to other people. If you don't have that, you're going to have a real hard time having meaningful partnerships or developing a channel for your product or your technology into the end user space.

And one last comment here, Kelly, I think is reinforcing what you're just saying here. They're saying that a lot of content from suppliers related to products is going to be filled with bad AI. So the human is even more important. It actually knows the product and can write and really put that context in there so that you actually are communicating something that makes sense versus again just having a lot of information that nobody fully understands.

That's really good. Yep. Hey, before we jump ahead, there's one last thing. This, this second article, right, that talked about influencer marketing. Right. And it's kind of interesting, right? We see that crossover and we think about TikTok or Instagram or so forth and you know, what are the Kardashians doing or what is this athlete doing or whatever it is. But there were some interesting points in that secondary article about really being an influencer ourselves and partnering with others. Mike, I consider you at some level an influencer in wholesale distribution. You're out at the events, you're partnering with the right people, you're doing, you know, your own marketing, your team's doing your marketing, you have an omnichannel presence, both your company and your Persona. And it's just, I love the comment that they made in this is they triggered trickled out some key points but the one that hit me is that humans are humans and they're talking about using LinkedIn, right? It says LinkedIn users are diverse. Someone who buys makeup on TikTok at night could be a marketing director by day. Preferences don't clock out at 9am or 9pm what works in B2C can shine in B2B. Right, because we can take that influence of an individual, whether it's a celebrity or it's just us. Right? And we have multiple places we can touch them. We could be touching them on TikTok and Instagram and things like that, but we want to get them as they're coming back and doing that shift that says I might be buying, you know, or reading or consuming content on Instagram, but I have those same habits that I'm taking back that I'm doing day to day. When I'm nine to five, so to speak, on LinkedIn, I just moved platforms. But I've got the same behaviors that I might have in my personal life. I've got the similar behaviors of how I'm consuming digital content. It just shifts to the platform shifts during the day.

Yeah, I agree. And I, and I think to the point of B2B being boring, there's a little bit of truth to that. I think, you know, when you talk about influencers and providing value, part of that, what people are doing, you know, from, you know, five to nine is there's a fun component to it. Right. There's some entertainment value to that. And I think that it's okay for us in the B2B space to not only bring value, but make it fun. And I'm excited to see some colleagues in our vertical that are starting to do, do some of these things. Right. They're in their marketing and the value proposition they're giving to their customers. They're gamifying it a little bit or they're making it fun. They're, they're, they're, there's some comedy baked into that and it's engaging their customers and making them want to come back for more value and to see kind of what's the next, you know, clever thing that they're, that they're feeding it to them with.

Yeah, good. Well, we had a comment there. Bob Britton says I'm completely wrong. So Bob will just agree to disagree because I'm, I'm a believer, full believer, that people cross over well, but that's a.

Well, I think he may be saying something a little different.

Okay, good.

I think that you can definitely apply beat. And so I'll read Bob's comments so that you can. He says, I completely disagree with B2C. Working with B2B. B2C is based on want. B2C is based on need. Then maybe you can get to want. I think that there's two things going on here, right? There's a lot of things from a marketing strategy perspective that we could and we do take from our consumer experience into the business world, right? I mean you just look at Amazon even from a marketplace perspective or a buying experience. But I do think what he's trying to say there and I, and I is right, Think about it. As a consumer, you're the sole, you're the sole decision maker, right? Or maybe you have to check with your wife or husband or whatever, but you basically see something, you want it, you may well take action on that. It will create that immediate demand. In business generally, especially in B2B, there's maybe multiple decision makers, there's much bigger decision making process. The need has to be justified. So it's a different experience all the way around than you would have in a consumer. I think that's more what Bob was. But, but certainly some of the tactics and things that we use in, in B2C can very well carry over to B2B and make it more interesting and more and more relevant.

Well, and there's another comment that Bob made as well. It's a good point about gamification, right? And you can do that on both sides, right? That that's really the key. And my view of all of this has been, look, we need to touch people wherever they're at, right? And you know, we even, you know, think about people will say, well, why, why would a, a technology company like us that is focused on wholesale distribution ever do an ad on, on Facebook, right? Well, guess what? When Mike Mortensen's looking at his kids ski trip, right? And we've been touching him on LinkedIn, we've been touching him through other campaigns, whatever it might be. And we can drop that lead Smart Technologies or our product channel, cloud information or about some issues in that same format. Right now we're touching him across platforms. In my personal life, I'm still running into these people and I see their content over here. We just, I think we just have that. We'll just lack of a better term, we'll take omnichannel Marketing versus Omni Channel sales is a good opportunity for us. And that's where my focus is on that. Catching them at all angles. So we should move on though from a time.

Make one comment I agree with Bob. Right. Want versus need is definitely something that protects the industrial distributor. Right. Because we're not selling things that people want, we're selling things they need. But in a market where sometimes the products that we're supplying become commoditized, it's really important to help differentiate yourself and in a crowded market and help those customers understand why they need to buy it from you. Right. And so like you said, Kevin, touching them in various aspects of their life provide. Providing more value while you're, while you're selling that product. That's. That's all part of it.

Right?

That's good.

Yeah. I just want to. Kelly must know my wife really well. She says men go into Home Depot to buy one thing specific. And women go into Home Depot and must go down every aisle. Man. That's exact. If when I go in Home Depot with my wife, I make her take out her cell phone so I can find her somewhere around Home Depot.

Losing your mic there, Tom?

Right back.

Nope.

How about now?

Yep.

Okay. Anyway, I was just going to say Kelly must know my wife really well and her. Her behavior at Home Depot so.

Well, this is similar to my wife's behavior at Costco. I do this Costco shopping because all of a sudden you know, the budget just so. That's interesting. Good, good comment, Kelly. Good comments, Bob. Great comments today. In general, we're. We're kind of running short on time with some other things to talk about. So let's kind of look at this. We move into our technology, cyber security and AI. There's a. An article here about that we posted coming from Forbes that said it's titled simply Human why HR Needs to Take the Lead in Cybersecurity. And in the point, I'll just kind of recap that and you guys can make any comments. The point was that normally we just drop everything about cybersecurity and so forth into it. You know, we're seeing more and more people doing more with that each literally weekly. The threats are there. The number, the percentage of people that are. Are hacked or have had threats are, Are growing consistently. I think Mike was it even. I think I saw a reply from an email from you that said there was a. I think a message from maybe your IT that said something about this isn't a regular email coming in or something like that. Right. So organizations are taking steps. But what I really liked about this and we could have a whole conversation about this, but it talked about the human side of it. Right. So HR playing a big role in cybersecurity they know who works there better and who no longer works there and so forth, and it and them having that relationship to make sure we know about what's going on. But such a big factor with cybersecurity is about training people. And HR traditionally will own the training component of things in a business. So if we only leave cybersecurity in the IT side of the business, we're missing the boat because that HR group of people is really going to know, did we get our message across correctly? Are we effective with the message on how we need to protect ourselves? So I thought it was a unique article and worth worth sharing with our friends.

I have a friend who owns a security cyber security training company and they're growing gangbusters. Probably one of the most fastest growing areas of employee training is security and cybersecurity. And there's a lot of nuance to it. Right. It's not just don't open an email, but there's. It's, you know, you have to. You have to become more and more sophisticated.

Yep.

It's all about people. Right. It's usually not a technology problem when it comes to that, but some, some person on the inside has to open the door. And so if we can. If we can give the training to the people to upskill them, that's a great, a great way to go about it. I love that article.

Yep. Good. Well, let's jump ahead because we want to spend a little time on this copilot and Genius tools, as we like to call them in our company. But, Tom, I want you to drive this one for us. This is from VentureBeat. Salesforce made some big announcements this week about some AI tools and literally, it's funny, you know, here's my. We're in March, so you get your. I'm going to probably give you two compliments this month, Mike. I don't know if I've ever shared with you, but you know, you know that Tom and I have been friends for kindergarten, so I only give him two compliments a month at the most. But I literally was listening to some of the AI tools that Salesforce is launching and I felt like I was in a product meeting that we've had over the last. Many of them over the last three to five months. So, Tom, why don't you take this one away?

Yeah, no, they've released, you know, they, they announced it, I think back in September, so it was about six months ago. But they've. Salesforce has released their first version of a copilot and you know, a chatbot basically. Obviously the big deal is it's using your internal data from, from Salesforce. So you're using in first party data. You're using data from your business versus just data from the Internet. And they really, really continue to emphasize, right, for this to work in an organization you've got to have your data act together. So you know, yeah, I mean I think it's the first step. The copilot capabilities that Salesforce released are predominantly designed for larger enterprise company, both from a price perspective and an implementation perspective. But I think it definitely was in alignment, as you said Kevin, with a lot of the stuff we've been focusing on, working on. Obviously we're partners with Salesforce so we get a lot of the inside scoop on some of these things as well. But you know, a lot of the things that we're doing for wholesale distribution specifically is a lot of what they covered and released here generally as it relates to their copilot.

Well, I think it all ties into what we've been talking about today, right, is having knowledge and data that's available to us. And the core piece of this is going to be, as we talked about a number of times today about copilots, how do I make myself more efficient? Now the, the big thing that I think we need to look at and what needs to be the focus in my belief in, in wholesale distribution and manufacturing is companies have to make a decision and it's, they're going to have to come to a reckoning very soon on these things is do I want to go figure all this out on my own and buy one off products and just pay for the paid version of ChatGPT or whatever other AI tools and LLMs that they want to use or do I want to move down the incumbent line of thinking? And incumbent line of thinking would be am I a lead smart channel cloud user? Am I a Salesforce user? Microsoft is showing us the simplest, fastest example of the incumbent solution is most of us use Microsoft Office related tools. So now we have those tools of co pilots coming in to help me build a presentation, right? When you look at companies like ours, right, or with what Salesforce is doing and where we're launching products and tools in is I already have an incumbent solution in my business where I've got abundance of data. Now if you're just using CRM for CRM sake to track how many emails somebody sent and made sure their notes got in, probably not going to be a great tool for you. But when you start doing what we do with our customers, which is connecting to ERP systems, marketing automation, E commerce systems, watching customer journeys through the CRM. By bringing all that data together, you've got this treasure trove of data. You know, typical distributor is going to have tens if not hundreds of thousands of, of pieces of invoice data, potentially millions of pieces of invoice data that translates into the CRM. And now that CRM is the place that we run these AI tools against to get these actionable insights. So I think that the time is coming very quickly as we're looking at co pilots, digital twins and so forth, is the companies are going to have to make that decision. Am I going to figure this out and go hire a digital person that is a prompt engineer or, or am I going to rely on an incumbent supplier or incumbent technology partner to help us down this path?

Yeah, Tom, I'm not surprised that Salesforce is doing this right? I mean, and when you talk about the incumbency path, I think many of the large technology providers out there are scrambling and it's everywhere from search engines to ERPs, right? They're scrambling to adopt this technology. And, and for most of us, we engage with so many pieces of technology on a regular basis in our day that it's hard to know how to use all of them to their fullest, even, even to use them effectively. And so they're baking these co pilots in shoot. I mean it's, I bought a new truck and it's telling me, you know, the thing dang near drives itself and it's telling me, hey, you've, you've driven a long time, you should pull over and take a break. I mean there's, it's, this is, this is going to be the world that we live in where these co pilots are helping us navigate the technology that we live our life on top of. So I'm not, I'm not surprised at all. And I think it's really smart. My director of E Comm and digital, Mike Powers just chimed in and said we are finding so many applications through MS.365 apps that are available, their Copilot tool and everything that are, that, that's that incumbency piece you were talking about, Kevin. I mean we're already using it and they're providing us just better tools to be able to do that. So I'm super excited about those, those technology providers that are, that are thinking this way.

Well, it's glad to hear you say that, but. And you really nailed it with all the tools that you already Have. Right. And that's what I think the importance of and the value comes with what you can do with incumbents. And maybe it's not an incumbent of that you have now. It's. It's somebody that you're looking at that might become your incumbent. Right. Because they have the right tools that are necessary in that place. Because, Mike, you really kind of bubbled this up. I don't know if you meant to, but the reality of it is that people get either, we call it either login or click fatigue. Right. And it's, where is that data? Is it in a BI tool I have? Do I need to get that at an ERP? Is it in a spreadsheet on SharePoint somewhere? Where's that data? And where we're headed, at least where we're headed as an organization, is taking all of that data and saying, hey, you know what? One of the features that's within my customer intelligence and CRM tool is I can get AI related data back from one piece of software that I already need to spend a good chunk of my day in. Right.

That connectivity is super important to Kevin. Right?

Absolutely.

You know, because incumbents are changing. The incumbent technology providers that aren't going this direction and providing this connectivity to other pieces of technology are going to see themselves, their value proposition waning in the market. And companies like us are looking for those incumbents that are awake and saying, okay, and then if they're not, we're saying, where do we need to move? Because the connectivity is not there, the tools aren't there. So it's really, it's. There's a shakeup going on in that, in that arena.

Yep.

And there was one more thing that they pointed out in here. And Evan, I know this is something you and I that we haven't agreed on completely in some of our product design things, but I believe that the user experience and technology is going to become more conversational and less transactional. And that was one of the things that Salesforce also mentioned, is they believe that the user experiences are going to become, with technology more and more conversational and less and less transactional. And I know that we've all lived in a transactional world where you go to a screen and you put something in and you get it out. But as we start to get familiar with having conversations, it's going to become, it's just going to become natural for us to do that. So anyway, lots of good stuff I thought in there.

It's good. And by the way, I'm coming around to your line of thinking more and more so just.

Well it usually does. It's the smart thing to do.

That's not true actually.

Smart thing to do.

No. I think what we know right now is how we get the user interface of how we get data from erp, E commerce and marketing automation and typically those are all siloed data within an organization anyways where the future is it's going to be a different user interface and all of that data is going to be available and we're going to have some things that get pushed to us that says you need to be thinking about this. We do that in lead Smart channel cloud already and there's other things that are going to be I can go now talk to my data with whether I'm voice recording or or typing something in to get that information back. So let's cover a few last little pieces here in our sales and M and A section. There's good article there that the Distribution Strategy group put together about how distributors can strengthen their role in channel partnerships. This is the kind of recap from a podcast they did about a month ago at a couple large electrical distributor representatives from actually I think they were both in Europe and but it was good article and it talks about stuff that Mike was talking about earlier and we talked about at length about having that relationship between manufacturer and distributor that is a partnership that manages and supports the channel which has always been a struggle. Right. Quickly covering we put this article in here again about the Do It Best and United Hardware announcing an intent to merge. Right. And the reason that I shared that Mike, I'd love some of your quick thoughts on that is the idea that you've got Do It Best which is more retail driven which typically is got maybe some of those people have a little bit of a wholesale side but then you've got this United Hardware that was all wholesale. Right. Coming together and I think we're going to see start seeing more and more of this crossover of I've got front front of the house and Mike, I'm going to ask you this if you see this more in some of the rural areas I'm going to say rural but maybe not less metropolitan areas that you have branches in where maybe the you go to the lumber yard. The lumber yard has a commercial component or a retail component that's tagged true value or Do It Best but there's a big wholesale side of that. Do you see that in some markets.

You'Re in for sure. Right. You know in in. In more out of the way locations Distributions is not, is not as segmented. And so you're, you're, you're forced to kind of be everything to everybody. And traditionally when you go into larger markets, I think you see some distribution companies being very focused. Well, well, we're going to, we're going to concentrate on just on wholesaler or we have a retail presence or we're online. The, the shift is happening and I'm seeing it in our industry where these companies that were traditionally back of the house business focused on large contracts with large customers are now seeing that there's, you know, they need to have an omnichannel experience and they need to, they need to hit all, all value drivers for their customers. So if the customer needs a contract that they can handle large vendor managed inventory, great. But if they also need retail help over the counter or they need a website, they need to, they need to have that. So it's really forcing distributors to, you know, play all roles and that's, I'm not surprised that you're seeing consolidation like that. That gives, that gives the company the, the new entity all of those skill sets.

Yep, very good.

Yep.

The. So if we jump Tom, to our. Where did I go there? To our people in leadership section that we added a while back. There's a quick article there on US labor market steadily easing. So we won't go into that one today. That's a long discussion. But it is, isn't this is it women in business day or week that we should talk about briefly.

International Women's Day.

International Women's Day. So to hats off to all the women in business in our lives. And that keeps, I don't know, probably the three of us keep us moving every day. So last piece, industry scuttlebutt, some revenue increase information from Hardy with heating, air conditioning, refrigeration, market trade association. So good news there. Our friends at Moblico, little shout out to them with Mike. You guys use mobileco, don't you?

Yeah, absolutely. Awesome.

Yep. So we have a, we have a deep integration with them so we can take their marketing messaging that they do as well as their, the data coming from their customer messaging tools. Bring that right into our CRM. Good folks. They just put a partnership together with Hawk Search where they're doing some product search on their platform which is kind of a cool little thing. So appreciative of those guys, Pierre Kelly and the team and Jim and over there at Moblico. So congratulations to all of you guys. The folks at Enduries International just did another acquisition so congratulations to them as well. So that kind of takes us to our last section, which we don't have time to chat about today, but a good article there about an ex Google engineer charged with stealing AI secrets for Chinese companies. Whole discussion we could have right, about espionage. There was an arrest this week of a military officer kind of doing the same thing. So as we start thinking about data, comment earlier about from Kelly there about cleanse cleaning data in our organizations. As we start talking about data, understanding who has access to it, how it could leave our organizations is probably hard or probably important. I should say so. All right, guys, recap.

Yeah, man, that was a lot. That was a lot to cover. Mike, thank you. Been really good insights. Really appreciate you having you here today and enjoying this and adding a lot of value.

Yeah, you guys are great.

Well, we're trying to all these articles every week. We gotta have like a three hour show or something to keep up with everything.

Okay.

Yeah, it's, it's good. And then when we have good guests that bring value, it's, it's important as well. So I don't mind taking that little extra time. And our audience is still with us. So kind of in recapping, we didn't do this today. Again, I'm Kevin Brown, Tom Burton with our good friend Mike Mortensen with ARG Industrial. And we've enjoyed being with you all today. As we mentioned before, if you're listening on the podcast, on any of the popular podcast formats, you didn't get a chance to see the email newsletter that we review every week that goes out to thousands. I think we're eight or nine thousand people that get that each week. Now if you would like to get that newsletter, just reach out to us. HelloDsmartech.com or the website for the podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. and all of our previous episodes are there. YouTube live, Facebook live, LinkedIn live, all the podcast formats. If you like what you hear each week, come join us again. Share it with your friends. Hit the like subscribe button, leave a review, whichever platform you're on. We would greatly appreciate that. Mike, anything exciting for the weekend ahead?

It's my first weekend back at home in a little while, so we still got tons and tons of snow. I got a little cleanup to do and it's sunny, so enjoy a weekend at home.

Good, very good. Can you get that new truck to plow your driveway by itself?

Well, no, it's not, it's, it could, but I don't think I'm gonna put a plow on the front of it, and it will be here. I dropped it off at the port to Tacoma day before yesterday, so it'll be here on Monday. I'm pretty.

Oh, good. Good. Congratulations. All right, Mike, thank you for everything today. And we'll wish everybody a fantastic weekend. Do good things, be kind, and enjoy.

See you next week.