Around the Horn In Wholesale Distribution - Episode #30

Sam.

There we are.

All right. Good morning.

I could have sworn I saw Brandon dancing over there to the music.

That's right, I was, but I didn't think my camera was on.

Ah, see?

Oh, man. Yeah, Busted.

We should have made it. We should have created it. We should have created a tick tock video right there.

That's right. We're gonna talk about that a little bit later today. Good stuff. That's good. Tom. Hey. Well, good to see you both. Fantastic. Brandon, to have you with us today. I've been looking forward to this day for quite some time. We're gonna talk a little bit more about you and having you with us today before we get into the news in just a moment, but I wanted to get quickly get started. And one. Welcome, everybody. We're appreciative of you being with us whether you're on the live broadcast today on LinkedIn Live, Facebook Live, or YouTube Live, or you're listening in on any of popular podcast formats that will be available on in a couple hours today as well. So my name is Kevin Brown. I'm here with my business partner, co founder and lifelong friend, Tom Burton. And we're joined by Brandon Lee. Brandon is a. I'm going to do my best friend and you're a man of many hats. I'm going to try and introduce you a little bit here with a note that I actually wrote to myself. I said you're a fractional chief transformation officer, but you're a software developer. You're one of the top voices in the country on social selling. You're a marketing guy as well. And why we're really excited, besides having you as a good friend for a number of years now, we're excited to have you here because you've been doing quite a bit of work with both some buying groups in wholesale distribution as well as wholesale distributors. So we're loving the fact that you've joined us today. We're gonna get some good feedback from you. But before we dive into the news again, Kevin Brown, Tom Burton, Brandon Lee. This around the horn and wholesale distribution is sponsored every week by Lead Smart Technologies. And what we do with that is we consolidate the week's news and wholesale distribution because like many of you, I get what seems like 50 or more emails and newsletters and press releases and so forth. So we try and consolidate that down to some things that we thought was interesting every week to bring that to you, our watchers and slash listeners on this program. So we're looking forward to a good session today. Tom, why don't you kick us off?

You want to jump right into the news. Well, a couple of things I wanted to just point out before. First of all, this is episode number 30. That's why we say we saved Brandon for episode number for my age. That's right. We needed to have a 30 something on the show with us. So that's why we saved it for. For Brandon. And we should also point out that Brandon and one of the companies he works with is a lead smart customer as well. Lead smart user. So anyway, all right, let's jump.

I'm glad you said that because they're there as a buying group. Client of his that he works with is using our lead smart channel cloud program in a really unique way. So we'll probably find some tie into that through the discussion today. That'd be good.

And good morning to Mike as well. Nice to have you here from. From Boston, if I'm not mistaken.

Yep.

All right, here's the news. Let's do it.

Sure. So the first article that we had there kind of talked about this was from Modern Distribution Management. In fact, I think if I saw Mike Hockett, one of the editors there, was going to join us this morning. I hope Mike had a chance to Mike, we if you're here with us, we or Tom Gale, we publish a lot of your information or republish it each week. But they posted a great article about the February M and A roundup. And you know, one of the things we post pretty consistently is just a snippet or snapshot of what's gone on the previous week in M and A. And it's kind of astounding. You know, it just makes me think. And we'll just start this off for our points of discussion this morning. Good. Mike is with us. So, Mike, join us today, give us some feedback if you would ask questions or share some of your thoughts. But you know, it's astounding to me when we get the pundits out there that, you know, as we talk about all the time about be careful with what you see on the news. You know, the world is crumbling around us and the economy is tanking and so forth. But, you know, this MDM, putting this list together, January 48 deals within wholesale distribution, pretty astounding. Talking about February being slower with 29 deals. But, you know, so if you think about that 300,000 plus wholesale distributors in North America, maybe that's a reasonable number. But boy, it's interesting to watch because there is while February was a little slower, there's Still a lot of deals being done, which means there's money within these companies to be buying and acquiring. And we're going to talk about a couple of those later in the episode today.

Yeah, well, remember, February is a short month, so they couldn't fit them all in. But more, more realistically, it's, it's, you know, I could see too, is that with the holidays, right, things get backed up, things don't get done in December and so from the holidays, so a lot of things will close in January. But if, again, if you were to probably average it out over the last 12 months, there's a tremendous amount of deals that are happening and there is a lot of capital, there's a private, A lot of private equity interest. Brandon, are you seeing that as well with some of the, you know, so just let me give. Set the stage a little bit more for you because, and Brandon, I think you're on mute too.

So if it's not a good way to go through a podcast. Right.

Yeah, I was just, I was just listening. I took a sip of coffee. I didn't want to make, you know, bad noises for your show.

I just didn't want you to say something brilliant and we missed it, so. That's right. But you know, Brandon is working with, with a buying group and having lots of different distributor, wholesale, distribution members and all of that. You must hear a lot of chatter and information about buying and M and A opportunities. You know, what are you seeing again? Maybe at a macro level, just with some of the members you're dealing with.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I mean, look, I spend a lot of time on the technology side of the buying group for, with ProLink in the JanSan space. And so I'm really kind of head down on member portal and CRM and ERP and all that. However, I do get to be privy to a lot of the conversations. And yeah, there's a lot of private equity money. There's a lot of consolidation. And you know, and I, and I think in some of these spaces too, it's, you know, third generation, fourth generation and they're picking their head up. And like the article that you guys shared, the, There wasn't a fifth generation to give it to and it. And they ended up, you know, saying, hey, let's, let's go partner with someone and make it bigger and better and hand it off. So, yeah, I mean, I think we're just in a season of that right now. And I agree with you. I think the, the news can make us all run in fear. But there's still a lot of money, there's still a lot of opportunity out there and there's, things are moving and happening.

That's great, great feedback. And you know, it's interesting you, you made a great comment. Later in the news, we're going to talk about one of those acquisitions that that Mallory Safety did. They've been on kind of a acquisition path for a number of years now, doing quite a few deals each year. And I was actually on the phone earlier this week with Andy Mitchell. I think Andy might actually be with us today. He's with us pretty regularly. He just got back from two weeks in Fiji, so I'm a little, little jealous of him after sitting on the beach for a couple weeks. But you know, they just finished this deal with JG Tucker and Sons here in Southern California where I'm at. That's a family owned distributor. And that's exactly the point you made, you know, Brandon, is they, I don't know if it's fourth or fifth generation or whatever, but there wasn't another generation to pass that off to. And they said, why not join a bigger organization that could get more done and got acquired. So kind of a neat, neat setting there, you know, Mike Hockett again with mdm commented here, you know, nothing, you know, there's no, there's no blockbuster deals of a, you know, a national account or, you know, national distributor, manufacturer being acquired. But there's a lot of these, as Mike put it, tuck in deals which are kind of interesting to look at, you know, so good feedback on that.

All right, let's move ahead.

Yeah. All right, Tom, you have any feedback or any. Tom, any thoughts about how people use data and you know, no, I don't care about data.

Data.

I know this is a big thing to you, but.

No, I think, I think everyone should just ignore their data and not worry about it and you know. Right. Maybe silo it a bit more. I don't know. That would be my, my recommendation. Okay.

How did, how did I, how did I know there was going to be this much sarcasm on the.

Today?

Well, for me, today, for you guys, every Friday.

Well, you know, it's what I mentioned to you earlier just before we went live this morning, right when this, we came up for this. And just as a side note, I don't know that this is interesting to anybody, but I'll really tell you the story is so what would have been Juneish Dom last year? You know, I, I was commenting to Tom and I said, you know, get all this data coming in all week. And I said maybe we should just do our own little simple newsletter to our wholesale distributor and manufacturer list that we market to share data with. And we try and not only market to them for lead smart technologies, but do some thought leadership as well, folks. Yeah, that's a great idea. Let's jump on LinkedIn live and here we are at episode 30. But one of the things I said, if this ever gets orchestrated or scripted or structured, I don't want to do it. So have a few laughs in the day. Right, Good.

Absolutely.

We'll dive in on this. Tom, let's chat about data algorithms, siloed data.

This, I mean, this is, this article was really focusing on the manufacturing aspect of things. Right. And the plant aspect of things. And you know, obviously there's been probably more automation in the man in the actual manufacturing and the supply aspect, chain aspect of things than there has been in say, the front and the sales office and the marketing and even in the back office of a business. But again, they're just talking about how to. A lot of the stuff we've talked about for the last few weeks is how are you using data again to optimize everything? How are you using this to build intelligent systems and centralize that data and make it so that you can have more and more optimized manufacturing? Well, again, you could take that article, remove the word manufacturing and put in sales, marketing, you know, G A, whatever the case may be. And you could repeat, you could repeat my notes.

Man, you're reading my notes exactly.

It's the same thing.

Yep, that's exactly what I put into my notes. I said, you know, it focuses on operational issues, but this translates across an organization.

Right.

When you think about this, that article used an example of a train breaking down, I think it was, and parts coming in from all over the country and people and things needing to be done with that. And when you have siloed data, it becomes very hard to make decisions that impact across your entire organization that are insightful decisions or you make decisions, but you're missing huge pieces of data.

When you have.

And I'm going to, you know, the majority of the folks that join us are kind of on the revenue or sales and marketing side of the business, typically, or executive management. But you know, when you've got, we've talked about this all the time, right? When you've got one lump of data in your E commerce system, one dash lump in your ERP system, some stuff over here in a CRM system, and then you know, a plethora of spreadsheets around your organization. How do you make intelligent decisions from that when they're not talking to each other? Yep.

You know what I liked about that article, and you guys both keyed in on that too, is you could sub out the word and it could be across any of the other areas of the business areas or big business segments. But what I got in that article too is it, it speaks to that mindset of understanding or the, or the way that we look at data and, and the accessibility of data in the hands of people that need to know. It's the ability to spotlight opportunities to make awareness of different challenges, to equip the team with information so they know the example you gave. You know, parts are coming in. But being able to easily have access to timing of things equips everybody on the team to have more intelligent and more accurate conversations with, whether it's other suppliers or customers or internal team members. And I just think that mindset of realizing that we could do so much more with data that saves time equips the team is really, really important. And that's kind of what I got out of reading that article from more of a 30,000 foot view.

And Brandon, think about what we've been working on even at ProLink, right? We've been taking data that's been siloed, we're consolidating it and then look at the insights that we're starting to pull out of that by taking more of a holistic viewpoint of that data versus well, I go this for this and this for that and this. All of a sudden, one plus one plus one equals six, seven, eight. Right. Because we're using the data in a more holistic manner and looking at it in a more holistic manner. So it's like there's just a lot of value on this. And as I again, we've talked about this on previous shows, if you're doing nothing in your business related to transformation, digital transformation, if you're doing nothing else, start looking at that data part of it and start looking now about how that can become more of a holistic strategy. Because that's really where the value is going to come. Whether it's, again, no matter what department it's in, it's still going to provide that same level.

Yep.

All right.

I think before we kind of jump onto that, I wanted to kind of throw one last thing at that.

Right.

Is we've talked a lot in the last month or so about, you know, chat, GPT and AI and different things that are going to tie into that. You know, you're, you know, I'm the sales guy, Brandon's sales and marketing guy and has a strong technology understanding and background. But you're the, you know, you're the computer scientist and the, and the data and the tech guy. Right. So I look at this as we talk about this all the time because you reference this within our organization is if you have bad data in your organization, applying AI to bad data is going to give you not optimal results, if not bad results. Right. So it's really one of those things now is if you want to keep within your organization, it doesn't matter what kind of organization you have. I mean this could be an insurance agency as well as a wholesale distributor.

Sure.

If you're not managing your data well and cleaning it and optimizing things now, when you want to start using a lot of these tools that are going to start becoming available, be questionable results from that. Yeah.

And even again, I know we talked about this a couple weeks ago going back to the M and A conversation, you know, and I'll just use wholesale distribution. Companies that have got their data act together and are using their data intelligently are going to have a higher value than those that aren't because that data is super valuable. So it's, it's not just, hey, I want to get my data act together because I want to, you know, do AI or create some nice reports or, or business intelligence, but look at it just as an asset in your organization. And because again, as we've talked about before, the beauty of wholesale distribution is the amount of data that's available. It's just, you know, mind boggling. The amount of data that is available that's actually relevant and valuable to drive. To drive the business.

Yeah, it's one of those things, you know, we see with, with lead smart customers quite regularly. Right. Is when we, we don't just look at, you know, a lead that for them that came off of a, a spreadsheet from a trade show. We look holistically. Right. Is what is that company that that person's from? Who else is in that company that's in your system? What have they been buying? What were they requesting at a show two years ago? Is it the same sample? Is it a different sample? And when you start bringing that data in, you get deep, deep insights into things.

Yep. Yep.

What does Mike have to say here? Looks like Mike Lauer's chairing some thoughts on data.

It's weird. All of a sudden I got like the stream just decided to kick.

Oh, did. It wasn't there before.

Yeah, it wasn't there before, but. Yeah, but, you know, and what Mike's, Mike's saying is that bad data can result in bad analytics. Right. If the data is used in an analysis is inaccurate, incomplete, or consistent, it can lead to incorrect or misleading insights. Absolutely. And this can result in poor decision making, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. And yeah, we see that. And a lot of reasons that sometimes people kind of give up on their data is because they've had some bad experience like we just had there. It's been wrong or, or whatever and ah, well, I don't need to, you know, it's. It starts to become something that they don't want to deal with, but on the other side of it and again, right now there's so many good tools and ways to actually do. Could go from there.

So, you know, that just makes me think we should. I'll throw this. If Mike Hockett's still with us, you know, we should get Mike or Tom Gale on with us at some point in time to kind of look at some of their research because they, with modern distribution, manage, they watch this really closely. But I was thinking too let's, you know, maybe get one of the, the investment bankers or M and A consultants that, you know, play in the industrial distribution and, and wholesale distribution world. We should probably look at getting one of them on and talking about this topic because, you know, it just makes me think, right. We were talking about an acquisition that Mallory did earlier today. You know, we're going to look at some more of that later. We talk about it every week. Is, you know, what, what are the people seeing? You know, what kind of data are they seeing within companies that are being acquired and would that have made a difference in their valuation?

All right, we got to move enough data for one day. We're saturated. We're saturated with data at this point.

Well, let's talk about millennials and Gen Z B2B buyers. This was a pretty cool article.

So, Brandon, how does it feel to be a Gen Z? I mean, how do you buy?

Well, you know, since I just turned 30, it's, you know, I'm still pretty young in my career.

Actually, I was thinking you could go get Megan your lovely wife, because, you know, she fits into that.

Hey, she's, she's hitting her fifth decade this year and you said that finally. It's taking her a long time to get here. Geez. Yeah.

All right, so Tom's next birthday is going to start with a six.

So 36, I think. 30.

That's right.

The one thing that I found in there, we've, that I, in that I, in that article that I thought was really good and we've talked again about this a lot about the younger buyer. They want to buy. They want, they want to buy the way they want to buy. They don't want to deal with salespeople unless they are willing to deal, you know, want to, and it's the right time. But one of the things I think is really important is it was talking about younger buyers will, you know, I guess older buyers will put up with high pressure sales. They may not like it, but they'll put up with it because it's what we've been used to. Right. Or, or dealing with salespeople or a sales situation where they don't want to deal with it. But younger buyers just don't tolerate it. Right. They will not tolerate that sort of high pressure, you know, all the sales activity. They want to then have that, that freedom to go by and do the way they want to. And by doing that, you know, if you got, if they get that pressure, they'll just go to somebody else because their tolerance level is much low. Whereas the older us, older guys, we may not like it, but we'll put up with it. And I think that was an important punchline that was, you know, kind of throughout that article that I found interesting.

Yeah, I, I think in that article too, the, the point is, they say is millennials and Gen Z buyers are active information seekers.

Exactly.

And I think that gets, it's so quick and easy for people to just kind of, you know, sweep that under the rug or, and go, oh, yeah, yeah, but we gotta pause for a minute. Go me. Wait, what does that really mean? Because it affects so many areas of the sales and marketing process. They are actively looking for information all the time because they've grown up with this in their hands. They've grown up inside of social media, they've grown up with texting people and they're, they're used to consuming content at a much higher rate than people that didn't grow up with it. And if they are actively sinking information and we don't have a company doesn't have a thriving digital strategy around messaging, around digital engagement, around digital networking, there is a lot that they're missing out on. And I'm going to pause there because I could go, I could go for a while on that.

Yeah, I was seeing you get over fired up there. I was fire up there.

Yeah, I love your passion about it because I, you know, I look at it the same way.

Right.

And it's nice to, for our audience to hear that from somebody other than, you know, us talking about it because, you know so much. We've been talking a lot in the last couple of months about E Commerce and tying E Commerce data into other systems in your organization. And, you know, this is one of those things that it gets kind of going back to the data conversation as well is if you don't understand the changing dynamics of the marketplace, the guy around the corner who's also a Milwaukee tool or a DeWalt tool or a 3M or whoever it is distributor just like you, and he's doing it, he's going to eat your lunch. Right. And it's, it could be a challenge for people. So that's, that's really what we need to look at. I. This. There's a couple things in this to hit me. You know, Brandon commented on one, you know, active information seekers, right. When I was a field salesperson, right. Calling on distribution throughout the western United States and then nationally, you know, it was the earlier days of what the amount of data that's available to us now. We didn't have, you know, at the tip of our fingers, the ability to get that. Salespeople were far more important because they, they could, you know, kind of disseminate and digest for you what a manual might say or what a sell sheet might say. You can go find most tools and equipment that you would want to buy from a wholesale distributor. Much of it you can now find on Amazon. And now you can start looking at the reviews on Amazon. You can look at the reviews in other places. So the demands for younger buyers are different. And I look at this and I've had this discussion with some of our customers before who have said customers or prospects have said, well, you know, we don't really see that. You might not see it today, but this research is saying, you know, the buyer has changed, right. 64% of the buyers and B2B buyers right now are born. I just can't even imagine. This number just scares me. It goes with comment here about being careful talking about age because just kind of thinking about where I was, not where I was, where I was in my career in 1996. So I said I was three years into the manufacturers rep agency that I owned in 1996. So these buyers now were born then. You know, when the group of us and many of our listeners and here were already in, in the workplace. And now those buyers have different expectations. So something that has to be paid attention to, you know, chief purchasers of goods and services for their organization. It says they want to do things different. They have different expectations.

Yep. So.

And Kevin, can I piggyback on that and just highlight something you said? You know, people are saying, oh, we're not. We're not hearing this, or we're not seeing it. That would actually scare me more because it means it's happening and you're not even aware. And you have two choices. Right. You can stick your head in the ground and just go, oh, well, we're. We're immune to this, which is not accurate. Or the fact that you're just not seeing it means there's. The conversations are happening and you haven't even been invited into it.

Wow.

Powerful, right? Hugely powerful statement there. And spot on. Right. These things are happening, and if you're not. If you're not on that bus, you know, whole different things.

And the problem is, is that younger buyers tend to want to be anonymous. Right. So you may not see it. You may not. It may not be as obvious and visible than somebody who's willing to, you know, talk to the salesperson, go into the brand, whatever the case may be. Right. So it's. You may not be seeing it because that's exactly the way they want it to be, because they don't want you.

To see it when it plays into. The other one we talked about is that they're. They're quick to share their dissatisfaction, but their dissatisfaction might be shared with other peers, but not necessarily to the client, because they've never. To the. To the manufacturer, the supplier, because they've never actually even engaged their dissatisfaction, which they're very quick to be okay with. And. And the way I read this, it doesn't say they're quick to communicate their dissatisfaction. They're just quick to be dissatisfied and move on.

That's right.

And that's where.

If you're not in that conversation, their tolerance is low.

There you go.

And they just will move on to the other.

You gotta be in the conversation. Right? Yep.

All right.

That's great insight, Brandon. Thank you for that.

Yeah, for sure. All right, well, now that we're on the subject of younger buyers, let's talk about TikTok.

Well, so that's pretty funny.

Is it?

And literally, you know, as I was looking at these articles yesterday, I was thinking about this. I said, what a perfect time to have Brandon on with this. Brandon. What? You have five kids, right? Yes, What a blessing.

Yes.

And, and I'm sure there's days that you have to remind yourself that that's a blessing, but never their ages are preteen to just graduated from college if I'm about right.

Yeah, we go, Zoe's 10 and then our son is 18 and then we're 8, 18, 20, 21 and 23.

All right, so I would just like you to take over this whole tick tock for B2B discussion because you're probably surrounded by it.

Yeah, well, look, I think the, the article that we just talked about with with buyers, people that have legitimate buying power are younger and younger and Tick Tock is. There's a lot with Tick Tock I, I think there's some legitimate fears about will Tick Tock get shut down in the U.S. totally get it. I still think it's worth the investment because until that happens, if it ever happens, there is so much opportunity and value that's going on in there. And I'm not even talking about my kids with Tick Tock. I'm talking about me with Tick Tock and how much? How much? I mean I can talk about all of it because I think for me with the kids it's just a no brainer. It's their go to. I think my kids primarily use Snapchat to one on one with each other and they use Tick Tock to consume content and learn and it's not unusual throughout the week we have a. A text group for the family that is called Family L E E Just you know, throwing that out there and how clever my family was with that. But not unusual for our kids to share to the entire family a link to a Tick Tock and talk about it.

Yep.

Right. And it's on. It's health stuff, it's funny stuff. You know, my poor wife gets at the end of it, it's things about think funny things mom do. But they're so influenced and they're catching. They're capturing so much content in that. But there's also the ability, the necessity. I think if we're going to go into these things with Tick Tocks, we have to play in the Tick Tock space. Meaning we have to look and dress and feel and sound like Tick Tock. Going into Tick Tock with a boring video is just not going to work and it may feel uncomfortable. But I know in the Jansan space there is a janitor out there with about 850,000 followers because he made and it's probably more by now because he made his job as a janitor at a high school. Fun and funny and interesting and he's got this massive following, right? And now he's got influence with all of these people and it's in the Jansan space.

And guess what? He's going to have a sponsor from, you know, one of Prolinks providers or, you know, this. He's going to turn that into a business if he hasn't already.

Right.

He's probably making a good living from it now.

Right? And because he's there and he's doing that, if you know there's hashtags, right, go get involved with the hashtag because if they're seeing that one because it's entertaining and your video is behind it and it's still somewhat entertaining, but now you're moving into. It's just the ability to piggyback on all of this momentum and interest that's being developed.

Yeah, I, I love that.

And, and Will even jumped in here, said I learned about chat GBT the week it came out from TikTok. One of the things that I think a lot of people are, don't fully appreciate about TikTok, it's a search engine and it's a search engine for the younger generation. They don't go to Google or that's not. They don't, but they go to Google less and they look for things through hashtags or other things on TikTok as a, you said as a tool to learn but also a tool to research, which I find interesting. So rather than getting a list of websites like you get on a Google search, you get a list of entertaining videos. But ideally those videos actually have relevant information that are valuable for what I'm actually looking for, you know, and again, it doesn't have to be dancing and you know, crazy comment on the dance.

I was doing a minute ago.

Yeah, that was, that was, there was a reason for that. But, but, but anyway, it was. There's a lot of ways to make a video, Brandon, as, you know, more entertaining or more, I don't know, relevant, I guess, for that medium.

And I think that's a good point, Tom. Is that the, the word we use, making them entertaining? And if I, if by using that word anyone heard dancing and all that stuff, that's not really what we meant. Entertaining can play a variety of different ways. And TikTok, it's, it's fast paced, it's musical, but I mean, I've seen videos on there of how things are being made. Right. It's all in a manufacturing plant, but it's high speed and they're going from start to finish of getting something from raw product to made and somebody enjoying it in 60 seconds. But it's so entertaining and it's so capturing and so fascinating. The people watch the whole thing, even if they're not in the industry. Stuff like that is just, I think has been taking over TikTok right now and people in the manufacturing space and wholesale distribution. I mean, you have such cool machinery and technology that is fascinating that people would love to see. We just have to go and make that part of a strategy.

Yeah, I think that's great. You know, and to your point there, Brandon, too, about or Tom, Sorry, Tom. You made the point about search engine.

Right.

That would come with that, I think it said, for years Google has been virtually synonymous with discoverability for consumers and ad buyers. But Google knows that what's happening is that TikTok is becoming very different and that TikTok tickets, they say TikTok recognizes this and is building additional functionality to make content discovery easier. Last summer they expanded video descriptions from 300 to 2200 characters. Well, maybe that doesn't sound like that's that big a deal, but this is how there is a generation of people that is now actually expanding into others that they're very, very focused on where they get their dad and they're on TikTok. And tick tock is, you know, as I would look at it and I don't have an account and I've been avoiding it on purpose because even when I look at Facebook or Instagram, they have a thing, it's called reels. I get sucked into that and all of a sudden 15 minutes is gone and I'm like, I have accomplished nothing. I've watched a bunch of stupid stuff, but I don't do it enough that any of those algorithms have figured me out. But I know that that could be coming. And it's actually something Tom, we've not even talked about. But I've been thinking about it a lot just within our marketing and lead Smart. So it's interesting. The kicker for me is Will Quinn's comment here, right. That he made earlier. He learned about Chat GPT on Tick Tock and Will is a road warrior. He was probably on an airplane when that happened. So if we have a couple other comments here, let's chat with those, talk about those briefly and then let's move ahead.

So. And I wanted to say hi to Carson. I don't know who he's expecting to find knowledge from, but I'm glad that he's here looking for us. So that, that's great. And I think Mike had a great question.

He knows he, I can tell you Tom, he's looking at it from me.

That's it. That's very smart. Carson's like, I want to find somebody. I could get something.

I haven't met Carson but I know who he is from the work that the two of you do with him.

Right.

So he's looking for it for me and he's had disappointed.

And Mike has a really good question is what are your thoughts on distribution? Looking into a micro influencer marketing strategy. And I think that's what we were just kind of talking about even with the janitor. Right. Talk about a micro influencer. But I think you're. I'll take a first cut at this. I think that what you were saying even Brandon about or about, you know, manufacturers or Kevin you saying this about there's a lot of interesting things that manufacturers or even wholesale distribution have behind the scenes that people are interested in. And I think there's a lot of ways to turn that into an influencer strategy with, and really build, you know, what is it, Dirk Beverage. Kevin says that we have such, this noble industry that's what we're dealing with.

Here is noble calling.

Right. Let's, let's make this more visible. And I think there's a really way to do that through that, through that influencer, a micro influencer approach. Yeah.

Can I jump, can I jump in on Mike Franz's question? And this people may not like this one, but look, I think micro influencers are going to be fine for you. But Mike go create an evangelistic voice for you or the brand or somebody within your brand that I think is even more important because influencers are going to come and go and you know, influencers, the more you use them, they're going to, their prices are going to go up. But if you internally make this part of a strategy and you create a voice, you own that voice, you own the audience. You're not renting somebody else's audience. That's where I think this gets so exciting, especially in this industry. I mean I saw a video the other day in Tick Tock that was somebody on a forklift just going through the warehouse doing a couple things. But it was on fast. It was on like, you know, 4x or 5x speed with music. And I, I thought it was totally interesting. I'm like, wow, this is really cool. I think a lot of people in the, in the space don't realize how cool your, your facilities are and warehouses to the average person. And you're giving them a glimpse into this window of what it's really like and then you just put a little bit of a spin of entertainment on it and all of a sudden you've got an audience and you're building and yeah, it may be some people in your audience that aren't ever going to be buyers, but you know what, that creates a swell and all of a sudden you've got this brand, it's thriving, people are paying attention and it's very, very valuable to your, to your sellers as are out trying to go get people to respond to calls.

So I want to jump in on that just quickly. You know Brandon, this is the first time you've had an opportunity to join. Join us. We're gonna, we were talking about this earlier in the week and we're gonna do a, I'll call it a bonus episode sometime in the next couple weeks where we talk deeply about kind of what you do, helping wholesale distributors with some marketing and identifying some of these things. So kind of watch for that coming up where it's more of a one on one talking about kind of this as we described it early right. The Brandon's work as a fractional transformation officer. But a big part of that comes down to technology and marketing and these things are going to be important. So we're going to talk about that when we do this separate session. We'll dive into these things a little bit more and that'll be posted. We'll post that to all of our platforms as well. But what I was going to mention too is again your first time with us today folks. If you're listening or watching this, if you're not following Brandon on social media, post consistently post really good relevant content dad jokes. You're either into dad jokes or not.

But the jury is out on the dad jokes.

Yeah, hey, I, I beat, I beat Chat GPT this week on, on the quality of dad joke. So I'm a reigning champion for a few more days.

So I'm just saying if follow Brandon or connect with him because there's a lot of value to what he brings to, to marketing and so forth. So you mentioned Chat GPT. Let's jump into this just article real quick. Not a lot to talk about here but you know, as you can imagine there's you know, scammers that are trying to, to spoof this and make a couple of bucks off of it. So watch out that you know, if you're looking at whether it's Chat GPT or any of the other AI platforms or tools, make sure you're using the right one.

Well, what I found interesting about this, just to 1500 new domains registered in a week that had Chat GPT in it. It's like you can't make this stuff up. And people, I don't know how many apps but like a number of apps that are up on the App Store. Pardon, It's.

I'm sorry to interrupt you but I just, I'm glad you mentioned that about the apps because how does Google Play let those through?

I don't know. Don't know that. But maybe they're trying to sabotage Microsoft or something, who knows? It's. I mean it just goes to show you, it's just how absurd it is, but it is something you need to look out for because the Chat GPT interface is a little bit innocuous. It's not very, you know, sexy, I guess you could say. And I guess it wouldn't be hard for somebody to try and replicate something like that that you think you're there and you put in your name and stuff like that and you know, anyway, it's just. But 1500 in a week. Right. Means that have chat GPT. It's like man, astounding. Yeah. Anyway, we'll continue.

Good. Well, thanks for sharing that. Just, I mean just be, we. I put it in there. Just be cautious folks.

Right, yeah.

So, so let's catch a little bit of the industry news here. So in this, just, you know, if you want the depth and the details on all of everything that's going on, go to MDM Auto Distribution Management. Some of the trade publications publish stuff throughout the week. We do it once a week of what we thought was really valuable. So you know, we talked earlier about the Mallory acquisition. I don't know if Andy Mitchell that kind of leads that team with Tim Loy there. Congratulations to you guys on a successful acquisition of JG Tucker. I've done business early in my career for many, many years with Gil Tucker who was I think the grandson of the founder and a great good family owned company. So nice to see that kind of tucking in with the good folks at Mallory Bunzl continuing. Right. Interesting organization. Not something we have time to talk about at length today, but you know, British distribution company who now has been in the process of also acquiring. Oh, Andy did pop up. Good to have you with us today, Andy. So you know Bunzl's been acquiring both manufacturers and distributors, although they're Historically a distributor of products. So they did a couple more acquisitions in Canada and Germany, so we wanted to publish that for them. Hardy, the Heating, Air Conditioning Refrigeration Distributors International Group, they're the trade association for H Vac. Their members are doing well. It's not as January wasn't, wasn't, you know, crazy big, but as we talk about each week.

Right.

Most folks in wholesale distribution are growing. So Hardy's an organization that we're getting ready to start participating with in some of their upcoming events as well. So we're big fans of theirs. Blockchain off to.

You know, I just, this was a. I thought a very good article on a lot of fronts, well worth reading, not just about the cyber threats, but really talking about what blockchain is about and why it's valuable and useful. You know. And Brandon, we've talked a lot about. We've talked a lot about, you know, the importance of companies wanting to share data. Right. You're in a situation where you're kind of a middle organization working with suppliers and distributors and. But we want to share and collaborate really between all of those. And, you know, we're having to do some things that, to do that that is architecturally maybe less than optimum right now, but in the future with blockchain, that could go to a whole nother level. Because with blockchain, it enables that decentralized collaboration. And it talks a lot about, in this article about, about the capabilities of it, which I think, you know, a lot of times people hear blockchain, they think blockchain equals crypto, equals bitcoin. And it's not. Crypto and bitcoin are something that has been created on the blockchain. But the blockchain capabilities for business in the B2B world are, in my opinion, massive. And this article goes into that and talks about some of the use cases on that. But the cyber threats are like anything, right? You've got to be aware. No different than any other technology. On the plus side, though, I think there are, I know there are a lot of things on the blockchain that make security in some cases a lot easier in a weird way in this decentralized world than it does in a centralized world. But it doesn't mean you can ignore it or you just, you know, go off on those things. So overall, a really good article. If you're interested in this area, and you know, Brandon, I know this is an area that you're as a. Is the transformation officer, you're looking at into the future of, you know, and what's possible with all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And it really just comes, I think, I love that you said too that, you know, blockchain people think crypto and, and kind of shut themselves out. But you know, blockchain can influence the user experience. And I don't really know exactly what that's going to look like now, but when you have companies with sensitive data that needs to be shared, we look at the old school way that, that how long that would take months and months and months for the people to be able to access things. Now we can get that in real time in a variety of different ways and in a really simple user experience. So that's what excites me the most about that.

No, I mean people ask me a lot about what's the biggest value of blockchain. And I say it's interoperability. Right. It's the ability to have companies and businesses work together in an interoperable format with. Without having a lot of the centralized barriers that we deal with today by, well, how do I share this and who gets to log in and do they have the right. This and all that kind of stuff. So it's, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of work still to do to get through just even the mindset and the understanding of it. But underneath all of that there's a tremendous amount of power. And again, I highly recommend this article just as a good overview of the whole thing that's.

I'm glad, glad we talked about this a little bit. You know, one of the things that we try and do on this broadcast each week is kind of help folks both in manufacturing and wholesale distribution to kind of be looking for in the future. Right. Looking at what's out there that maybe we're not implementing in our businesses now that we should be either starting to implement or at least be thinking closely about. So we just added this, the, this tech spotlight in the last couple of weeks. By the way, I didn't mention this in our opening today. What we've been scrolling through here is this newsletter that we send out. Probably different than a newsletter. We should find a better name for that. But we send it out to thousands of people every Friday morning. If you're not getting it, you can put your information here in the chat or you can direct messages on any of the platforms or email us directly. The email address is helloadsmartech.com and we'll get you on that list if you don't get it surprises me. We often forget to mention that we send this out each week. So but we also add in this good Reads section each week and that's kind of something that we've tried to add. So maybe something about leadership, maybe personal development things. And so this week we had this three ways to give your company what it needs in 2023. So nice little read there as well. Oftentimes this comes from Inc. Magazine or from other sources like that, but we like to add something in there. So we're, we're kind of short on time. And I want to chat with Brandon for a moment before we leave. But Tom, you want to talk about this last item on here?

Yeah, this Must See webinar. Yeah. So Must see. Yeah, Must See Webinar. Must See tv. So we, you know, we get a lot of questions even from the show and people on the show about, well, what the heck does Lead Smart really do and what is your products and all of that? And so we decided to create a webinar that we're going to do on the 15th. And this isn't going to be a sales pitch, so it's not going to be, hey, buy our software. But it's really going to be a deeper dive of, of what is modern CRM Smart CRM. How does it matter to your business? How does it tie into the things we've talked about today, Data blockchain, eventually AI, all of that kind of stuff. And so anyway, we're going to do that on the 15th. There's a link. If you just click that link in the, in the newsletter here, it'll take you to the registration. But anyway, I'm looking forward to it because it's a lot of questions that we get about, well, what the heck do you do at Lead Smart? You know, how does it all relate to all these things you talk about? And I think this would be a great way to kind of pull all that together and, you know, be able to showcase and spotlight some of the things we're doing. So there's a webinar that you're going to attend this month that is one to attend. That is the Must See webinar. Good.

So, you know, just kind of in wrapping that piece up right. Is CRM is kind of just this.

Right.

We started with, you know, writing numbers down on paper. Then we got Rolodexes. Then we started getting some Salesforce automation tools. Then this word CRM came around and people kind of poo poo that sometimes like, well, my people don't use it or it's a big Brother Tool or whatever. And really the purpose of this is to talk about what's capable. We talked so much today about data early in the segment that we had have been together on today about silo data across an organization. We're talking about how you can use that to maximize your business in your CRM solution. How customer intelligence and what we know about customers and how we can use that knowledge and the data, the knowledge we gain from the data to impact how we provide our services and products to our customers. What are they buying? What are they not buying? What should they be buying? Understanding that that's very different than what I always kind of refer to. But here we are back to aging ourselves. But that old statement about, you know, not your father.

Right.

It's, there's a lot that can be done that people don't think about and that's what this webinar is about.

Yep. And I, and, and I think again we'll talk about this in the webinar. But CRM is low hanging fruit as a way to leverage that data. Right. It's a very, very quick and relatively inexpensive and relatively fast way of starting to leverage that data. And we'll talk about that as we go forward.

Forward.

Anyway, I know we need to wrap up, so.

Yeah. So let's finish off here. So Brandon, before. Well, so we've got. Added some. I don't know that they made it in here. Right.

No, these aren't, these are the same. So nothing.

Okay.

So we'll have next week, we'll have quite a few more events coming up. We're going to try and beef this up quite a bit. We'll be at the Ad Bearings and Transmission national meeting in San Diego in a couple of weeks. Looking forward to that. I'm really happy. It's just down the road, so that'll be good. Before we shove off though, today there's, we talked quite a bit with Brandon about what he does. But Brandon, you have. And we're going to, we'll cover a lot more of this when we do our one on kind of one on one session coming up as our kind of our bonus podcast with you. But you also are involved in two pieces of technology that you've developed and one of them is kind of a little bit, you know, undercover skunk work still. But can you give us a just kind of a little feedback about maybe funnel, amplified and I'll let you say the other word if you choose to.

Sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate it. You know, I spent the early part of my career doing a lot of marketing materials at scale for whether it's distribution companies, it was manufacturers or even professional services. And if you think about the, the old school method of printing brochures, getting it in the people's hands that need it, and then they'd staple a, you know, a business card to it and then that was their tools that they used and it worked and it was great. But digitally we have the opportunity to do that better and faster and in and in output that is more easily consumed, especially by the digital space. So in other words, we can do things like create TikTok videos that are really, really cool, but then you leave room on the end for an intro and an outro to be used by different distributors or by different sales reps and things like that. And yeah, so Funnel Amplified was designed really to start this, I think, seven years ago, just to help equip individuals with relevant social content that they can very easily. They get it on their phone and it'll pop up from the app and they get a green button, they get a red button and if they want, they can have a blue button. Green is publish it to my personal accounts, red is no thank you and blue is let me change the words a little bit on it, but I like it and just really, really make it simple. And it's, you know, it's the starting point of that social presence because one of the hardest things for all of us is, you know, we get that blank page in front of us and go, what should I say? Right. And so Funnel Amplified was designed to just really be that training wheels to get people started. And it's a way to empower marketing to be able to provide those brochure type materials to the salesforce, to the leadership, to customer service. For me, it's not enough, but it's a, I mean, we, we all need to be able to open up our own digital mouse and post our own stuff as well. And we can talk about that. But it's a good starting point. And, and I think a lot of companies can find a lot of value on it by just being able to amplify their voice, amplify their brand through individual social accounts.

It's awesome. Well, thank you, thank you for sharing that. And again, as I mentioned earlier, if you're, if you're not connected with Brandon or not following him on the social platforms, I, I get great value from the content that you post. So. And you, you are the master of consistency. Right? So getting ready to close out. Probably will regret this dad joke for the weekend. Come on, Brandon.

Oh, okay, well, here's one. And this came from our 10 year old daughter and she said, she said, dad, this is you got to be your dad joke for Friday. You get it? You guys caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting it. Yeah, it was this. Yes, it's okay, it was. Do you know that Americans eat more bananas than monkeys? Because really, who do you know that's ever eaten a monkey?

That's actually funny.

On, on that note, I wish everybody a good weekend.

Mike Franz had her last minute question there. Mike, reach out to me. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are suggestions on that. So great weekend, Brandon, my friend. Thanks for being with us, guys.

Thank you so much. I appreciate being here.

Yeah, good show.