Buyers, Sellers, and the Times They Are A-Changin'

Foreign.

Welcome to around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution with Kevin Brown and Tom Burton. Sponsored each week by LeadSmart Technologies. Tom, Kevin and their guests review the news of the week and dive deep into the topics impacting manufacturers, wholesale distribution, independent sales agents and the global wholesale supply chain. Whether It's M&A SaaS and cloud computing, B2B, E commerce or supply chain issues, we peel back the onion with our guests into the topics that impact your business the most.

Hey Kevin. Good morning.

Good morning, Tom. How are you today?

Doing good, doing good.

Fantastic. You know I was just thinking we were chatting a few minutes before our great intro music started. Always gets me going. In fact I've got a little Pandora channel tied to this, this music now too. But hey, I forgot to ask you, when was the last time you had a flat tire?

You mean on my car?

Yeah.

I don't know, 25 years.

20 years?

Yeah, probably.

I had another one last night.

Isn't that like two and two weeks or something?

No, it's like two and 45 days, you know, just ridiculous that. So I need to borrow forever.

You've got these, you've got these big ass tires and stuff. They shouldn't be going flat.

I just. Unbelievable. Yeah, 400 bucks by the time they're mounted and stuff. Yeah, I went left 9:15 last night. I'd stayed at a after Bible study for a short meeting and, and got in my car and just getting ready to almost down Pacific coast highway so home by 11:30.

Gotta stop driving over those, those things that cause severe tire damage or whatever.

Yeah, there you go. Maybe I was backing, backing up when I was but it's crazy anyways so today's just gonna get better because yesterday was not.

Good morning. Good morning to Tom May. Good morning to Will Quinn. Good morning to Brian Connolly. Happy Friday to everybody.

We're gonna look for some good comments from Will Quinn that's here today. We see a bunch of other people coming in here as well. I got to actually spend a little bit of time with Will on Monday of this week. So we're going to talk a little bit about ISA associations event that was this week. But before we do that, let's dive in. Kind of cool to see more people popping in. So welcome to around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. My name is Kevin Brown, joined by my lifelong friend and co founder of Leadsport Technologies who is also the sponsor of our podcast, Tom Burton. And we join together every week. Typically we will also get some, some guests that will come with us back. We've got some Good guests coming up we'll talk about shortly as well. But what we do is we spend the week looking around what's been going on and worldwide news related to the economy, technology, whatever might be going on, and we try and package that back along with the news of the week related specifically to wholesale distribution, bring that together in what we call around the Horn and wholesale distribution, where we can share thoughts with a live audience, which we're doing this morning. So if you're with us this morning again, great. We're broadcasting live now on LinkedIn live, Facebook live, YouTube live. If you like what you hear, click the like or the share button. If you're on LinkedIn, do the same thing with the invitation you got and tell your friends the more that we get here, the better comments that we get. We get a lot of people we know. In fact, Tom, I didn't even mention this to you, you know, being at. We're going to talk again and a little bit about the Industrial Supply association meeting this week, but ran into a bunch of people that were new people that I met who were familiar with around the Horn, read the newsletter that we send out as well as join us live here. So share with your friends if you can, if you enjoy what we do here. I mentioned the email. Every Friday morning, zero dark 30, we send out an email that goes around to really most of North America, but we have some international people that join us as well, where we consolidate all of that information. So mid afternoon, this will also go on to a podcast. So if you're listening on the podcast formats, the one thing we wanted to share with you, we reference the articles that go out in that newsletter. You wouldn't be seeing those, but we'll share with you what they're about and where they're from. So, Tom, what did I miss?

Well, I think you covered it. I think you covered it.

How to. How to get the newsletter if you don't get it, why don't you tell.

Them, hello, Elite Smart tech dot com. Very simple.

Send us an email.

I think everyone's getting the newsletter, so not a problem. But hey, good morning also to Adam and Brandon and Mike. And Mike. Mike Franz and Mike Hockett.

Awesome.

Yeah, got to see both of those gentlemen this week.

Okay, so do you want to go a little bit into the show or.

Or why don't we do that real quick before we cover the articles that we posted today?

All right, let me see if I can get this to work here. Hold on.

So Monday was a great golf outing. In fact, I spent some time with Will Quinn that's with us today. There's I Will Tom. You know, my, my golf skills are poor. You've seen them over and over over the years. You knew it was going to be a hard day when on the first hole we used all four of my shots. So we did part of the hole. But it was great, great, great golf.

After one.

Well, that's what I told the guys I was playing was, I'm done, I'm going to grab a beer and head out.

Yeah.

And no met some great new folks. I had never met the other three people in my foursome. So it's really good to meet new folks. Luncheon was great, really cool to see a lot of old friends and meet a lot of new folks. An absolutely beautiful course at Lookout Mountain in northern Phoenix. So that was a lot of fun but kind of the highlight for a lot of people. If you're looking at with us live this morning and see this picture, that's a tall gentleman there in the middle, NBA legend and hall of Famer. And you've probably been a. Yeah, well, you know what, before I go on from golf, Will Quinn just commented here that his team won an award. They physically got an award as the most honest team there because not mistaken, you were eight over. Yep, yep. So my team was three under 17 is what one 17 under. So hey, Bill Walton was there. So we'll talk kind of quick about this. But what an inspirational gentleman that Zach Brado on the right from Net plus Alliance. Zach, it was good to see their whole team there. So Tom, kind of scroll through this. We'll kind of talk of a few about a few things here I want to talk about. We go from there. Mike Marks was there. Let me talk about Mike really quick. This is actually one of my posts. What we're looking at here is we just searched the hashtag ISA23SO on LinkedIn. So if you want to relive the Week, Twitter or LinkedIn just use that hashtag ISA23 and you'll see a lot of stuff. Mike Marks did two sessions. Mike Marks is with Indian River Consulting Group, a well known writer, researcher, board of director members within wholesale distribution and a funny gentleman. Mike spent a lot of time. I'm going to reference in some of the things we talk about today, Mike's comments. I think what's coming up next is more. That's good. We can go on from there. Tom, this was some of my posts but I want to talk real quick about, about Bill Walton and I Don't know if ISA is going to be sharing any of the recordings, but if you get a chance to hear Bill Walton speak as. I've always kind of liked him but never been a big fan. But his conversation was about, he really talked about overcoming adverse adversity, teamwork, resiliency and working together. This Guy has had 39 surgeries. He has two replaced knees. His back and both of his ankles are fused. He can barely walk, but he never stopped moving for I think 90 minutes. He spoke. Phenomenal speaker. Born with birth defects in both feet that caused him problems walking. He overcame that to play basketball in high school. Ucla, NBA hall of Famer, I think he said he broke his nose 14 times and has lost 10 teeth playing basketball. But the stories that he shared about his teammates. I'll hit this really quick, but it was great. The number one teammate ever had was. It'll come to me in just a second. But toughest player ever played against was Crewmadul Jabbar. Absolute best player he ever played with was Larry Bird and just inspiring. And I, I hear a lot of keynotes out there and they're good industry folks that are really good. I think Will Quinn is commenting about that. You know, featured speakers mingling among the crowd. He was there at the cocktail reception on Monday night, Tuesday morning, over an hour he sat outside taking pictures with people and genuinely was interested. He was lining people up, so the picture was right. Phenomenal guy. So I won't spend all day on this, but good experience. So go sir, maybe search YouTube if you get a chance. So let's jump in. You wanna. I'm gonna reference back to some things through the week, but why don't you jump ahead on the news tomorrow?

Well, let's start with the first one here. You know, we've talked a bit about these over the, over the, I guess the last few weeks about, you know, the supply chain supposedly, you know, leveling out and some of the issues. But now there's conversations from the Wall Street Journal is that there's a labor dispute and is that going to potentially create more disruptions along the way? So I don't know. Right. It sounds like these talks have been going on for a long time and you know, continue to drag on. But I'm sure there's a lot of posturing and everything like that trying to, to be worked out there.

Well, and you're, you're right on with that. And what's interesting, it talked about too, right. Is there all of the back to school and pre holiday season Stuff is getting ready to start coming in. So it's because of all the port problems previously. People are ordering earlier. The stuff's been diverted to the Gulf coast and the east coast, but everybody wants to use Long beach and LA Harbors. And it's a difficult, difficult time. Talked about. This particular union represents 22,000 workers that handle 4 million containers a year. You slow that down and things change for all of us. You know, why do we post that here? Because 4 million containers also can include, you know, electrical wires and connectors. It includes power tools. It includes, you know, hard hat, safety glasses, reflective clothing. All of the types of stuff that, folks that, you know, we interact with mostly in the, in the industrial and building material and related industries, those products are coming in. So it's going to be, this is something we should be paying attention to. There's some, you know, I don't want to get into the, the morality of and of some of the things that some of the union seems to be doing because there's always two sides to a story. But, you know, raising a comment about, raising spurious safety issues about container handling equipment that causes the equipment to be out for days or weeks, that's really nothing wrong with it. And work slowdowns and so forth. Man, I hope they can get this stuff solved because that just gets ugly, you know.

Yeah, but I do think, as we've talked about before, is because a lot of companies are putting contingencies and they've looked at other options and, you know, they're, they're. I think that we're probably, you know, whether you're manufacturer or whatever, you're probably a bit more prepared for anything like this because it can happen that you would have been before. So I don't know that this is ever going to go away in 100%, but I think we continue to be more prepared. Yeah.

You know, Tom May just made a nice comment there. He said, should not all the China sanctions decrease the amount of products coming in? Tom, I would just suggest you go to look at the inside of your shoes, your shirt and your gym bag. I think all the labels still say the same, but I, I don't have any statistics with that, but I'm not seeing any slowdowns of this. If anybody else is, we'd love to, kind of love to hear about that, but, you know, kind of enough of that.

That's.

I think it's important that we talk about those things because, you know, the large part of our audience here is tied to a wholesale distribution and that's impacting products that could be coming in as well. So as we move forward, though, this morning, you know, I think the, if we had to title today's broadcast, Tom, I would say it is times are changing would probably be the, the, the.

I think times have changed is.

Well, there you go. Okay.

I don't think the R is. Is part of the equation anymore.

Well, I, yeah, I think you, I think, I think there's something in between. Right. We've seen change and there's a whole lot more coming.

Sure, there's a lot more coming. Yeah.

Yeah, you're right. And we talk about this regularly. You know, it's funny, I was just thinking you shared a. We're going to talk a little bit just a touch later about chat GPT. But as a little bit of a digression and side note, by the way, back to Tom's note about decreasing sanctioned products from China, he's commenting here that says Made in North Carolina, where he lives. Now, I've never owned anything that says Made in North Carolina other than maybe some ribs and a cheeseburger. So we'll have to check that out next time I'm in the south and see what I can find. That says Made in North Carolina. But, you know, you had sent me over the weekend a really intriguing podcast to listen to. And you know, we had Marty McLaughlin on last week from he's the chief marketing officer at Affiliated Distributors and he was talking about our banter because of our lifelong friendship. And man, I was just thinking, you know, because we were a little bit different pages here in Times Changing. Man, those guys got into it. I was listening to a podcast where they were like throwing rocks at each other. It was really something. So I'm not going to throw any rocks.

No. I think we need to kick up our game a bit more, but I.

Think we should argue more.

Yeah. Brandon Lee says cigarettes and Tom May says furniture. See, everybody makes something.

Yeah, that's right. Furniture and cigarettes in, in North Carolina. Great. Glad their governor doesn't listen. So. But, you know, it is so to your point, right. Times have changed. There is a lot more coming and we're going to talk quite a bit about that today because the mantra I think is, you know, buckle up, get ready and start changing yourself because there's challenges that are going to come if you don't. So I've got a few references from the ISA event this week that we can go to as we talk about this. But why don't we talk about this Amazon business milestone that they just hit.

Yeah, I mean this, we've again, we've talked a lot about Amazon business, or Amazon Supply as they call it, but it's growing by 40% and customer base by 20% over the last 20 years or 22 years, not 20 years in the past two years. So I think this ties into even a lot of what we've been talking about in the past with Brian Beck and others about marketplaces and the expansion of marketplaces.

Yeah.

What is, I think, interesting in the article is, is that the depth and the sophistication of the marketplace is, are continuing to grow so that you can, you know, even have more of a hybrid experience. Right. If you go to a marketplace, you're looking to get something you can. And again, this is where AI is really, I believe, going to help us go to another level of customer experience. But these marketplaces are becoming more than, oh, I just go in here and you know, it's just, it's more than just a big E commerce site to put in a credit card. There's interaction, there's experience that's going on again through the marketplace, but it's driven through the marketplace, but it's more than just a transaction.

Yep, yep, that's, it's phenomenal the changes that they see going on there as well. And you know, there was, as you mentioned, you know, 40% global customer base growth and $35 billion from where they started. And they said 96 of the four global Fortune 100 companies are actively using their platform in the B2B side. So, you know, we think about when we see the trucks driving down the street so often and there's, you know, we should really set a table setting at our house for the two or three Amazon drivers that come to our house each day. It seems like for, for the last number of years that we think about what's coming to our house mostly. But what's coming to the job sites is, is, you know, and the factories and the healthcare facilities and so forth are growing and growing on a consistent basis. So something to watch. But that the reason we, we shared this one today and to talk about that, about what's going on there on the B2B side of Amazon, it really ties into the next article that we talked about today, which is B2B buyers want it all online and now. And this is one we can maybe spend even a little bit more time on. This is a pretty, pretty telling story that goes here and it's, it's not new to people who join us weekly or Regularly here. This came from Digital Commerce360 and it was from a McKinsey and Company survey of 4,000 business executives in 13 countries. And like the headline of this is, 70% of decision makers are prepared to spend up to $500,000 in a single transaction.

Yeah, I don't know, I have to admit I'm skeptical of that and I think maybe the are. Prepared is the key word there. Or thinking about it or maybe it.

Should be our preparing.

Yeah. Or what. That seems a bit absurd but maybe, you know, again you have to kind of peel the onion a little bit on the, on the research. But I, what I think it does say. Right. If I were to just, you know, maybe take away a bit of the hype is that companies are prepared to do much more or willing to do much more on E Commerce if the right experience is there on E Commerce and it can be done with convenience. And like they talked about, you know, we just talked about hybrid models and you know, more personalization and again a much better experience. So I can accomplish a lot of that. Then I do believe that companies will be willing to do more and more because it's not just the experience, it's also the trust. Right. You have to have trust that if you're gonna, you know, do a transaction of a large amount that it's actually going to get fulfilled and handled. And so there's.

Let's unpack. Yeah, let's unpack that number though because I think where you're headed with this is the typical. I went and found something online and I'm going to click a buy button. Yeah, this is really like likely tied to. I would do that transaction online, but it was sold to me in a hybrid model. There was lots of things going on because we know most of most lead smart customers that we work with. Their E Commerce model is more about educating, working up quotes, doing projects with customers versus a customer going on and saying I'm going to go buy, you know, a $400 saw or three truckloads full of pipe. Right. So E Commerce takes on this different thing that we need to always kind of when we're talking in our audience. It's this melded E Commerce experience that includes quoting and, and requests for information and so forth versus just somebody saying I'm going to click on a half a million dollar equipment loader. Because I read about it online. But I do think this ties the hybrid. But I, I'm going to go. This, this article really had my attention as I went through this. I read it twice. I read it last night. Again this morning. The the article closes. I want to come back to some of the statistics there. The article closes by from McKinsey's quote is it's a defining moment for sales and marketing leaders.

Right.

We are at a tipping point right now where you cannot stand by and wait for these types of things. It just you have got to be involved. So they talked about one of the Comments here was B2B companies winning the most market share are simultaneously employing five major modern sales and marketing tactics. Deploying advanced sales technology. That's where our company leads. More technology plays in increasing hybrid sales teams and capabilities delivering hyper personalization tailoring strategies on third party marketplaces and and achieving e commerce excellence across the full marketing and sales funnel. Says they're developing sophisticated digital customer experience by leveraging social media, mobile devices and texting early in the buying process. It's astounding. Right. I mean this is kind of like they, they almost wrapped so much of what we talk about on an ongoing basis up in a nice little bow and, and threw it out there and says this is what you need to do if you really want to move ahead.

Yeah. And again this is where I think AI will really start to make a mark over time is and using internal first party data within an organization to help facilitate that experience that you just went through. Yep. So if buyers are certainly willing and not more than willing but they want to go through the experience kind of that digital experience all the way through, then you're constantly looking at refining that. But you've got to manage that in the same way that you would manage an in person relationship or a phone relationship or whatever the case may be. So it's, it doesn't really change. Right. It's the same actions that are going on. It's just taking place through a different channel and through different technology and a different experience. Yeah.

Well, Mike France here makes a good comment to go along with this. Right. He talks about, you know, local distribution. You need to step up its hybrid model, you know, to make this as a service concept a priority. Right. And, and man, Mike, you're spot on there and I couldn't agree with you more. And that's really what we're trying to talk to in this audience right now is you know, we have large national accounts folks, whether it's the industrial world of Grange or Fastenal, we have some of their folks that join us regularly here. But we have a lot more of an audience of the regional, local and privately held national companies and this is just this ongoing theme of, you know, it was spoken about multiple times at the ISA23 event this week. You know, in fact, Mike Marks really hit on it. We'll talk about that again a little bit in Mike's presentation brought up the same information we share regularly with our customers at Lead Smart and we talk about here each week is 70% of B2B buyers are millennials. Right. They expect. Mike said it. I posted in a LinkedIn in their Twitter post that said you have got to sell to buyers the way buyers want to buy. And if your mindset is that I've got 19 storefront locations and five additional warehouses and I've got 123 salespeople that we've grown to quarter billion dollars in sales, that's a phenomenal model and should be applauded. But that model needs to shift now. Very clearly. What we're seeing, this is just one more article leading that direction that times have changed to your point, but they're changing even more and bringing these marketplaces, digital tools, AI, the right technology for your sales team. It's never been more important.

Yep. And I also do believe not to go off track, but you leave that to me. Pardon?

You'll leave that to me. Going off track.

Yeah. You're a master at that. Is the. Is the. Is really. The speed of change continues to accelerate. So if you were to kind of look at, you know, almost like the hockey stick model, right. Change, change, change. We're seeing here the speed of technological change and certainly it's happening within the AI world. But so the speed of change is also going to be much, much faster. Right. And I think that's also maybe even sometimes more intimidating than the actual change itself is the speed of which things are actually occurring. So it's. Yeah. And I'm sure you were, you know, touched on a lot of that, even at ISA is, you know, this isn't something you have five years to figure out.

No, no, no. You know, and it's, it's. I referencing back to Mike Mark's presentation because he just was flooded with. At isa, he was just. On Tuesday, he was just flooded with data. And Mike and I had lunch together afterwards. We kind of sat off in a corner of the. Of the ballroom there where the lunch was served and chatted a lot. And we talked about this and you know, what we were saying is we were talking about whether it's. It's CRM or upgrading ERP systems, bringing AI into the business or whatever. It's. It's not necessarily that in the short term, somebody's going to go out of business, but their business is going to be highly impacted. And sustainability for the long haul of those companies, it's going to be extremely challenging because it's not. It's not. We're not in a setting here where some. Let's talk about distributors. Right? It's not that some distributors are changing like this and doing well and others aren't. And then, well, we'll see what happens. The buyer changed, right. And the buyer makes the decision about how they want to do business. And if we're not meeting him where he wants to be, we're going to suffer.

And I think that, you know, we had a customer. I won't mention any names, but I'll just. You can feel it in a business. And I. There's a point where, and we've seen that with a couple of our customers where, you know, they're kind of going downstream in their business and all of a sudden you can. They can tell that they're swimming upstream and they're swimming up against a big current.

Yep.

And we saw that with one of our customers that's a, you know, long, long, long time manufacturer. And they realize, okay, this is hard, swimming upstream. Right. They tried to swim upstream for a while. They tried to just push through it. You know, okay, we'll swim harder. We'll hire. We'll hire more people that are better swimmers. We'll do all that kind of stuff. They kept trying to swim upstream and they realized that the current was just getting faster and faster and faster. No, they weren't going out of business, but the effort that was going in to continue their growth and continue to move forward was getting harder and more difficult. And I think when you start to feel that as a business, when you start to feel like, man, I feel like I'm swimming upstream and I don't have that current or that tailwind behind me. That's when you got to be thinking about, this is happening. It's here. Right? And it's not, you know, and that current can get faster and faster and faster. Really, really quickly. And not only do you end up losing customers, but in the example of our, of our customer, right. They were losing good salespeople, they were losing good employees. They were. People were getting frustrated because they didn't want to go swim upstream, you know, over and over and over. So I think you. Most businesses can start to feel it. They may not know what it is, but it is that current that's coming from what we're talking about here. Yep.

Great. Well this is good. I just, there's I've got a whole list, you know, of show notes that I put together here that are statistics. I'm not going to go through those because of time today. But what I would recommend you is if you get a chance click on this link in the newsletter. It's the articles entitled B2B buyers want it Online, Want it all Online. And now it's posted April 14th. I think this is a digital 360 as well. And great article with some great statistics. Or again if you're not getting our newsletter, just let us know hello atLead smart tech.com or if you want that article in particular, let us know. We'd be happy to send it to you. Some really solid. I don't know why, this one just really resonated with me. Maybe it was what went on all week. So let's kind of move ahead to this additional article here. Going back to digital, right? Wholesalers go digital for new money making opportunities. Some good kind of tips in here. They just talked about quite a bit about using insight driven strategies, collecting data on product profitability across different lines, building product mixes correctly. I just immediately went back to something we think about all the time when we're talking with our customers and potential customers is about the silo data that they have around their companies. You know, and this is really looking at pulling a lot of that together to really help the digital strategy as well.

Yeah, and they talk about, you know, building personalization. So personalization is something that also is rapidly becoming more expected from a buyer and it also really can benefit a, you know, because now you can communicate a message that's much more aligned and relevant to a specific buyer versus a generalized message that may hit, you know, pieces of what that buyer actually cares about. So yeah, there was some other good, interesting stuff in there as well. Just about that. Again, it all ties together, right? It all ties together on how do you, you know, kind of again get the tailwind behind you, reverses fighting the headwind. But it was just another view of that good.

I think that's worth people, you know, taking a look at if you have some time, you know, it's interesting as we typically talk about we. So that's kind of the four key articles we had today in the news. But you know, as we have our industry scuttlebutt section of our newsletter, we typically move through that pretty quick. I want to spend a little time on that today. There's a great article about Verison in there and launching an AI driven app that Verisin is a company that Paul Noble founded. He was at ISA this week. Really sharp guys. He didn't speak this time but he's spoken the past. He actually started this SaaS company to help manufacturers plan, do better inventory planning and manufacturing planning. Some really cool tools. But they've developed some app based tools now for manufacturers. So kind of neat stuff using AI tools as well. And like, you know, we just keep talking about each week we're going to see more and more of that flowing in. But the Sonepar article here, and Sonepar is a French owned global, global distributor of electrical and electronic products. Major company out there. But they talk about this, there's an article here that talks about their digital investment and they announced earlier this week that they are going to invest over a billion dollars in digital transformation. That's astounding.

They're not investing a billion dollars in Lead Smart though, unfortunately for the digital transformation.

So yeah, I didn't see any Sonapar people in Arizona this week. Otherwise I could have talked to him about that. That would have been good. But you know, this talks about what they're doing, right? Digital transformation over five years, focus on personalized customer experience. Just what we've just been talking about all day, right? They said all customer and associate touch points so customers and employees will be incorporated into the platform they're building. Web, phone, mobile app their branches system to systems back to our silo data.

Right.

And delivery all through digital transformation. So this doesn't mean that you know, everybody needs to invest a billion dollars. Right. But there are steps and we talk about this regular and we talk about it ongoing to help our customers with that is you don't have to spend a billion dollars. You don't have to spend a million dollars. But having an action plan and a digital transformation strategy and you know we have a, in fact Brandon Lee that's with us today, right. He's a chief transformation officer for the organization that he's consulting with right now on a long term contract and he's helping companies move in that direction. Right. I've got data everywhere, I've got antiquated technology. How do I bring these things to get things together to have a roadmap for the future, to grow and drive my businesses ahead. So anybody needs help with that and they're looking for an outside help. Brandon Lee's your guy. Besides the fact he's a super, super friend of ours and, and sharp, sharp guy that understands Technology and he's even built technology. So I just, I think as we talk about what distributors are doing this week, this announcement from Sonopar, they really highlighted some things that they want to do about omnichannel platforms and so forth. And that's what the customer wants. Let's deliver it. Yep, that's good. All right, next article there that Tech talk this week or Tech Spotlight? You want to chat about that a little bit? Did you catch that?

What's that?

You want to chat about that a little bit?

Yeah, Come on, boy. I'm a little slow this morning. A little slow you must be because I'm not drinking coffee. So the, again, the same theme, right? What it's talking about in this article, not so much about chat GPT but about being nimble and how is an organization become nimble. I have spent and I think, you know, Kevin, we talked about this, we're going to do a webinar here soon about. I think the webinar will be entitled something like AI Friend or foe. Really dig into it and we'll let you know. Hopefully in the next week or so we'll do a webinar. But I've been immersed in the last two weeks really understanding where the AI revolution is going and I've been looking at it from the viewpoint of how we're going to incorporate it into our own technology at Lead Smart and how we're going to work with this with our customer. But what I'm finding is, and you know, I'm, I'm, I've been in technology my whole career, right? 35 years. So I went, you're old. I'm going to be 40 soon. So it's, it's, you know, I had, I was in the dot com and you know, mobile revolution and all of those types of things that have, that have gone on there and the speed of which the, the innovation is occurring and the technology is occurring with AI is orders of magnitude faster than you had with other previous technologies, you know, and even, you know, the iPhone, right. The iPhone was a major change. The smartphone, let's just call it that. Well, it took by the time the first iPhone came out to the time the second iPhone came out I think was a year between iPhone 1 and iPhone 2.

Great example.

Right. Well, the things that are happening in AI are happening in days. Some of the things that are happening innovation wise. And it's just, it's, it's mind boggling. So the, the key is, is what they were talking about in this article is man, it can be overwhelming sometimes when you have all of this change and all of these things that are here. As an executive, it makes sense to really, you know, and whether it's AI or anything, take a step back and figure out, okay, how can I be more nimble and not get overwhelmed by these things that are happening really quickly? And disruption, because disruption can now happen in days or maybe micro disruptions kind of can happen within days versus years. It's a very, it's a very different challenge for executives in a business. I mean, I feel it in our business, right. I feel like if we don't stay ahead of this, somebody else is going to and we're not going to frankly going to be servicing our customers the way we should be servicing our customers. So the, the pressure is on all of the time to be trying to, to, to keep up with it. So anyway, it was a good article that talked a bit about that and. But how it actually meant is running a business and doing a business.

Yeah. And you used it. Thanks for that recap on that is nice you did. That was this month's compliment by the way, the that you used the term nimble, which I think is perfect for this. Right. They use the term cultivating an ambidextrous or paradox mindset.

Right.

It was kind of interesting that the shifting, changing parts of things. Good, good stuff.

No, and I think they're ambidextrous thing is like sometimes you're going to have to go left hand and speaking of Bill Walton. Right. Sometimes you're gonna have to shoot left handed, sometimes you have to shoot right handed, sometimes you have to go around the back. But if you don't embrace that, that's what I'm finding. If it's like sometimes it can be overwhelming, you know, and you have to almost figure out, okay, as an organization, how can you embrace that, not go chase shiny objects but at the same time know that you're going to have to adapt, you know, kind of in real time to some degree.

So if you get a chance to. We don't have time to go through all of those today, but if you get a chance, if you read that article, they talk about four pillars to help with that as well within the article. So give some, some additional good feedback. I wanted to jump ahead here. This, you know, each week we have back to those who are listening on the podcast or if you listen to recording and you're not watching this. Right. We're reviewing on our monitor here for those that are live with us on LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube a newsletter that we send out each week. So we start off with some global news, relate that back to wholesale distribution. We talk about some information typically about M and A activity announcements with major players and wholesale distribution. And we have a couple of features that we talk about relating to just Goodreads. We talk a little bit more about this week in tech or Tech talk as we call it. And so that's what we're kind of looking at now. And in the Goodreads this week there's a great article, I think it was actually posted in Modern Distribution Management, but it's from Dirk Beverage and Dirk is in the wholesale distribution world. Whether you distribute janitorial supplies, electrical supplies, healthcare products, whatever it might be. Dirk Beveridge is just a phenomenal speaker, researcher, coach. He does we Supply America tour. He's getting ready for right now. They he gets in a motorhome with a camera crew and I think he did two months of traveling around the country and he stops and parks that motorhome for a couple of days, flies off somewhere, does a keynote address. He comes back and but he's visiting with family owned wholesale distributors and so his sessions are really good. So it's all recorded and available both on LinkedIn and I think he's got a YouTube channel. But he's hosting next week an HR and distribution conference in Nashville. In fact, his keynote is a friend of mine, Shawn Dubervack from formerly the Chief Economist from the Consumer Technology association. And Sean's a phenomenal futurist speaker. I'm hoping to see the recording of that. But Dirk posted an article here that's entitled rethink your employee value proposition. A modern approach to employee engagement and distribution. Back to the oh you know what, Will Quinn just commented on that Will is in for your company helping sponsor that we Supply America tour again this year.

I'm pretty sure they are. Yes, yes, I'm pretty sure they are.

I haven't, I haven't heard that for sure yet. And talking to Dirk, I talked to him in December face to face over lunch and hadn't heard that. But in the past Infor, phenomenal developer and supplier of ERP systems globally had a great presence at ISA this week as well. Will, who's with us most weeks, is one of their strategists in their organization as well and he says yes, so great session that you can do here. But anyways, this is just. This article is just right back to Change, right that we're talking about. It says this is on some research 90% of distribution leaders believe we must reimagine our traditional employee value proposition. And what does that mean? They describe it as the great. And this is right, this is classic Dirk, right? The, the great redefinition that goes with the noble calling of distribution. Right. He's, he's got these catchphrases that are great, but he said everything is being redefined. Right. How customers buy, the needs of employees, how we market our business, how we communicate with one another, technology adoption and integration and how, when and where we work.

I love that. Yeah, I, I don't know why you need to be nimble. I mean those seem to be just the same old things that we've always done.

That is well said, right? That is just. By the way, we'll just post it if anybody heard that. And you want to check out what Dirk does with We Supply America. It's. We supply America.net. so for those of you listening on podcast or recorded and can't see the broadcast live, that's where you would find that. And it's really cool. He does some, some really neat stuff. He's visited with some great companies. But they, they quote in here an HR manager from a distribution company here and she says you have to meet the people where they are. Right. There are fewer individuals in the workforce, less people want to work the way baby boomers worked and fewer people want to work in the environment of my whole life is this job. Wow.

I'm going to do a little tangent here because I was, I heard an art and I'll find the article twice today.

Twice today for you.

I've got to, I've got it.

Go, go, go, go.

But I heard and I'll try and find the article but this was interesting is that there was more and more companies are hiring though older people 15 years and older because they're finding that a lot of the older 50 year old plus people have a different work ethic than some of the younger people. And it's not that the younger millennials are bad. It's just there's certain jobs that require a certain type of approach and work ethic to that. And so there's been a resurgence of 50 year old plus hires because you were just saying is like people work differently than they did back as baby boomers. Yeah, but the baby boomers there's a place for, for that type of work and that type of work ethic and a lot of companies are starting to recognize that as well. Anyway, I go off on a tangent but it's relevant to it.

No, it's, that's absolutely. Well, you know what? There's, I can't remember. I've seen parts of it with my wife, the movie and, and parts of it a bunch of times on airplanes. There was a movie with famous, famous, famous actor whose wife was retired wife died and he decided to go back to work and he went out and interviewed for a job anyways became like the personal assistant of the like millennial type woman CEO of a technology company, I think anyways, and he brought them around to a whole new way of thinking on a lot of stuff. And it was kind of funny, you know, this, this digital only organization where you know, the guest sign in thing is on an iPad and everything they do is digital. Who was that? Was it Robert De Niro? I think is who was in it. And anyways, probably 10 years ago. Great, great story tied exactly to this. Right. And you to your comment right? There is. And it makes me think, Tom, you look at some of the technology companies who have been going through these crazy layoffs, right. And it's really sad to me. I had this discussion with a couple of different people, both some international folks that were at ISA this week and, and, and some US folks that we see so many layoffs happening right now. And it's almost like there's this, well, well, they did it. So now my board expects me to maybe do that that aren't necessarily even needed. And it just, it's sad to watch that, how horrible that can be. But I know in the technology space in particular, there was so much hiring during the pandemic.

Right.

We need all these people. We need all these people. Well, some of those people were lazy. I won't say lazy. They didn't have a strong work ethic to start with.

They were inefficient. They were very inefficient.

They were inefficient.

Right.

And the pandemic didn't feed into that of helping that.

Right.

Because nobody was pushing too hard on. Because we're in a global pandemic and you don't want to make, you know, you don't want to make anybody cry or feel uncomfortable. Well then they're walking around all day in their pajamas, you know, and a dress shirt for their Zoom meetings. And there you go. Will Quinn says Robert De Niro and the intern, it was called.

I haven't seen that. Haven't seen that.

Yeah, it's, that's a, that's, that's an airplane watch, I think. I don't know if that's worth it. I don't think it's worth a Friday night on Netflix, but that fully it's good story. Thanks Will for sharing that with us. But you know, we've got people that their work ethic is just different. It's different than their, some of their could be even older siblings. And so some of what's going on in these tech layoffs has been getting rid of some dead wood, you know, along the way as well. So anyways, I just, I thought this article was good because it really tied all the way back around to what we're talking about. We talked started the day off talking about changing buyers. Now we're talking about changing salespeople. Tom, you and I have been talking about the fact that the sales people that are coming in right now where we're going to be hired are expecting different things of technology tools. We have talked to two or three people this week that they've said that they've interviewed people recently. These are organizations that don't even have a CRM or have very antiquated CRMs and certainly no customer intelligence, no forward looking views like we do. And that have said people in interviews have asked about what does our tech stack look like. So buyers are changing, sellers are changing, E commerce is moving fast. We're winding down. 46 minutes in I think we're at. And what do we need to talk about to wrap the day up?

Well, as usual we have our list of upcoming events that are on the newsletter here as well. Took a bunch of them came off. So there was a bunch of events this last week.

It was crazy busy all over North.

America that popped off this list. But there's still a lot of things coming and. Yeah. So do you, do you have any upcoming guests that you'd like to share with us before?

Yeah. So I think it's the people are stuck with the two of us I think about next week. But the following week we've got Mike Hockett who's as executive editor, senior editor. I'm sorry Mike, you know you're here today, Mike, if you're still on with us, tell me your exact title. But Mike is with Modern Distribution Management. He works with Tom Gale there at mdm. They publish so much great data, host some really cool events. We'll spend some time talking about mdm, but Mike's an industry veteran as well. We spent some time one on one at our booth this week at isa chatting as well and he's going to join us on the 5th. We're going to have coming up next month as well. Kate Daniels from NetSuite is going to join us. I'm negotiating with Will Quinn's agent and handlers about maybe Will joining us. And we've got another.

We can afford that. We can't afford that type of thing. I mean, we could probably get Bill Walton, but I'm not sure we can get Bill.

Yeah, I should have talked to, should have talked to Bill Walton about coming on.

Yeah, you never know.

Yeah. But it was, boy, there's a handful of others. Tom, you curveballed me. I should.

That's all right. No problem. That's all right. A few coming up. So that's.

We've got a handful of really good guests coming up as well. Absolutely. And. And then we're going to, you know, I think we'll probably start Aloha Fridays here coming up again soon, at least occasionally. It's gorgeous day here in Southern California. And so that's probably coming up. So I'll warn people ahead of time, but. And then we start going in. Summer starts easing. Blue Hawk Conference is coming up. As Will just added, we need to get that on this list. In fact, anybody that if you've got a industrial distribution related event or trade show that you're going to, that you see on our newsletter that we don't have posted, please share that with us by email and we'll get that added to the list. So. All right, that's, I think could be a wrap for us, Tom, today, everybody.

Have a good weekend. Thank you. Comments.

Yeah, be safe, do good things, be kind and join us again next week, hopefully.

All right, take care.

Talk soon.

Foreign we hope you enjoyed today's episode and our guests each week we try our best to dig into the topics that are impacting your business. So please reach out to us and let us know how you think we can make the show better or topics you'd like for us to tackle or talk about more often. And even guests you'd like to see join us. We're looking forward to bringing you next week's session and hope that until then you stay safe, stay focused and do great things. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review to help others in wholesale distribution get access to the conversation. And finally, please check out our sponsor, LeadSmart Technologies and their manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry CRM Customer Intelligence and channel collaboration platform. That's Lead Smart Technologies Opportunities atLead smart tech.com.