Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution - Episode 139

Sa. Sam. Keep going, keep going.

Not quite a spin. Morning. Not quite there today. All right, I want to be. Just got the tail end of the.

Bug still, so you can hear me. Okay.

You know, you sound great, Tom.

So I want to thank if Will's on today or Bob for their GoFundMe account and I get a new microphone and hopefully I have no disconnection problems today.

Is that what you call my company expense account is your doorstep?

So I figured somehow it got.

Did that surprise you?

It did, especially. It surprised me because it showed up, like, Friday night.

Oh, well, yeah. It said when I went to order it, I got you the same new one I got. And when I went to order it, it said that There was a 4:00am to 7:00am delivery slot.

Yeah.

So I grabbed that one. So there we go. So, yeah, so the. The guests that are with us today or listening in, that have heard you heard me say for the last few years. Can't hear you, Tom. Now we don't. Shouldn't have to do that anymore.

Knock on wood.

Yeah. So here we are acting like a real, you know, professional podcast with, like, hosts that might know what they're doing or something. So that's good stuff.

Not push it, just have a microphone that works.

Okay. Don't get ahead of myself.

That's right. Don't get ahead of yourself.

Okay. So 139 times we've done this, huh? So the newsletter says.

That's what it says. Okay, so let's get to it.

Let's get started. Well, let's. Let's jump in and talk about why we're here. I'm Kevin Brown, that's Tom Burton that's here with me. If you're watching us live this morning on YouTube Live, LinkedIn Live, or Facebook Live, it's 9:03 Pacific Time on Friday the 25th. Certainly appreciate you being with us. We get together every Friday morning. We talk about the news of the world and what's going on and the economy, supply chain mergers and acquisitions, technology, AI, robotics, human resources, people management, lots and lots of different topics. And we do that based upon the newsletter that we publish each week that's called around the Horn in Wholesale distribution and manufacturing that goes out to thousands and thousands and thousands of people each week. And we get together on the show, we discuss it, but what we discuss from the news is really how it impacts and relates to wholesale distributors and manufacturers. There's so much going on in the world and in the industry and certainly within technology and so forth, that we get together and try and unpack that. We've got a great guest next week that's in AI Expert and last week we had a data analyst and I'll call it pseudo economist on with us. And so we regularly have guests. But if you're listening to the recorded podcast on Apple, Spotify, Odyssey, Amazon, wherever you get your podcasts at, you're missing the live show where we have the newsletter that we're showing. So as we go through the day, if you get a little confused, if you're just listening to the fact that we are talking about a bunch of different articles, the articles that we're referring to are in that newsletter. If you'd like to get that newsletter, we'd love to send it to you. You can just reach out to us anytime you want@helloadsmartech.com helloadsmartech.com or if you're active on LinkedIn, just search around the horn and wholesale distribution podcast. The newsletter opportunity will be there. You can also find the newsletter link on the lead smart technologies LinkedIn page and you can subscribe to the newsletter there. Or you can go to the website for the show, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and we will get that newsletter out to you. So we come to you each week with the news, as we mentioned of the week, but we couldn't do that without the support of the team that's behind us. We've got a couple of people working on the front end of the back end of the podcast. Lillian, John do a great job each week. And that's not free. So we have a sponsorship from the company that Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies. At Lead Smart, we've developed a product that we call Channel Cloud. And Channel Cloud is an AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence platform for wholesale distributors and manufacturers. We have versions for each. What we try and do is corral silo data from across a business that ERP data, the E Commerce data, Marketing automation and other silo data as we refer to it as that is out on its own. We try and bring that together in a place where we can get actionable insights, deep customer reviews, information about our team, our business. And through that we're able to help companies accelerate growth, significantly expand their customer experience and gain deeper insights that they've not had. So we use some AI tools to do that. If you're digitally transforming in your business or unhappy with your current CRM solution, that's maybe not getting your return on investment. We'd certainly love to talk with you about the opportunities for that and you can reach out to us at any time. So, Tom, that's it for that part of it. Let's kind of dive in. We've got our friend Dan Judge joining us today, so we're happy to have Dan with it. Dan's going to be a guest on an upcoming show. We'll look forward to having him with us. So here we are, issue 139, April 25th. Apparently there's still some things going on with tariffs.

Correct. Hasn't gone away yet. Hasn't gone away yet.

But what's your take on the last seven days since we were here last on the things that have happened?

I have more of a macro take. I, I believe that. And you know, obviously as we go through these articles. Right. First article, you know, hey, if you want to trade, cancel tariffs. And then on the other side, we've got a big deal coming. A lot of talk, a lot of chatter, but not a lot of stuff behind there. But and I think you saw this this morning. I saw it this morning. I believe there was some relaxation on the China tariffs on some products coming in from the US Particularly semiconductors and other things. So my take, I guess, overall on this is that I believe both sides are recognizing that this is not really good for anybody, but yet no one's going to want to just back down. So it's sort of a quiet in my, what I'm seeing is sort of a quiet. It's the right word. I can't, I wouldn't call it a fade, but basically quietly, things are sort of settling down a bit. And the question will be is can we really get to a real result with everybody trying to, you know, figure out who's got the biggest ego and who's going to, you know, let down first or whatever. But I think it's being done obviously a bit more covertly, something that we're not seeing all the things. And because I think everybody realizes that this is not a win win situation, it's kind of a lose, lose situation, at least the way it's going about it.

Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with that per se. I add a little shift in perspective, I think with that a little bit is that I think all we're seeing right now is what we've anticipated from the discussion we had and same discussion we had last week with, with Alex that was with us as well was the idea that, look, you've got to look at the big picture on what's trying to be accomplished here. And if you're looking at the big picture, things are, in my belief, things are starting to play out as I don't want to say as planned necessarily because, you know, there's been some concessions and some concerns about what's going on in the US Markets and so forth. But I think if you're looking at this, it's things are starting to settle. In this particular article that I mentioned, you mentioned a moment ago, China tells Trump if you want to trade, if you want trade talks, cancel tariffs. Well, that's from BBC, so there's a little bit of a different take and spin on that as well. But I think what we're really kind of starting to see is that both sides and, and I actually heard something earlier in the week on the news. It was, you know, the, the Canada and Mexico pieces are important to this. All of the other ones were just kind of window dressing to get to the China point of this is right. We really got to get the China part of this taken care of and, and balance things out. So I think now what you're seeing is and especially in the last few days is the jockeying of the two egos, right? Xi Jinping Ping and, and, and President Trump and the jockeying with their egos to get things started. You know, Chinese premier is saying that no, there haven't been any talks and Trump is saying that he actually reached out to him and we're going to see more of this, right. And, and then to your comment earlier, right, is if you look at this morning's news is that, you know, China is exempting. That was just from four hours ago. And we're live at, you know, 9:10am Pacific Time on the 25th. You know, that China is starting to exclude or exempt some U.S. products. And the article that I read about that was that they are surveying major indust within China and asking them which ones do you need exempted. So this is just, I think we're, we're seeing what probably could be expected. The next article that we have today is talking about Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant said that he sees sweeping agreement wins down the trade down the road here with China and those will be coming together. So I think, you know, there's, what would I say, Tom? My take is all of this makes sense based upon what we kind of talked about, even with, with Alex last week with our guest.

Yeah, well, I, I would say first of all, I've listened to it twice now. If you haven't listened to last week's.

Episode with Alex, was that, was I that Good.

Yeah, it's like Kevin was amazing. No, it was really a very, I thought a really good objective. Alex brought some really, really great objective, just analytical data to the real numbers. Real numbers. And if you. And again, going back to kind of the multi, whatever the four dimensional chess game and the overall strategy, if you haven't listened to that, I highly recommend. It was a little bit of a different model than we usually do. We didn't really get very far into the news last week. It was really more just getting an Alex and just really going through and getting some. I mean, Alex is what, doing seven or ten keynotes a week. He's out there talking to a lot of people. So anyway, I highly recommend doing that and going back and taking a look at that, if you haven't already. I don't know If I agree 100% that it's playing out as expected. I think that it's playing out in a way, like I said earlier, that both areas have realized that this, you know, 120% or 145% or 100, all of the, you know, that all is great chest pounding, but it's not real, it's not sustainable for either side going forward.

Well, I think the point that goes with that, Tom, is do you believe that either party had any expectation that that's where that they would end up?

No, I don't think so. I don't think.

Absolutely not.

I think they all got carried away in the moment. Right. And you know, tit for tat, right now we're at this place, it's like, holy crap, what have we put, what have we gotten ourselves into? And. But yet it has to be unwound a bit in a way that doesn't look like anybody's giving in along the way. So that's why I said, I don't think I would say that it's playing out the way it expected. I think it's playing out because to your point, I think everyone got a little carried away. I.

So it's one of two things, right? I mean, sometimes I think there's so much more going on behind the scenes than, you know, every time I go to Washington D.C. and feel the buzz around that town, it's like there's so much going on there that, you know, the average person just doesn't even think about it.

Yeah, broken.

You know, it's, it's funny, I was emailing yesterday with some, some of our good friends at the national association of Wholesalers and. Excuse me, you and I are both going to be in, in Maryland visiting a, a great lead smart customer in the next few weeks. And so I was setting some time up with some of the guys there to talk about a few things. And, and yeah, I mean every time I'm there visiting them or for other meetings or whatever in D.C. there's just a whole thing going on. And you know, I think if I look at this is there could just as easily through all of this been clarity from the back channels between the US And China and the US And Canada and the US And Mexico that there was sweeping tariffs coming from the US and maybe less with Mexico and Canada. But I could see China having completely anticipated something similar to what happened. Maybe the numbers are higher. But my, my point was not it's playing out that as expected is what was expected is if you look bigger picture versus just why can't I remember this? What was it? Reconciliation day?

What were the Liberation Day?

Liberation Day. Right. If you look beyond the verboseness of that and you know, the tariffs on islands that only have, you know, penguins or what all of the stuff that the talking heads on the news want us to talk about. And you I'm kind of harping on this. I'll stop quickly here. But as we've just been talking about the last three weeks on this show is that look, big picture of all the things that this administration said they want to accomplish. This is a component of that. It's not a singular point in time of this horrible thing happening now. Markets off bond rates funky. Right? Weird things happening. Yes. I think, you know, as we're going to talk about in a moment is interest rates and jobless claims. Right. We'll, we'll lead to here in just a moment is I think we're going to, I don't know whether it's another three weeks or if it's another three months, but there's going to be some balanced point between the US And China. There's going to be a balance point between Mexico and, and Canada as well. The unique part of it right now, and we have an article in here too about that we'll mention to you today is about freight and so forth is that, you know, last month Long beach harbor you and I grew up in the city of Long Beach, California was the busiest port in the US and then last night on the news I saw that the director of the Port of LA said that they expect everything to be container ships coming in down by 33% within the next couple weeks. Challenge with that and the reason I mention that now is what no one expected at the level was the tariffs on the other Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, other places. But if you stop and think about it, so much of what they have going on there from manufacturing standpoint is only a proxy for Chinese companies.

Sure, we talked about that last week and I guess, and we can move on in the articles, I guess where I do agree is what has happened is there is some change taking place. The degree of that change, where that change ends up, is it what anybody hoped for or expected? I don't know. But I do think that yes, you have to at least acknowledge that there is some change occurring or discussions that are going to lead to change or things that are leading to change. And look, it's not easy to make change in the big political system. So maybe that's what we should be thinking. Now granted, yes, there's a lot of price that we are all paying for that process of that change. But there is some change taking place. Time will tell. Is that change actually going to lead to any sort of positive outcome?

You got it. It could be in fact that, you know, because basically what the, excuse me, what we were talking about with the supply chain issues and the shipments coming in is basically with the port. What I heard on this local, you know, LA news last night was the Port of LA Director basically says is the spigots shut off of ships coming from China and Southeast Asia.

Right. Coming up here.

What's that?

We have an article on that.

We do, yeah, exactly. Right. But the, you know, the issue with that is how long does that last and is that a couple of months that we see these higher prices and some things that go with that. You know, I, I, we were talking about this just as a side note the other day. Right. Is I think you said you were at Costco last weekend and I was at Costco, what was it? Wednesday, Tuesday evening I was at Costco. And you know, my Costco bill was dramatically higher than three months ago. Right. But that's not in, that's not tariff related. That's just what's going on in our economy right now. So let's, let's shift because we're going to come back and talk more about tariffs with some articles. But we have this article about U.S. jobless benefits are inching up. And so this is the weird thing right now that we need to kind of talk about because we've got this push pull right now with the Fed Chairman Powell and the President. The President wants interest rates lower because back to the big Picture is he wants manufacturing coming back, he wants infrastructure being built and with lower interest rates. Right. And if you have a balanced trade with other countries and if you could get interest rates down a little bit, you're going to see a lot more of that happening. So I think in this setting, it's going to be interesting to watch. And one of the biggest factors that the Fed is going to be looking at is jobless claims. So we had intel with a few thousand people that was announced with layoffs earlier in the week and lots of other big company layoffs, forgetting about the government employees that are yet being paid for a period of time but will be looking for jobless benefits before too long. I think we could be in a really interesting place where we could see something being done with interest rates because of the employment factors.

Yeah, we touched on this quite a bit last week with Alex. Right. The job market's still really strong. So, I mean, this article is jobless claims. We're up by 6,000. That's not a whole lot to move the needle. Now, we even talked about the layoffs or the, or the things that are happening in the federal government and the government things that are. There still doesn't seem to be moving the needle much as it relates to.

Well, I think you talked about that a few weeks ago is that the, those government employees are still being paid for a period of time.

Right.

So they wouldn't be showing up here for a while. That was what I was trying to reference. But when you talk about, you know, the, the handful of large tech companies. Right. That have done these major layoffs in the last couple of months is pretty dramatic. Excuse me. And that is what I think we're going to start seeing. So I think if there was something, and the only reason I mentioned this is if there was something that was going to impact the government's or the Fed's willingness to do something from a, from a interest rate standpoint to, I don't want to say give in to the President because they would have the numbers that they're looking for in that setting. But in that case, it would be probably tied to jobless.

I agree.

Jobless claims.

It would be a catalyst. Right. That would allow to do that. And I didn't read the full article, but it was even another article this morning. One of the Fed governors said, well, you know, there's more and more chatter that maybe we'll do something in June at the June meeting. You know, there's another reason too, that the administration would like interest rates to Come down. I agree with you on all the ones you just said. But it would also appease the market as well.

Absolutely right.

Which is if they could appease the market throughout of all of this, it gives them a little more, maybe a little more catalyst to do some of the things that they want to do that has created the market volatility.

So well and nobody's looking for, you know, zero percent money, right. What they're looking for is to get interest rates, you know, out of that four, what are the four and a quarter to four and a half or 4.75 right now. And you want to see the stimuluses get mortgage rates down from that as well. So. All right, let's keep moving ahead here. We got another good article here. This one, it was published in a lot of different places but border states, the large electrical and they're in H Vac and lots of other products. It's a major national distributor now. They publish regularly a supply chain update. And so we published it from the LinkedIn article that where they posted it at. But they do a nice job of, you know, their view on things and their take. So they were talking about a substantial number of different topics. Did you catch anything out of that that you want to reference or want me to jump?

I mean, I know there were a couple key points in there you wanted to bring up about some of the lag times, right?

Yeah. So they were talking about, you know, lead time trends within some of the different markets. But they talk quite a bit about the maritime shake up in this as well. They said ocean container shipping costs continue to soften. That's good, you know, if you've got the container prices down. But if you don't have anything to put in the containers because they can't, they're not, can't be afforded. It's a, it's a challenge. It's going to go with that. But they go through and they talk a little bit about job growth and this is, they published this last week. So it's a little bit in conflict with what the, the article, previous article that we had because just there was some new data that came out. But they talked about the Federal Reserve coming out as well. This is just I think a really nice thing they do and they're doing it for their customer base, but it's nice to see that as well. So they talked about job growth forecasts, so they talked about that as well in here. But then they start talking about raw material prices and aluminum prices and copper prices which are just going to be a big challenge. And then we start thinking about aluminum and some of the other raw materials that come out of Canada. Those are where some of the challenges are really going to come in.

Yep.

So it's, this was, this was a good, good point. And they talk about home building slowing a little bit. And, and I think with the homebuilding side of things, when we can figure out what's going to happen with timber from Canada and some other raw materials from Canada and then seeing what may or may not happen with interest rates, I think if you, if you were to take it, how would I say this best, Tom? I think if you were to take the traditional focus target numbers that the Fed's trying to work from and there was some, I don't know, flexibility with that from the Fed standpoint. And this is a very uninformed, uneducated and the truth of the Fed policies and or economics. But it just seems to me like the numbers that we would see across the board in home starts, in building applications for commercial buildings all across the board would really bump up with some probably, I don't know, 500 basis points, a full, a full point reduction in interest rates. Right now it just seems to me like that would just spark a ton.

I think it would. I mean, I think you, we've talked about this. Right. There's a lot of capital expense projects and things like that that have been, that are, everybody's in a holding pattern on. Yeah, I tend to agree. But I also think there's again, if you have price increases, which is what appears to be occurring across the board, the actual worst thing you want to do is lower rates and then six months later or three months later raise them again.

So yeah, I think you would have to have the softening of the rigid policies on both sides lowering and raising. Right. You would need to be ready to take a little bit of risk that goes with those.

But even if you said it's 3% instead of 2%. Right. And you're saying I'm okay with that, that's maybe what a point and a quarter off of where we are right now. Point and a half from where the things are. So it doesn't, it doesn't really. Yes, it would have a short term impact to your point, but it doesn't necessarily change anything longer term if you're seeing inflate or I don't even like to use the word inflation because inflation. But price increases increasing more than that 3, 4%. So yeah. Anyway.

Good. Well let's, let's kind of Move ahead here. We just, we mentioned this article earlier. There's if, if you're a listener of the show and you're interested in following the. What's going on in, in ship shipping. Not, not over the road but over the water shipping. There's a. Just a great website, it's just called gcaptain.com and it's one of those things for me being a mariner. Hey, I don't think I told you I'm actually going to get out on the water next weekend and do some sailing and do a little race from intercoastal race here and looking really looking forward to that. It's been, I don't know, eight months or so since I've been racing. So excited about that next weekend but if you're, if you're an ocean geek like me when I look at some of these articles because I get their newsletter every day I could read it for hours. But this, it's just a great G Captain has some great articles about really what's going on and what's behind shipping and some of the gray market oil transfers from Iran to Russia and that it's kind of intriguing. Some of it's almost like reading a spy novel. But anyways one of the largest shipping companies in the world, hopic Lloyd says 30% of China's U S bound shipments have been canceled. So we can balance that out with what we were hearing from the Port of Long beach or Port of LA CEO yesterday. About 33% likely a reduction of inbound ships. Kind of seeing this balancing act where he was talking about one port. This is about overall from China So that's going to take some catching up to do when things balance out. Right?

Yeah and that's gotta. Look, I don't know. China has got to have be feeling that. Right?

Absolutely.

I mean there's, there's, that is so much if you look at that's. That's not a trivial amount.

No. And it's, I mean we're going to see Amazon prices. I saw an article about that yesterday just going up pretty quickly and you know Walmart is, has already been working. I think we talked about that two or three weeks ago about what Walmart having right now. It's a big, big help to them for all the work that they've been doing on finding domestic vendors over the last few years which is a huge benefit to them right now. In fact that'll be an interesting thing to watch because I said, and it's been said over and over again is that if there was anybody that had an opportunity to take a run at Amazon, it's Walmart because of their infrastructure and their trucking fleet that they already have. So Amazon's catching up on that. So it's an interesting time to see how well that domestic manufacturing group that they've been working on, how helpful that is. So we're going to jump into our manufacturing and distribution segment, which is always a good spot here. There's a great article from Modern Distribution Management. In fact, if you're like three weeks now. Right.

We just never got to it.

This is. I think it's just the second week, but. But yes.

Yeah, I.

We just. For those of you that get the newsletter, I try and on Wednesdays and Thursdays curate the articles from all the newsletters I get each week. So Tom has no idea what's coming. So I get them going throughout the week. Lily runs with it from there, gets a newsletter all prepped and everything ready for us for the show. And Thursday evenings, Tom and our guests get whatever the potpourri of articles that I've chosen for that week are. But yeah, there's been a couple just because we've been talking so much about that T word that in the last few weeks we haven't gotten to a lot of the articles, but MDM posted this. And by the way, just as a little side note, we're about three weeks away from NAW and Modern Distribution Management now as MDM is part of NAW with their big SHIFT conference is coming up in, in Denver. Just got registered for that earlier in the week. Looking forward to seeing a lot of folks there. So if you're going to be at the SHIFT conference that MDM publish or puts on each year, let me know. I'd love to meet up with you there. So this is the 10 tips for preparing for economic downturn, which downturn, which I thought was kind of nice that I like seeing things where people do step by step. You know, the steps that they put may not be the exact steps that are needed in your business, but it's a great baseline to get started with with your own thought processes on things. Right.

Well, I think. Right. If one thing we've all should have learned in this industry is status quo is not a good strategy right. From all of this. And I think what they talk about in here are. And they're kind of diverse items, right? They're. They're very diverse and they're not. But if you're just kind of going through a checklist of things that, hey, From a status if I really need to move from the status quo and be looking at, you know, new and different ways of viewing my business and operating my business, I thought they were some really good ones. The one that I really, of course, that hits home for me, which we spend a lot of time on, I think it was number nine, which was revenue leaks, like really looking for revenue and profit leaks. And that one really resonates for me because every day I see so many revenue and profit leaks occurring in businesses just that they don't even know are existing, whether it's related to quotes or orders or just, you know, cross selling and all those types of things. So again, you know, these are just things to be, I guess, thinking through and they kind of went across the board about how you would adjust with some of these challenges and changes.

Great. Yeah, the. When it kind of hits here, let's just hit these quickly. Right? It talks about first, don't panic. Instead of fretting over rising costs and sinking customer sentiment, concentrate on value and strategic advantages you can provide for your customers. And it, I mean, we should always be thinking about value regardless of the business that you're in every day. Right. To focus on the fundamentals, prioritize your profitability, reinforce core offerings, innovate and make investments in the people, process and technology you haven't had the time to make before now. Your best defense is a good offense. Agreed. Think long term, right. If we believe the sky is falling right now, the sky is going to fall on you. Right. But that doesn't mean it's really falling. It's just what are you focused on? And I think there are some people right now doing some really good jobs. As probably one of the comments that I've been really appreciative about in the last, oh, probably month or so of our show is when we had John Gunderson on about a month ago and John was talking about. John's a electrical industry veteran and a been on the purchasing side of things forever and does a lot of writing and speaking on that now. And he was talking about the opportunities that are available right now for people that really have one, strong balance sheets and two, really understand their purchasing model and so forth. And so I thought it was really great what John was talking about because there are opportunities right now for those people that, like I said, have strong balance sheets and understand their purchasing model where they can take existing inventories, maybe planned purchases that they have already in place at specific pricing and do some pricing blending with that so they're not Seeing the big spikes that most of their competitors are going to do. So they talked about diversifying as well, identifying new market opportunities, new product categories. You know, that kind of ties into the paper that you wrote recently or the article that you wrote recently about organic growth. Right. So often we think about just I need to buy a competitor or open a new branch is where my most of my growth is going to come from. But there is dramatic amounts of growth that can come from diversifying. And the fifth one it talks about is gaining a deeper understanding of your customer. When you understand your customer better. Plug for Lead Smart technologies here because you have the right technology that will help you visualize that you can do more with them. Right. You can understand that better. So there's some great points here. Consider your products perceived value, focus on value based pricing. Rationalize your customer book, book of business, which I thought was great. Really understanding more about do I have the right customers? You had mentioned earlier, number nine, profit leakage and then be flexible and agile. Now is the time, I think where folks that have strong balance sheets and bright people could really take advantage of this and gain some market share.

Yep.

So very good. So that was a good article. I'd recommend folks taking a look at that. Next one is from Distribution Strategy Group. Tariffs make it hard for distributors to know if the price is right. We don't need to spend a depth of time with that. But I thought that was a nice article as well. They were talking to a president of a distribution safety and tool equipment company and they were just talking about some of the uncertainties that go with all of that. So it's good. That was a good one. Anything you caught out of that, Tom?

Trying to remember. Actually no. The answer is no.

Okay. Well, part of this is talking about some of the strategies that people are using and you know, some folks are changing vendors. I think I commented on this a while back, is talking to a friend in the Pacific Northwest that's a regular listener to the show and he runs the purchasing and operations side of a large distributor and he was mentioning one of their vendors and this was before our big, big announcements on all of the tariffs. But with that they were coming. He said he had already had a vendor who did almost all their sourcing from China give him a huge price increase and then a week later come back and rescind that price increase because they'd found other vendors. Right. So you know, and that's really, to me that that is a big factor on the people side of your business. The pressure that's on the people in customer service that are having to deal with customers that are getting price increases and your supply chain and your purchasing people that are having to deal with this stuff. There's a lot of pressure on those folks.

Well, in the, and one thing I did remember in this article now is the one of the people they interviewed. Right. Were saying, we're not going to give you a price unless we have it in stock. Right. So if we don't have it seen in inventory right now, you're not getting the price.

Yep.

Which, look, I get it. I just don't know that that's. How do you do business with that? Right. So.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. There's a lot facing these folks. So let's, let's kind of roll in two. Why don't we. Tom, why don't we jump into E commerce and marketing? You want to do that? Jump in that next segment.

I wanted to hit Kelly's comment, though.

Oh, good.

Just because, I don't know, I tend to agree with this. If you don't have a good CRM, you're completely flying blind without instruments. No excuse. Now. I mean, it's, it's so true. Without it being, it's, it's like, and I don't even say it's CRM. It's understanding a. What your customers are doing, what they're considering, what they're looking at and proactively knowing how to best serve them and add the most value, which inherently drives more revenue and profit. That all sounds very, you know, okay. That all just sounds, you know, great at a high level. But there's so many tactical things that can be done nowadays to do that with a customer, that is. Anyway, it's.

Yeah. Well, I think the important part of, to go with that, the, from Kelly's comment there, as well as I think it's, you know, if we just randomly say CRM, most people that might be listening to this are thinking, you know, your father's Buick of, well, we had CRM and our people hate it and they push back on it. When you have smart CRM where you're connecting to your silo data across your business and 60, 70, 80% of the data in your CRM is coming from the company to a salesperson, that's when they really get those insights that Kelly's talking about here that help you understand.

You're right. And traditional CRM is thought of as tracking and managing. And the new one is basically. Or what we do is about how do you enable. There's very Difference between tracking and managing enablement. Anyway.

No, that's good. You know, Tom, before we jump out of there, I just, I was, I pulled up and I don't know what you do on your end, but we do this every week. But I have a browser tab with all of our articles that we published open, so I just jumped to that one. We were going to skip by which is from industrial distribution. But I did want to just give you a couple of pieces about what some of the, some of the major companies that wholesale distributors are buying through are mentioning and assessing with the impact of tariffs. This is Kimberly Clark, who's everything from Kleenex and Huggies that they make to toilet paper to protective clothing coveralls and so forth and everything in between. Said they expect tariffs to add $300 million of costs and warned about a flat year of earnings. Right now we're already starting to see. Right. With earning reports coming out earlier this week of companies and the airlines in particular, multiples of them this week walked back their earnings guidance in that as well. 3M said the company stuck to a full year forecast for profit, but with excluding. They talked about excluding the impact of tariffs, what they expected their share prices to be. But they did include a slide in a presentation. It says that with a tariff impact sensitivity, they said they could lower earnings by 20 to 40 cents per share. Those are pretty major impacts. So they have in this.

Over what time frame? Like how long the tariffs would have to.

No, that's a great point. You know, and in all of these things, I think, I think what we saw, Tom, with this is we had threats of tariffs. We had people kind of doing the wait and see. Then they hit and they said, okay, we got to run for the hills and make some statements about what this could do to us. So we're not surprising anybody if our, you know, these are mostly that these companies that they're talking about here are mostly publicly traded companies. In this particular article, not all of them, but most of them are. But now people are covering their tails, right. Hoping that things get balanced out to what we were talking about at the beginning of today's show. Things get balanced out fairly quickly and they can get back to business as usual. And this is a, this is a hiccup, a long time, not a major, major impact.

Well, no one's going to get penalized right now anymore from a market perspective or evaluation perspective any more than they already have been by putting out, quote, unquote, bad news or, or.

Well, and this is keeping the analysts busy. Too right. The analysts are going to be going at all of this stuff for, specifically for publicly traded companies. The analysts are going to be going at this and saying, throwing flags and saying hey, you're blaming other poor, poor behavior and poor performance on tariffs, but this is what it really is.

So.

Yep, that's a good one. Let's kind of jump ahead. Let's go into E commerce and marketing. We have a great article there for Digital Commerce360. We had this article last week as well. And this one is tied to E commerce to reshape global economy by 2040. I think that this is, this is our friend Mark Broham wrote this just a little over a week ago. I've got a call actually with Mark next week. He's a good guy, good friend. But Forrester emphasizing the evolution of commerce and E commerce is being driven by consumers across generations. Tom, this is not something new for us on this show to talk about, but any thoughts from you on this particular.

I have a, I have a thought and a question for you. So one of the things you don't take questions. Okay, well then I'll just ask a general question. We'll see who answers is.

You know.

They talk a lot about consumer behavior and. Yeah, right. And, and what the consumer is looking for. I was at a dinner last, last Sunday and Easter dinner with a few different people from different kind of and one of the conversations that came up was is people on their Amazon and their E commerce shopping are a one thinking twice about before buying and be really looking to see where the products are made. Right. Are they made in China? Are they made in the US and if they are in China, at least the conversation. Again, this is just anecdotal data from.

One conversation, one dinner party. Yeah. With a little, with a little gin in cabernet.

But this was even before then, right. It was just, it wasn't. This was and so when I hear these things, I don't know if it's a trend or not, but I've heard this now a couple times. Right. Are people thinking twice before buying and two are they thinking twice about when they do buy where it's coming from? Now maybe that's a short term thing and maybe if this tariff thing gets solved in a week and that'll be one ear and out the other or is that really is consumer behavior maybe going to be changed permanently or at least altered right. Through some of these things that are, that are happening now if that's the case. Right. Think about that from an E commerce perspective. Think about we're going to talk about perplexity here in a minute, right where you're now not just looking for the cheapest price on a product or the cheapest place to get it, but you're looking at where is it made, where is the packaging made, where are all of those things that you know, you want to quote unquote, make the responsible purchase, Right. Is that going to factor into that behavior that is talking about there? So in the intelligent commerce.

Well, I hope John, our editor and producer makes a clip out of that what you just described because I am not seeing anything out of that behave similar behavior from the woman that runs this household. So there's no slowdown. But, but she happens to buy some household things and so forth as well. But I I don't disagree with anything you're saying describing with that Tom. And it, it's good. I think it's good anecdotal data. The this particular this is in Mark's article is from some forester research has done. It said this was late 2024. It said 76% of US online adults prioritize free shipping. And the reason we're talking about this is because wholesale distributors are those that haven't yet are evaluating or should be evaluating, moving to having a very robust e commerce experience for their customers. And we talk all the time on this show and you're hearing in lots of different places about the importance of that, acknowledging kind of that gray area that we're in right now. But I think that gray area is going to go away. And the difference between expectations of my consumer purchases versus my business purchases is just going to be I expect the same experience across the board and there's already large groups of people that feel that way. But this is saying they're prioritizing with the cost of shipping, no hassle returns. And then it talks about product price as the final factor. But the most important one out of these from a percentage standpoint was the free shipping standpoint. Now there are lots and lots of wholesale distributors that we could have a conversation with that could say I do a great job of these things. Already there are software companies that are helping. Right. That we run across and see regularly at events that we travel to with for distribution that are helping with returns and managing those much better. But I think this is just something to watch and I included this article just from the importance of and I think we're just we'll probably continue on this soapbox for specifically for wholesale distributors, but also for manufacturers who are kind of looking at Omni Channel right now and having a presence in some marketplaces with their products directly is the customer experience is more important than ever. Right. I always just say the guy that took his bought his movie tickets online and on his phone and ordered an Uber to take his girlfriend to the theater the night before, he's probably ordered lunch from doordash. And he has different expectations than the guy that retired two years ago that he replaced.

Right. And that was my point earlier is, you know, the expectations you talked about, we talked about in the article, free shipping and pricing and all that stuff, those have been expectations that we've all had for a long time. But are there going to be any additional expectations that people are going to expect again, where things are made and, and, and so forth? And it'll be interesting to see if that plays out or not.

Yeah, for sure. Let's jump ahead. Let's. Let's talk about AI power to genic search and what that means to E commerce as well. You want to take the lead on that one?

Well, yeah, and I'm not sure how many people have used Perplexity, right. But if you've used Perplexity or, or Chat GPT for search, you've probably seen, you know, rather than doing a search for something and getting a list of websites, which is traditionally what you'd see in a Google search, you actually get the idea being as AI going through and providing as much insight and information about that search as possible and then you can continue to have a conversation with it. But perplexity is added into that equation is potentially the ability to make the purchase right within the search or within the AI conversation. So if I'm having it, hey, you know, what are the best places to buy? Levi's in Ventura, California. And it comes back and it says, well, you know, what are the best ones for? I don't know, the size or whatever. And it can actually introduce you and make the purchase right in line with the, with the conversation that you're having, which is what they're calling is agentic E commerce. I haven't seen that you use Perplexity more than I do. Have you seen.

Yeah, I was going to ask, that's what I was going to ask you is how much do you use it or do you use.

I don't use Perplexity very often. I use Chat GPT for the search.

So I think here's just. And listen, this is, you know, I. Ford and Chevy discussions, right. I. My experience is that for general search, I think it's a better experience than ChatGPT. I think they've been doing it longer for general search and I just, and I have happened to have on my, on my MacBook I have a widget and so it's a single click. It brings up a small little toolbar and I type it in. I have it on my phone. I voice ask voice questions and can have and I just using the free version. I think it's a great experience. And that's not to minimize Gemini's experience or ChatGpt's experience or others in this setting. But I think probably right now Perplexity is probably leading the game and very much specifically in their partnership this is that they've got with a company called Firmly AI that really gives you this quick view. And then as they're launching this agency, an AI agent that basically lets me do a search. And I think Tom, the probably the most important thing on this topic for people to think about is what is our historical experience. And you described it, I'm going to reiterate it, right. We go to Google or Safari, whatever browser you use and we've spent the last 20 years approaching 20 years more than that. Yeah, right. Where we type in and say, right, well you're to your example, you know, Levi's in Ventura or I just, you know, want to want to search Levi's or, or I want to search, you know, a new car maybe that's a little broad, but the garden tools. And when I do that in Google I get all of this listing of things where it wants me to click to go to their website, inform myself, then make a purchase there. What this is saying by using AI powered or artificially powered intelligence, artificial intelligence powered agents, it's able to now say Tom Search is searching for Levi's in Ventura. He doesn't need to leave the perplexity search to actually make a purchase. And that is very powerful. I think, you know, one of the things I think that Google is doing nicely right now and we'll probably get into a discussion at some time about the government wanting to break Google up from a search monopoly and so forth. But I think when I do use Google still, which is still probably, probably for me, I'm probably 50% search on Google, 50% on perplexity. And that's probably because I always have a browser window open because I'm in our software, our lead smart software, right throughout the day, which is browser based or cloud based. So I have browser windows open. So I kind of split between those two for my Searches. I think Gemini is doing a nice job right now with it being built into Google or to Google Chrome. When you go to search by popping up and giving you an overview. But then what's below that is still all of the traditional Google search, you know, pieces where I've got to click through all of those. So this is, this is. We don't need to spend too much time on this. This is something to be paying attention to. And the reason. Go ahead.

No, I was going to. Maybe you were going to say this, but is this going to evolve into B2B searches or B2B?

That's the reason the article's here. Right. Is as this happens. Is right. We need to be thinking about, if I'm an E commerce manager, director VP at a wholesale distributor or manufacturer, I need to be thinking about am I preparing my E commerce solution to work with these tools so that when my customer wants to go into the Perplexity browser he has or app that he has on his phone, am I prepared on the back end with my e commerce solution so that I could participate when he wants to go buy.

Yep.

Enough.

Yep. Good.

Let's jump into technology and cybersecurity and AI segment of our newsletter. But as you're doing that, Tom, scrolling through that, I'm going to do that. I'm about 20 minutes late or so. But for those of you that are listening on our recorded podcast on Apple or Spotify or Odyssey, wherever it might be, what you're missing right now is that we have a newsletter that's open. We send that newsletter each week. So those who are with us live. Excuse me, those who are with us Live on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn Live. And it's, it's interesting that I don't ever watch live shows on Facebook, but it's astounding to me that there's, and I'm appreciative of those of you who are out there that are listening on Facebook. It's great. But this is live on our show this morning at 9:55 Pacific on the 25th of April on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. And YouTube is growing every month. We saw some great statistics of that. But you, if you're live with us, you can see what's on our screen. You can see the newsletter that's there. If you don't see that and you're wondering what are these guys talking about? Our next article, right. What that comes from is our newsletter, which is called around the Horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing. Three simple ways to get that just Send us an email@helloadsmartech.com we'll get that right out to you. If you are active and regular on LinkedIn, you can get that there as well. And the simple way to do that is just go to the Lead Smart Technology page there and you'll see a link that says newsletters. You can click on that and sign up for the newsletter. Or we have a website for the podcast www.aroundthehornpod.com. past episodes are there. You can register and sign up for the newsletter there as well. But we'll get it out to you. Had quite a few requests this past week for that as well, so the list just keeps growing.

Okay, good.

What's next here, my friend?

Well, what manufacturers see as the value of AI, this is from HR Dive, so it's definitely a bit oriented towards the people side of it. But it's saying Deere & Company, John Deere, Procter and Gamble are leveraging new strategies to galvanize their workers around the future of work rather than fuel job security concerns. And I think this is great. I mean we've seen, you know, we've done a number of workshops with AI, workshops with different distribution companies and manufacturers. And obviously one of the first things that we hear or we have heard is well, I'm afraid of AI because it's going to take my job, right. Or my job is at risk. And look, I get that and obviously there's a lot of talk about that. What this article gets into is how these companies are basically incorporating AI. The way we talk a lot about AI, which is how does it enable and augment what you're doing to make your job a, make you more effective and even more fun and have more enjoyable and doing the things that you really want to be doing. And I thought they had some pretty interesting things in here about just getting people kind of involved with AI and not making it so scary and kind of a very much a crawl, walk around approach to the whole thing and, and seeing some, you know, removing that fear and starting to get people to embrace it. So I thought it was a very, a good, a good slant on, on the whole. On cold conversation.

Yeah, no, I think this is the key and it's. Listen, there is a big component of this, of what, what is, what are my people going to think? And you know, we talk regularly and, and this, you were talking about some of the workshops we've done recently in that setting is that, you know, this should be thought of as augmenting, not replacing in most instances as we Talk about wholesale distribution and manufacturing. Right. If you're, you know, a technology company, excuse me, you might see some reduction in people, but the traditional or typical wholesale distributor or manufacturer is probably going to keep their headcount pretty similar. Maybe there's some redundancy in order entry and things like that. But you know, the types of people that we talk with and you know, day in and day out we're on the phone with both manufacturers and distributors is, I'm not hearing anybody that's saying in this setting that says I want to cut my head count by 15%. What the conversation is for those who are aware of the opportunity is, wait a minute, I can take the team that I have now and augment them with some AI related tools that is customer intelligence and AI enabled. Smart CRM is a good example, is I can do a whole lot more with the people that I have, so I might not need to hire.

Eliminating those revenue leaks and the profitability things and the things that were in that top 10 list.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. Well, in a good example, you think about it on the manufacturing side, I, you know, was talking or emailing recently with a manufacturer, a globe global manufacturer. They do business and put it this way, they have sales people And I think 30 or 40 countries around the world. And in this gentleman's role, every, almost every post that I see from him on LinkedIn is about hiring that they're trying to do of salespeople in. It doesn't matter if it's in Ethiopia or if it's in Botswana or if it's in London. Right. They're, they're, they have a global presence. They have manufacturing in four or five different countries as well. And they're trying to boost this team that's calling on distributors. And they've never had a, they've never had a dumb CRM in their business, let alone a smart CRM. And you know, I've thrown out the idea to him that said, you know, what if you didn't need to add all of these people that you're so focused on constantly hiring because the ones that you had were exponentially more efficient. Right. Not a little bit more efficient, but exponentially more efficient. Big deal.

Yeah, good.

All right, let's jump ahead from that. Let's talk about AI agents. We were talking about them a few minutes ago. It's a big buzzword. CFO Dive magazine had an article here about AI agents emerge as a potential target for cyber attackers. Any thoughts or take? Maybe, Tom, do you want to maybe do your Quick overview of what is an agent for those people that are with us that might not be familiar with that. And then where does this risk come in?

Sure. So we've talked a lot about this, but at a high level.

Right.

An agent is an AI application that has some sort of very specific outcome or goal and in a lot of cases operates autonomously to achieve that goal. So we always like to use the one that everyone understands. Hey, book a trip. Right? I want an agent to go book a flight for me or, or book a trip for me that are there. Well, and what does it say here? The number of. What was the number of agents? I wanted to get that.

It says for, for every human identity there are about 46 so called non human identities is what you meant.

Yeah. And then there was a total of, you know, the number of. So what they're calling these agents because they're doing things that essentially what you would do as a person.

Right.

You would replicate and try and do through an agent, non human identities. So, yeah, for every human identity, there are approximately 46, with projections estimating over 45 billion non human identities by the end of 2025. What do they mean there? There's about 45 billion of these individual agents that are out there running, doing one thing or another. Now let's go back to the travel example. You may have an agent that handles your plane flight. Once it gets your plane flight, it hands off to another agent that books your hotel, which then hands off to another one that books your car for an example. Right. That would be three non human identities or three agents working together. The challenge with those is from. I agree with them from a cybersecurity perspective is there's a lot of this peer to peer communication in the sense that I'm sending data from one of these agents to another. Each of these agents then has access to certain data. And let's face it, a lot of these agents are. None of them are not being developed with security as their primary spot on point. That's there. So I do think that, I know, as a matter of fact is that the whole area of security will evolve, is evolving very quickly in this area. But it's not just within the agent itself, it's the communication between the agent that is occurring and the handoff of information and data. So if I can, if I'm a hacker and I can hack in, hack into that handoff.

Right.

That could be as problematic as if they hack into the agent itself.

Yeah. So powerful discussion there. It kind of ties in a little Bit to something that, you know, we've talked quite a bit about in the past about just the fact that from a security standpoint, right, in general within our businesses and I think most of the folks that we talk to day in and day out, they're thinking about cyber security for hey, is my firewall, is there a good, do I have a good firewall to protect people from getting to my server?

Yeah.

There's another big factor though because you know, the vast majority of all technology out there has moved to the cloud or SaaS type software and what people aren't doing and we're seeing this quite regularly. I just caught in the corner of my eye, I got an email just a bit ago from a distributor that just went through a problem there, their current CRM provider. They hadn't ever thought to ask them about their cybersecurity features. Right. How secure is my data? And most importantly or as importantly with that, not most, but as importantly with that is how good is your cyber security to protect yourself from attack? So I can continue to use the software I bought from you. Right. And in the case in this, this particular distributor that just got this note from a bit ago was they hadn't thought through that, right. And asked hard questions of a vendor and their CRM vendor had a cyber attack and they went almost a month without access to any of their software that they've paid for and they weren't sure about their, where their data was and could they recover.

Right.

So there's a bigger component of this that talks about, you know, thinking about agents and we've talked quite a bit about what we can do with, you know, in chat GPT's case, just GPTs and, or agents that are not out automated but just the ones that we, you know, you and I were talking about yesterday, just as a simple example, we have an agent that we share just for time saving. It's not autonomous but for time saving for legal documents to review. Right. Well, you click a couple of the wrong buttons and all of your legal documents are out available to ChatGPT's LLM building. Right. So we have a lot of things to be considering right now with as we start one, as we migrate more and more to the cloud because we talk to people every day who still have their ERP systems on premise but are moving to the cloud. As we think about that, we need to be thinking about our vendors and what our people are able to do with our data.

And that kind of ties into the next article here, how to build a secure Enterprise cloud environment. I won't go deep on that. There's a lot of technical stuff in there, but it kind of just ties into what you were just saying.

Right, that's from Gartner, right?

Gartner. Well, cyber. Yeah.

Yep.

So, you know, the cloud and agents are interrelated, but they're two different things.

Yeah.

And obviously the agents are, are able to do a lot of their thing because of the cloud and the ability to access data that's in the cloud. So the two play ARM in arm and they kind of have to be looked at holistically. But yes, I agree with your point for sure. As you work with cloud vendors, everyone obviously does their due diligence on features and capabilities. One of the areas of due diligence has got to be how they're handling their security.

Well, it's interesting, right? Just a couple of points they talk about in this Gartner research piece was aligning cloud security architecture with organizational strategy. And then they talked about establish a cloud governance framework, address common cloud security challenges, explore emerging security architecture patterns. That's fancy for just saying what is happening out there and staying on top of it. But I think the point is, you know, we, we have a lot of people that regularly listen to this show that are senior or C level executives as well as on boards of directors. If you're on a board of directors, you should be familiar with at least an overview and general understanding of cybersecurity. And you should, as a board member, from a fiduciary standpoint, be asking very hard questions about where the company's at, not just from their own data, but what's going on with their vendors and their policies for cloud AI access and the data that, the risks that they have.

No, for sure.

You know what's awesome today, Tom? Your microphone's working all day. It's never an issue.

It doesn't seem to be as, I don't know, as interesting as it would otherwise, so.

Yeah, well, I think we had to fix it once people were ready to start putting a GoFundMe account up for your microphone. So.

Yeah, well, I appreciate them, everybody doing that, so.

And this is.

You're.

You're on two. This is not the only podcast you're on every week. So, you know, I'm sure you're. You're co host of the modern selling podcast that you're on. Probably were happy with this on Wednesday as well, right?

Yeah, it was just bored silly. There just wasn't all this random, random stuff going on, so.

Well, Carson and, and Brandon, you guys, you guys owe me one. So. All right. So as we kind of move through things today, we're going to kind of go a little bit shorter today probably than we have been recently. We've been going hour and a half, hour and plus on, on many, over an hour and a half on many occasions. But a friend, David Gordon with Electrical Trends, he had put a nice start, posted a nice article this week. If you're in wholesale distribution, I'd say you don't even need to be. They do H vac Trends now. They're working on some industrial publications. But David and our friend John Gunderson, I mentioned earlier post a lot of great, great research that they do. These guys are long time industry veterans. But in Electrical Trends they, they posted an article about achieving digital maturity as an electrical distributor. I think you could just plug the word in distributor in that setting. Right. Versus you know, electrical. So some nice things to be thinking about understanding what it is. They talk about digital processes, technology alignment. When they say technology alignment, you know how well systems, erp, CRM, E commerce, marketing tools. I think David listens to the show because he hears us preaching that all the time. Right. How well are we creating a seamless experience where we can access across all of those data sources? And then he talks about people and culture as well. So good article. I was, I thought he covered a lot of stuff in a short period of time. Any takeaways on your end?

Yeah, I thought it was good. I thought the layout was good. I agree with you completely. It's. It can go to any distributor whatsoever and it was a little bit different than your typical Gartner maturity chart. Right. You know the, the, as whether the laggard, the follower, the different levels there. Anyway, I thought it was, it's quite well done and quite a good summary.

That's good. Okay, let's kind of move ahead to our sales and M and A segment. Any of those articles appeal to you? Well, let's talk about what they are first.

Yeah, you want to talk about what.

They have before I come with that, let's mention them to our, to our listeners here first. There's an article we usually, we oftentimes feature things from salesandmarketingmanagement.com and they have an article here that was published earlier this week about how to build a B2B sales funnel that converts cold leads into loyal customers. So they just had some bullet points here about aligning goals and customer demands, organizing and aligning your teams. Create high value content for each funnel. Stage. This kind of ties into some of the comments that Kelly Quinn was making earlier about using technology in the right place. But I'll, you know, again, we, we talk every day to wholesale distributors and manufacturers. And the idea of this number three saying create high value content for each funnel stage, surprising how few actually have funnel stages that we folks that we talk to.

Well, and it's in the second article does the same thing, right? The second article talks about the B2B funnel as well. And you know, they're basically what I call the yellow brick road. They're talking about. All right, you take somebody who knows very little about you and very little about what you do, how do you actually turn them to somebody who is an opportunity? And it's not just a brochure that says buy my stuff or you know, I have something on sale. You have to have the right content as they move through that yellow brick road. To get to the point where you're guiding is what we've talked about over and over, right? You can't control the buyer journey, but you can influence the buyer journey. And so the as, as a marketer, right. If I look and see, okay, well, if I was standing in front of somebody and I had the opportunity to influence their journey through whatever I told them or whatever I went over with them, that's exactly what we want to try and do digitally along the way. And both of these articles, I thought, align towards that perspective. I'm seeing now taking it back to some of the things we see every day. I'm seeing more and more of our, of the, of manufacturers and distributors doing more with marketing than just, hey, I got a special or a promotion. So they're actually looking at how do they use marketing and how do they use digital marketing to actually reach people that may not have ever purchased from them before or have not purchased. You know, maybe they purchased one product line but not the other product line. And they're actually then going to.

You.

Know, go much, go much faster than, than that. That's there. So it's. Anyway, I think both of these articles are relevant from that perspective.

Yeah, good. And both of them are sales and marketing management. You can see them in our newsletter or on their website as well. So, Tom, let's roll into our people in leadership segment of the newsletter. Hang on. Somebody's just trying to get my attention.

Ha ha. Funny.

Pretty good, huh? Says workers are interrupted up to 275 times a day.

Yeah, so that was pretty good. I thought that was pretty good. But how many times have you been interrupted since we've been on the show.

Only about 17 text messages and 23 emails.

Yeah. Right. So I, when I first saw this, I was like 275. That seems like a lot. But if you really. What does that come out to be on an eight hour day? If you're, if you're. That's like 30 times 30. A little over 30 times an hour or 30 interruptions an hour, 35 interruptions an hour. I think that we've all gotten good on how we deal with that. At least. I feel like I've, I adapted to those interruptions, but I think we would be foolish to say that they don't create an impact.

No, I mean, so this is a survey that Microsoft did, compiled input from 31,000 workers across more than 30 companies and really kind of dug deep into this. And I mean, I think there's these interruptions that come. And then, you know, if you've got a mind like mine that just is all over the place to start with, you've got your own ones that come into that as well. But you know, if you want to. I mean, for me, I know like a good example is I've got some, some work I've got to do and some contractual work this afternoon I need to do. And I need to turn Outlook off. I just close Outlook and then turn off alerts on my computer so nothing else could be popping in and ideally turn my phone off and just hunker down because there's just this, the abundance of things that are coming in and blasting us. It's funny, I had to do some work on a, on a. We're getting ready to put out a press release in the next couple weeks about another partnership at Lead Smart Technology with another technology integration company. And I was working on the contractual component of that. And you know, when I did it, I did it at 11:45 last night because the house was quiet. I had some quiet music going and no emails were coming in and no text messages coming in because most everybody else was asleep. And, and so because, you know, all of us, our days are just overwhelmed with things.

Yeah. And they were talking about in here. Not that this happened, not just it was happening, but obviously the results of it. Right. Burnout and decrease productivity. Now I do think this is an interesting area where AI might be able to help.

Yeah. The article touched on that I thought was interesting.

Yeah. And how do we filter some of these interruptions? I think, and I'll, I mean, I think that we all sort of have I won't say all but probably a lot of us have also this fear of missing out too. So as like if we don't see a text message or we don't, oh my God, what are we missing? What's the. So we I think psychologically play into this as well and that doesn't help the situation as well. So.

Well, you know it's funny just, it just came to my mind earlier in this discussion on this article has made me think about, you know, when we're out to lunch or something, when we're together traveling. If I get an alert on my phone from something, you're like those are distracting, those are interruptions. Don't. Why do you take those off your phone? Right. And I get just a very small, small amount of them these days because I have 10 of taking some of that to heart with what you're describing because we do have that, that fomo, right. And you know, oh my word, what just popped up. And it is kind of amusing that how those things all, all play into things. But then it also made me think about, you know, you help out on the revenue side of our business oftentimes and some of the deals that we're working on with customers. So sometimes you're in the email threads on those and I'll get a teams message from you. Have you responded to Joe yet? Have you. What are you responding to Joe? When are you responding to Joe? I'm like well when I finish these three other things that I'm working on. So we get these and it does, it doesn't mean that any of them are right or wrong. They just happen. But I think what's interesting about this and maybe there's a little bit, there's a, there's a, there's a self serving component of this Microsoft research so says Microsoft's finding 40, 48 of employees and 52% of leaders claim that their workload is chaotic and fragmented.

Okay, I think that's fair. I think that's fair.

It's my life, no question. Yeah, right. And you know, I say I go from being out of control busy to my hair on fire. And there's nothing typically below that on the typical day. But what's interesting is it said the report makes the case for why companies will need to use AI agents to bridge the gap. And almost half of all leaders have already said using digital labor, which is, that's a, interesting to hear Microsoft using that because that's Mark Vinny mantra. Right. And those they're going head to head on this stuff. And Mark Benioff at Salesforce is saying that Microsoft and there he's. He won't let go of the clippy idea related to their pilot. Right. They're all their old little tool. But said anyways, they talked about this and said that almost half of all leaders were looking at digital labor to augment existing capabilities of their workforce as a top priority in the next 18 months. And I think that's, you know, the point here says it won't alleviate all of the pain, but if we can offload some of our mundane things that are also sometimes interruptions that can just get handled by digital labor, so to speak, or agents as we've been talking about earlier today, I think it's an exciting time in history. I'll give you an example.

I know we need to move on, but. Right. We have, you know, we've been evaluating meeting tools for tracking a meeting and then giving a list of to do's at the end of the day that came out of all the meetings which has been very helpful actually. But think about that from even an email perspective or a, or a text message perspective. Right. There's a lot of emails or things that we get that don't necessarily require an immediate response, but there's something in there that we may want to follow up on or know that we need to follow up on. It would be great to be able to at the end of the day say, okay, I was on eight zoom calls. Here's the things that came out of that. Oh, by the way, there were, you know, 50 emails that came in that actually had relevance that I need to be able to deal with. And I think we're going to see more of that rather than. Because the problem is. And I know for me if I don't handle an email right away and it slips down the inbox.

Sure.

Right.

Yep.

So yeah, that's. It's, it's not fear of missing out, it's a fear of messing up.

Yeah.

And missing the email along the way.

So I think, I think that's a good point. I mean, I think we're going to be at a place I simplest example, similar to what you're just describing is I had a text message because I forgot to block my, put my, my do not disturb on my computer. I got a text message. It showed up a few minutes ago and it was just from a, you know, a, a business guy who wants to have a meeting and if my, if I had an agent, which we'll have very soon, that would have just said here's my response, which is thanks for your text. Here's a link to Kevin's calendar. Right. It saves me 45 seconds. But if I could save 45 seconds 275 times a day as an example of this article, what could I accomplish?

Well, and I think if you use the agent and the technology too, then it can remove some of the fear of missing out because it's not going to disappear and you can handle it. You're not going to miss out. You're just going to be able to handle it or either have it handled automatically or handled on your own time frame. Yep.

So anyway, let's Tom, let's jump to our down to our we've got two segments that we'll kind of we're going to move through pretty quickly. But the first one is we had been in our people and leadership segment, but then we also have a segment called People on the Move. So there's three articles there. One of those is tied to we've talked a lot in the last couple of months about the the Big M and a transaction happening between QXO buying Beacon Roofing Supply and so there's an article there about all of the technology leaders that are being added at the QXO is added into the Beacon team for their expanded growth. Also an article about or update there about Tricor Braun adding a former Granger and Fleet Pride executive Kevin Wedick moving across. So that's good. And then we jump in and roll into our industry scuttlebutt segment. We just have three topics there each week. Good article in there about 3M's first quarter sales dipped but their margins and earnings climb. There's also a link in there in that when you read that article to what some of the categories the industrial and safety space at 3M are growing nicely as well. Fastenal CEO says that the company has raised some prices due to tariffs already. So with Fastenal as a major industrial, publicly traded industrial distributor here in the US doing that already. And then Fastenal also announced a stock split this week as well. So those were the key things in our industry Scuttlebutt section. Last kind of article for us to hit today is not religious, although it might sound that way. It says five things every leader can learn from Pope Francis who died earlier in the week. Any takeaways from you on that one?

You know, I, I read the article briefly. I didn't study it, but it was, you know, essentially from a from the Catholic Church perspective. Right. He was A bit more progressive in his leadership style and a little bit more open minded on some of the things together and tried to bring people together. And that was, you know, rather than create chasms, tried to create unity among things. And that was basically the premise of a lot of the things that were in the article.

Yeah, well, let's just hit a few of these before we wind down today. Right. And this is, you can just think about this from any leadership standpoint. Right. The comment was lead from among, not from above. Right. Be it be a man of the people, so to speak, which has not always been the case. And with popes and you can see that in executives and CEOs as well, they're not down in the trenches understanding what's really going on in their business. Listen to diverse voices. They give some examples of the Pope doing that, of the different people that he allowed to talk with him and influence him as well. It said to hold the line when necessary. It said while Pope Francis was far more liberal than his predecessor, he wasn't afraid to draw the line when necessary and gave some good examples of that. And then it talked about long term thinking, owning your mistakes and not hiding behind things. And so I just thought it was nice. And it just, you know, it seems like maybe some of it maybe sounds like a little bit common sense stuff, but I think we do a lot of articles and we share a lot of articles that, you know, if I were to read them, I would go, oh yeah, I know that. But boy do I know I need the reminders. As you know, an executive in our company, it's really important to be able to get those good reminders. So I thought these reminders were just tied to one individual who, who we lost earlier this week.

Yep.

So good stuff.

All right, let's wrap.

Let's do it. Well, that's it for us today. Thanks everybody that's been with us, we appreciate you coming and joining us each week. The comments that we had were great and appreciative of those. Had a nice audience in general today. Again, I'm Kevin Brown, this is Tom Burton. We get together every Friday morning unless someone is on an airplane, in the hospital or on a planned vacation. And we talk about the news of the week and how it impacts wholesale distribution and manufacturing. We've got next week. Joining us, Brooks Hamilton, who is a well thought, well, well respected thought leader in the AI world. And we've got Brooks joining us next week. We're looking forward to that. We've got, I think, Dan Wild from NAW will be with us as well. And then our around the Horn in wholesale distribution, what we call ATH 2.0. We've got Dan Judge coming up with us. Jan is the founder of NetPlus alliance, the buying group and an industry veteran and just a fine human being. And I got a couple other around the horn 2.0 guests lined up as well. And that 2.0 format is where we just do traditional podcast discussions with folks and dive a little deeper and peel that onion back, so to speak, as we do so. So we'll look forward to next week. Until then, we'll wish everybody a great week and we thank our sponsor, LeadSpark Technologies, the company that Tom and I worked for, where we take silo data from across your organization and your erp, E commerce, other data tools that you have. And we bring those together to gain great insights into your business, help make better decisions, improve customer experience, and accelerate growth and revenue. So if we can be of help to you, we'd love nothing more than have a conversation with you about how we're helping other companies achieve not just some growth, but amazing growth within their organizations by using the data that they have. So that's it for us, Tom, I'll wish you a fine week. Well, I don't even need to wish a fine weekend yet. Just for our viewers here, listeners here today, because I'm on a call with you in 32 minutes, I think with a vendor. Great week. Yes, all the best, everybody. Tom, thank you for your time today. We'll wish everybody a great weekend. Be kind, be safe, and do good things.

Have a good weekend.