Ethics In AI & The Importance Of Personalization In B2B Marketing, With Mike Hockett #aiforbusiness

Foreign.

The Horn in Wholesale distribution with Kevin Brown and Tom Burton. Sponsored each week by Lead Smart 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.

Mike, how are you?

I'm good. Happy Friday to everybody.

Yeah, isn't that great, Tom? You starting to feel a little better? You've been sick this week, which is very uncharacteristic of you.

Yeah, I think I'm coming out of it a little bit, but yeah, this has not been my best week of in a while.

So no more ski trips from you. You get out there in public and see too many people. We need you in your cave.

I have to be in my bubble and all hell breaks loose.

That's right. So no ski trips for you next year. Just we're locking you down. Got to keep you there. Very good. Well, good morning everybody. I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with my lifelong friend and business partner and co founder of Lead Smart Technologies, Tom Burton and our guest, Mike Hockett from Modern Distribution Management. We're going to chat with Mike a little bit in just a moment. We're excited and appreciative of Mike joining us today, but before we dive in, we'll talk a little bit about who we are and what we do. We get together every Friday morning here both on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live and Facebook Live, and we chat about the goings on the past week in the economy, supply chain, mergers and acquisitions, sales and marketing, anything that could impact both manufacturing and wholesale distribution. We do that, as we mentioned, live here where we're doing it right now. But later in the day our editors will have taken all of this data and consolidated it together in some show notes and will be available on all the popular podcast platforms. Apple, Spotify, Odyssey, Amazon, Google, across the board, those will be available. So our show each week is sponsored by the company that Tom and I work for, which is called Lead Smart Technologies. We developed an AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence solution that brings deep insights into data that distributors and wholesale, main wholesale distributors, excuse me, and manufacturers have an abundance of and we help turn that into, as we said, insights that help accelerate growth within organizations. So a couple of things before we get started today. If you are with us regularly and you like what we do, please Click the thumbs up. Follow the Lead Smart Technology page on all your social media platforms. If you're listening on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button as well and ring that bell for us. Or if you get our newsletter and you enjoy that, share it with your friends. And the more people that we get coming in, the more guests we'll get and the better the content will continue to be. Lastly, if you're listening on the podcast later in the day or in the future and you're not watching us live here or one of the recordings, you will not be seeing the newsletter. And that's the format of our program is we review a newsletter that we publish every week. It's called around the Horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing. It goes out to thousands of people. If you don't get that and you would like to, two simple ways. Send us an email@helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that right out to you. Or you can just pop over to the website for the show, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. and all of our previous episodes are there. More information about the show is there and you can sign up for the newsletter as well as subscribe to the podcast. So that's everything, gents. Let's get ready to roll.

I just want to say good morning to the people that are coming through on the comments. Ron, good to see you again. Dave, a regular from my other show here. This is great. And Will and looks like Brendan's here as well. And James, hey, smart customer here. So this is great.

Good to see Brendan with Industrial Supply Association. Brendan's going to be coming on with us here in the next couple weeks. They've got a big event coming up in April. Mike, are you going to be in Florida for the ISA event?

Oh, yeah. And if you go to the MDM homepage right now, the top story is our Q A with Brendan Breen is it's kind of a primer for isa talking about everything that's going on with the show and what's new and, and just kind of some Brendan's general thoughts about the industry. So thank you for Brent, Brendan, for taking part in that.

Good. Well, I'll be in. I'll be in Charlotte for the event as well. And maybe we can spend a little time together down there. Mike. It'll be good to see him face to face. It's been probably nine months or so since I've seen you, so that's great. So let's jump in and let. Mike, let's talk a Little bit more about you mdm. Some big news there recently. Why don't we start with you?

Yeah, it's been a couple real exciting months for us MDM folks. I'm hoping everyone has seen by now. In mid January we announced that naw, which is the national association of Wholesaler Distributors, has acquired mdm. And basically it's, we've had a long term great relationship with NAW as an association and there was just a lot of synergies on both sides of what we can do for them, things that they can do to help us just do what we're doing even better. But NAW is very happy to let MDM stay independent while being, you know, a brand of naw. So we, we're still getting some of the finer details hammered out as far as what this is going to look like going forward. A lot of strategy sessions, a lot of meetings this week. But yeah, we're all excited on both sides. Tom Gale, our, you know, who's been MDM steward for 30 years now, he's still on board. You know, I know he's looking to wind down his day to day with MDM, but he's fully on board through 2024 and beyond. Yeah, just, I think we're just all excited on different collaborations that we can do with NAW and just a lot of momentum for NA for MDM to end 2023 and to start 2024 here. So yeah, just a lot going on between our two organizations.

That's, that's great to hear and I'm sure that, glad you addressed that because I'm sure that's a big topic with, with many folks is what's going to happen to Tom because Tom is certainly an icon within, in wholesale distribution. So it's great that he be around.

You know, he's going nowhere soon, so we're happy to still have him for at least the rest of this year and then probably some beyond.

That's great, great to hear. We've got, I mentioned to you earlier, we've just been working earlier this week and last week with some of the marketing folks related to naw and we've got CEO Eric coming on Croatia, Dan coming on, you're here with us today. Hopefully Tom's coming on soon. So we've got with you here today and those other three coming, four folks from MDM and NAW over the next few months. So we're looking forward to that further discussion about that. Tom, you had another thought you wanted to share?

You know Mike, what would you say? Obviously there's probably a lot of strategic reasons for the acquisition, but if there was one that kind of popped out, what would you say is kind of maybe the primary strategic driver for the acquisition? And what do you think the outcome of that will be?

I think from NAW's perspective, it was two key drivers. One was they loved MDM's data analytics capabilities, which is something that just really no one else in the industry for distribution either does it or does it anywhere close to MDM's level in terms of providing data analytics to distribution customers, to manufacturing customers. These data reports that really help snapshot where product demand is down to the county level on a geography scale. So they love that capability that we had and now it's part of naw, and then they love what we're doing on the editorial side. And you know, MDM has, well before my time here, had a great reputation of being just, you know, a neutral, impartial resource of what's going on in the industry, especially from the thought leadership side. So NAW was. Had a role as a thought leader kind of going into this acquisition, but they knew that getting MDM on board was going to help position NAW way more as a thought leader and just, you know, an industry resource that they can give to their members. So, yeah, I think that that's what they saw in mdm. And then from mdm, we saw NAW as just additional resources that they can help us get the word out better. Just more, you know, research resources that they can help us with. So really, I'll keep saying it again, but there was just, you know, win wins on both side of the board here for both of us. So it just, it kind of made sense to partner after being very familiar.

With each other for forever. There's been so much crossover, right. And, and it, it's interesting, right? We, as we publish our newsletter each week, we do it in very similar, the format of what NAW does with theirs. A little bit different topics on a. On an ongoing basis for us, but they're grabbing information from MDM consistently and reposting it. Right. So it's a nice synergy there. So I have two questions before we dive into the news and today's show that I wanted to kind of ask you about, maybe you can give us. And we'll do this obviously when we get some of the executives from NAW joining us as well, but maybe you could give us just a quick view. Right, we've got Brendan with us today, CEO of Industrial Supply Association. We've got ASA and in plumbing and pipe, valve and fitting, we've got a lot of vertical organizations that are associations. How does that, how do those then relate to NAW as a broader group?

I mean, naw, if you compare it to mdm, they cover, they interact with a lot of the same industries that MDM does. You know, we're pretty focused on the industrial, commercial, building supply, hard goods sectors. NAW is also that. But they expand even beyond what MDM's coverage encapsulates. You know, NAW stretches into pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, oil and gas. Some of these adjacent industries that mdm, you know, we cover, but just we don't have the, you know, we haven't had the resources to cover those industries maybe to the extent that we want. So that's part of what we're looking to gain with NAW is, yeah, like, keep doing what we're doing, but expand it even further.

Right.

So I think that's what people can expect to see out of MDM going forward is, you know, maybe more coverage on some of those industries that we just haven't been able to touch to the extent we'd like.

It could be agriculture, food, service or different stuff like that. Right. So as I kind of looked at it, maybe you can reinforce this or correct. It is most of those vertical associations that are very narrow and specific of who they serve are members of NAW as well, because they're a broader organization across the board and wholesale. So I think that's a good, good, good fit with that. So before we dive in the news, tell us just quickly about Mike Hockett. Right. Let's know about you briefly before. I don't know. Everybody here knows you. Yeah.

So a lot of people don't know my background. Before I got into, you know, distribution, editorial writing, I was in sports writing, local sports writing. Coming out of college, I. I grew up, born and raised, southern Wisconsin. I thought my dream job was right. Oh, of course. No, but, yeah, I thought my career path was I'm going to write for the. About the packers and Badgers someday. But I kind of quickly got burned out on sports writing. The schedule's terrible, the pay was terrible. Just doing too much for too little. So I got out of that. And then 2014, I saw that there was an opening in Madison, my hometown here, for a B2B trade publication. I didn't know at the time that it was for Industrial Distribution Magazine. My first day on the job, they said, hey, we're putting you on this publication. And I was like, okay, what is distribution? So I had a crash course that first couple of years learning what the industry was, the key issues.

It's the thing that drives the world, that no one understands.

Yeah, I had no familiarity with the industry going in, so, yeah, it's. It's been. It's kind of been a really cool ride these past 10 years that I've been covering this. Coming from no background in it, but yeah, outside of work life, I'm a pretty avid gardener with my wife. She has the greenest thumb you would ever imagine. She's the mastermind. I'm kind of the. The guy that moves things around. I'm the labor part of it. Yeah, we kind of have our own mini home, like an urban homestead is what we call it on our little quarter acre here in Madison. So that keeps us busy outside of work life.

So I'm looking for my package in the mail of the maple syrup, because I saw on your Twitter feed yesterday you're a maple syrup. Is that farmer? What do you call that?

Yeah, I don't know what the correct term for it would be, but yeah, this is our fourth year making our own maple syrup from. We have a couple maple trees in our yard, and then we just. We just have five other neighbors, their trees. It's. It's a big business in especially northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, northern Michigan. But yeah, now is the time of year where the trees are starting to wake up. Like you kind of have. It's all about the weather. You got to find. You want it to be above freezing, above freezing during the day, below freezing at night. It just creates that vacuum effect in maple trees where SAP runs up and down. So right now we're collecting a lot of maple SAP, and then we're boiling the heck out of it because it takes about five gallons of SAP to get one pint of syrup. So you can just imagine the amount of boiling you have to do. So we're boiling SAP right now, all waking hours of the day, kind of through the weekend. We will be.

I gotta laugh my hair. Mike, not to cut you off there, but I don't know if you're able to see the comments here, but, boy, you're outnumbered. There's some big Minnesota fans here and. And Bears fans and so forth. So I probably opened a can of worms there. But if you want to know what Mike's up to and whether he's passionate about sports or not, check out his Twitter feed because you'll see the passion there, which is great. So that was great. We're thankful for you being with us today. It's good to get to know you a little bit better, Tom. Let's dive into the news and get started, huh?

Let's do it.

All right, so first article today from the New York Times. We mentioned earlier in our newsletter that we publish each week, once in a while. If you've looked at an article a number of times, like sites like the New York Times, where this article is from, they have a paywall come up if you're not subscriber there. I always just use a different browser, switch to Firefox or something to get to those articles. But this was interesting, this article. It says, are we in a productivity boom? For clues, look at 1994. Mike, I'm confident you were not in your career at 1994, but.

No, I was about eight years old.

Yeah, yeah, see that, Tom? Puppies. But Tom and I were in our career. We were a few years, five, six years into our careers. And either of you guys have any specific takes on this article? I thought it was interesting how it related where we're at today with technology to 1994.

Yeah. I mean, my take on it was, you know, there was. There was a lot of different points in there. Right. It wasn't just one thing. It was multiple points that it related back to sort of, okay, what are we dealing with now compared to then? What are the similarities? Whether it's remote work, whether it's technology, whether it's all of those types of things? Are all those things leading into that potentially a productivity boom? I know there was quite a bit in there about AI as well, and there were some people that were skeptical of AI really having productivity impacts, and certainly in certain industries. I don't think I agree with that, but that's a different conversation. But, Mike. Yeah. Was there anything that jumped out at you specifically that you really. And I know you have some. Speaking of data. Right. You had some data that you shared with us, but I think would be worth looking at as well.

Yeah, just broadly looking at the article. I thought there was a lot of interesting corollaries that they drew from 94, when at that time, it kind of talks about how computers had been around for decades at that point, but business wise, you know, we hadn't really figured out how to gain productivity from them, how to, you know, do some of these processes that, you know, rely on computers that did make things more productive. So that's where it kind of related that to this age that we're in now, 30 years later, where companies are just, you know, AI has been around for, you could say decades now. But companies on the business end are just now figuring out how to leverage that on a productivity scale and leverage just different forms of automation. So I thought that was the grand corollary that they drew there. And it is pretty interesting because, yeah, just on the distribution side, companies are just scratching the surface and in a watch and learn, you know, process with AI. So I think we are going to see over these next two to three years, especially as companies get their feet wet in AI, they're going to start learning how to become even more productive with AI. I do think there is natural corollaries there that do make some sense.

I think the crux of this though, as I looked and tried to always try and look at the story behind the story as we publish these things, I think for me, what stuck out here was that basically there was an adoption curve that happened with PCs and there was an increase in productivity for a number of years. It didn't happen right away. And what they're describing as well here with, you know, in the late 2000s and throughout the 2010s, we were gaining access to. Well, first off, we got, you know, in the 2000s we got smartphones. Then all of a sudden Internet connection speed went through the roof. And then we started with cloud computing later on. And what they're saying is part of this is that we're just getting into that cycle of seeing productivity increases from things that we saw a number of years ago. Now what we're looking at is this. Well, yeah, you know what there's. We've seen artificial intelligence at some level has been around for many, many years, but we're seeing the same curve of this cycle of accessibility to it. Now the question that comes out of this, will we still see that lag of when we gain massive productivity? And I think, Tom, that may be where your disconnect might have been a little bit here.

Yeah, I think the lag will be a lot less. The reason is that if you look back at some of the things you just talked about, even cloud or, or PCs or whatever, it wasn't obvious the applications weren't there, it wasn't obvious how the productivity was going to occur. It doesn't take long to look at AI and some of the AI capabilities to see obviously how that application is going to work. Having those different applications at the speed of which they come out, it's all about applications. And I think that's why we had the lags that we've had, is the applications weren't there to actually do that. But anyway, one more point on and I know we're going to talk about remote work here in a few minutes as well. They also brought up that, you know, remote work by eliminating the commute. And what do they say? I think eliminating having to get, you know, put on my tie and moving in the morning or whatever, that added quite a bit of extra time to people's job or day that they weren't being in a car doing other things as well, which I found also, you know, interesting and certainly that's not going away.

Yeah, they brought up the point that the, the debate is still out there whether remote work makes companies more efficient or not. I think there's arguments on both sides, but they did argue that, yeah, like just having that not having the commute to work and just having the conveniences at home can make employees want to stay at their job longer, which in the long run can save these businesses on just the training and retraining and hiring, retention, all of those efforts. So it's kind of hard to measure, but you can definitely see why there might be overall productivity gains from the hybrid work environment.

Yep, good.

Do we want to share those two? A couple of those?

Yeah, let's do those quickly. And it kind of ties a little bit into the the following article we're going to look at as well. Mike, you would share these with us?

Yeah. Just briefly touching on these. These come from the LEED School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, which MDM partners with for a lot of our forecasting projects. And what this shows right here is this revenue per employee and how it's changed year over year within wholesale distribution. So as you can see here, you know, over this is a 30 year timeline, back to 93 overall, pretty steady. But you can see the major dips where the Great Recession of 2008, 2009, certainly at Covid with 2020. And then you see this giant spike in revenue per employee in 21 and 22. That's predominantly inflation driven. That's because distributors were seeing major year over year revenue gains because they were able to charge way higher prices which really inflated their revenue dollars. Then you see a crash back to Earth over 2022, 2023. But I want everyone to look at the very end of that chart where you're seeing 2023 and beyond, which is really showing over the last few months we are seeing this uptick in year over year change in revenue per employee for wholesalers. And it's going to take more time to See if this plays out as a long term trend or if it's just a short term blip. But in the short term, what this tells us is that now that pricing has regulated, this might be a more true measure of, you know, better revenue dollars per employee. So this could suggest that distributors are becoming better on the, you know, on the employee front of being more productive per employee. And then I think we have one additional chart that kind of shows the same thing, just on a different scale. I don't know if you guys are able to pull that up. So the same thing, this is the overall trend line, this is just overall dollar amounts of revenue per employee and same thing, the overall uptick in, you know, 30 year revenue per employee. But then, yeah, you see where there's a couple dips where there was recessions, you see the big spike there in 2122 and then coming back to earth with that tiny little bump there at the end that could suggest that companies have now figured out now that things have stabilized, that might be a more true actually definition of wholesalers are becoming a little more productive per employee.

Right, so that looks like 2021 dip is a big Covid dip there, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And then coming out of COVID you know, manufacturing roared back, demand roared back and with that, inflation went crazy and that just drove these big revenue per employee numbers. So that you have to take look at that big spike there in 21:22 with a big grain of salt, knowing that most of that spike is inflation driven. Whereas yeah, it's, it's that very recent new bump that seems to be more like a true measure now that things have, things are basically back to normal.

It's not based on pricing or direct economy. It's actually true productivity increases potentially.

Yeah, so we, we see a comment there says LinkedIn user, I'm long on remote hybrid work, so I referenced that. I think that might be our friend Brendan Breen who has made a couple comments earlier and I don't know why Brendan's CEO of Industrial Supply association is. Whenever he joins us, we only see LinkedIn user versus his name and face there. I'm not sure if it's him or not, but whoever made that comment standby, because we're going to another article today that we're going to talk a little bit deeper about some of the ups and downs of remote and hybrid work. So that's good. So let's kind of jump ahead and we'll move pretty quickly. We've got an article here about US business activity moderates in February. Any takeaways from either of you on that quickly?

No, it just kind of matches what we've been seeing on the MDM research side that you know, demand seems like it's going to remain fairly flat in most industrial hard goods sectors. Yeah. What we're hearing from distributors on the, on the qualitative side is that yeah, they don't expect a real uptick in activity until around the midpoint of the year. So I think we're going to keep seeing that moderate word in a lot of headlines these next few months.

I think we're going to. We've used the term simmering quite a bit here right in one of the quotes, this was an article from Reuters and one of the comment lead was that US Business activity cooled in February and there was an encouraging news on inflation with a measure of prices paid for inputs falling to the lowest level in the early three and a half years which could allay fears that price pressures were picking up. You know, we've got quite a few guests that I see today that are senior leaders with industrial distribution companies and or distribution, general distribution companies. We've got a lot of listeners along that way so it'd be interesting if they have any thoughts on what they're seeing in that setting as well. But I think we're just just feels like, you know, whether it's does it look like March for a dip in interest rates and you know, stock market's been doing crazy things and pushing back on all of this other data and input. We kind of talk about this every week. But I think your point Mike, really the research that you had shared as well leads well to the first half of the year. We're probably just going to see some ups and downs and movements along the way and hopefully see some strong growth and maybe some dips in the interest rates as well which would suggest that pricing has come down at the same time. So it could be good stuff second half of the year. We're certainly looking forward to it as everybody is I think. Tom, any thoughts on that before we jump ahead?

Let's continue.

Very good. All right, well we've got our next follow up article. There is moving to our and Mike, I don't know if I shared this with you but you know we kind of did the structure of the email newsletter that we send out every week and by the way it's about the right time in the show for me to remind everybody that if you're listening on the podcast, the recorded podcast versus our live show today, we Put out our newsletter each week. It's called around the Horn in wholesale Distribution and manufacturing. Cover the topics related to those two industries or markets related to the economy, mergers and acquisitions, sales, marketing, cybersecurity, AI, you name it. We try and talk about that each week. Bring guests like Mike in. If you don't get that newsletter, just request it very simply@helloadsmartech.com and or going to the website for the podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and we'll get that right out to you. So personalization and B2B marketing in our new E commerce and marketing segment.

Are you this one, Kevin, Did I skip.

Oh, I'm sorry.

It's okay. It just didn't.

We skipped 2023 technology orders expectations. Any thoughts specifically on that one, guys? I jumped ahead.

I think. I think the gist of it was that, you know, December ended pretty strong even though the overall year for manufacturing technology orders, which really encompasses metal working, metal forming, machinery orders, it showed that, yeah, December very strong. I think it actually jumped up 20. What was it 20? Or where am I looking here? I think about 12% above December. Sorry, 22%. December was above November. So a big monthly jump for the whole year. 2023 technology orders were down. What did I see? It was like 11.2%. But it sounds like the gist of it was that even though it was a down year, it was better than much better than expected going into the so definitely a positive note there. Even though it was down year, they just kind of point to some momentum ending the year for 2023. So we'll kind of keep watching that going forward to see if it's spilled over into this year.

And Tom, thanks for keeping me honest on that one and not skipping over this one because there's good data there. And I appreciate Mike, your analysis of that because it does kind of tie into our previous two articles right about we're in this holding pattern almost right now waiting for what's next. I like one of the quotes that it made here from the Gardener, not Gartner, but Gardner Business Media that they produced a sentiment indicator index and it said it shows that the manufacturing sector is still in moderate contraction but improving to its highest confidence level in nine months. So Mike, you would reference some of those stats earlier that it said further expectations of business conditions over the next 12 months are quite positive. So same kind of thing that we talked about previous article. Mike, you really nailed it with some of the statistics that you were sharing earlier. So let's get through this next few months, I guess is the key. Right?

I just have one maybe a question for you, Mike. Are you seeing in any of the data or statistics that you're looking at, especially relates to technology orders we're talking about here, companies are taking a little bit of a wait and see attitude. Let me see how AI is going to really impact the playing field. I don't want to rush into purchasing something and having it obsolete because, you know, in six months, are you seeing any of that as it relates to, in this case, manufacturing technology?

I mean, I think we've heard and I think it's the same organization, association for Manufacturing Technology, that puts out the monthly cutting tools reports. They kind of run right in line with each other. I think cutting tools showed kind of the same that it was a down year, but up a little bit towards the end. But yeah, I think in both, in the last few monthly reports I have seen them mentioned how capital, you know, capital spending on major projects are probably going to be a little reserved in 24. Not only because of this weakened demand in the first half of this year, but, you know, it's a presidential election year. We're. Companies tend to go a little conservative. So I, I have just seen some of those, you know, softening, you know, phrases being worded about general demand when it comes to cutting tools, metal working at machinery operations. So it's, it's not a surprise to see, you know, these reports saying that, you know, it was a good month in December, but overall 2023 was down. But yeah, we'll have to watch what the January and February numbers show us.

Okay, that's good. Thank you for that. All right, so as we jump now, we're ready, right, Tom? We're ready to jump to the E. Commerce and marketing. Great article there today from CXO today about personalization and B2B marketing. I think this has been a trend for a lot longer than 2024. But in the industry that we discuss things about in wholesale distribution and manufacturing, it's really an important topic to be thinking about as we look to serve our customers that are looking to buy differently. It's a good article.

Yeah. I mean, obviously this is a very passionate area for me. I wrote a book on the subject, which is.

You did?

Yeah, I did.

What's it called?

I don't remember, but I'll let you know.

The revenue zone.

That's it? That's it, yeah.

Revenues on. Okay. But.

But I think, I think I bought one. Good, good. The, you know, you hear the Word personalization, right? And I hear this when we talk to people all the time, they think of that as, oh, I put, you know, your name in the email. So I addressed, I said, hi, Mike, or I, you know, it's things like that. I think sometimes there's this mis conception of what we mean by personalization. And what this article was getting into is that personalization is first of all, understanding the buyer journey. And there could be multiple buyer journeys based on your customer profile and also recognizing that the buyer journey doesn't happen in one interaction. It's not like there's just one transaction and you're done. So you have to be able to understand the iterative buyer journey and then look at how you would potentially personalize that for individuals based around the different channels and the different ways that they want to buy, which goes way, way beyond, hey, I, I know your name. So your name pops up on my website or I know your company. It's really understanding how you do business versus just understanding who you are.

Yeah, that was appreciative of that. You know, then it in a nutshell, right? It says tailoring marketing strategies, content and communications to meet the specific needs and preferences of individual businesses or decision makers within those businesses. And I think that last piece of that sentence is pretty valuable, right? It's not about XYZ company that we're trying to message to, it's the constituents inside of that and then taking an understanding their journey, how they want to buy and what they want to do. Because to your point, you know, Tom, it's not enough to say, you know, dear my cocket, buy my wrenches, right? That's, that's not going to build relationships. And there's some, some key takeaways in this, right, of the value of really understanding the personalization within the B2B marketing. It talked about building relationships, right? All of us spend way too much of our day deleting emails that are poorly written. They're obviously from a bulk email send and not relevant to us, right? I get probably 10 to 15 emails a day thinking that our CRM and customer intelligence SaaS software company is a marketing agency. Say, how do you, okay, I showed up on a list somewhere. You certainly don't understand who I am. But they talk about building relationships. Relevance, enhanced customer experience, higher conversion rates, ability to make data driven decisions based upon what you're learning from that personalization, strong competitive advantage because many of your competitors that are focused on trying to get those same eyeballs at that same factory or at that same distributor that a manufacturer selling to. You've got a big competitive advantage when you nail this and get it right. And then customer retention. Right. It's not just about acquiring new customers, but when we continue to meet people where they want to buy and understand how they want to buy and then market to them in that way, customer retention expands dramatically at that point. So I thought there were just some good takeaways from that article. Again, it's called personalization and B2B marketing. How is this an important trend for 2024? If you're listening on the podcast later, it's from CxO Today magazine. You could probably find that online. So it's a good one.

I just liked how it got into. It's all about interaction. Like it's. You're not. You shouldn't be marketing to a buyer that buys strictly online with you the same way that you're marketing someone that only wants to buy from a brick and mortar store. It's just a different ball game and a different set of expectations that they have. So it's all about meeting that B2B customer client, how they like to interact with you, and not just treating everything as a blanket transaction. So, yeah, it's just. It's all about interaction.

That's great.

Before we leave here, I think one of the hardest things we even deal with this, you know, when we're working with customers on their CRM and their sales processes, we always want to do everything in alignment with how we sell or how we market and how we sell and how we market may have a big divergence between how my customer wants to buy. And if we look at that from a buyer centric perspective, it may look daunting at first, but you really can start to quickly say, okay, I can influence that buyer journey. I can influence that and get much better results than trying to shoehorn somebody into my sales process or my marketing process. And I think that's a mindset shift that we certainly have not seen being prominent yet. But I think it is going to be inherently more and more prominent.

It's just so easy to want to try to lump certain customers. Here's all of our big customers, medium and small. Here's all of our geographically customers. And it makes sense to do that to a point. But there has to be layers to that when it comes to person personalization and, you know, again, just how they prefer to buy from you.

So there's just.

It's all about layers to that equation.

All right, Kevin, let's move on.

Let's. Let's jump ahead the stumbling block in B2B E Commerce Bad data from Digital Commerce360 Mr. Data take us away.

We don't ever talk about data. I mean this is more of the same. I mean this is obviously in. In context of B2B commerce. We've talked a lot about it in context of AI but there was a lot of statistics in there around how companies believe their data is I guess not ready and isn't usable. We were talking a little bit before we went live. It's interesting that what I find working with customers every day is that their data is actually in some cases a lot better or more useful and valuable than they think. And when yeah of course there's bad data and of course there's data hygiene issues. We all, you know, everybody's got that. But a lot of times what I see is that that's used maybe as an excuse or a blanket excuse that my data is not really good. So I kind of looked at what they're saying here and I see it all the time. Right. Is that people believe and it's true. Right. There's silo data, there's data hygiene issues. There's all the things that they pointed out in this article. But on the other hand there's actually a lot of data that is super relevant and super valuable that can be taken advantage of right now. And then over time you can obviously continually to improve. So I just want to make sure that again we see that there's definitely two sides to the coin.

I just kind of look at it right. This kind of talks about for me the takeaway was at the end of the article said organizations are often hindered by siloed data, insufficient technology and a lack of internal skills or knowledge. So to your point right. Is let's turn this around. It talks about the negatives. It starts out as a stumbling block. I would look at this again. Organizations are often hindered by siloed data, insufficient technology and I'll add to that or lack of technology which is very common. Right. And lack of internal skills or knowledge. So let's just look at that as a springboard or an opportunity for where we can get to by recognizing that because as you talk about all the time is that you coming from a computer science and technology background and software background and my background in distribution and manufacturing is I think you use the term treasure trove before or you know, treasure chest of data that wholesale distributors typically have. Right. Distributor. You've got all of that end user data by market segment and so forth. And manufacturers have the same thing about what are the trends, about what are distributors buying. Right. In different markets and so forth. And so the amount of data that's there to be unlocked is one of the terms that it used. You know, unlocking the door to online growth, and not just online growth, but general business growth by understanding and gaining deeper insights to the data that we have. And that will typically take having the right technology.

You know, it's so good to have Ron back. It's great to have Ron back again.

Oh, my word. I talked to him about this. Come on, rp, what did he say? Tom is right again.

But no, somebody at the end even help with getting the data usable. Having LED Granger's product information for years, had so much had to be done manually and our suppliers with our suppliers back then, now everyone gets that data is critical. But yeah, his point is that there's a lot of ways even now to get that data cleaned up that's easier and more just confrontable than it would have been. Like, oh my God, what am I going to do? Print out a bunch of spreadsheets and try and put it through the process?

Yep.

No, that's good. You know, other than that first sentence, it's phenomenal. RP's comment there, I like that a lot.

So very good on this. Before we move on.

Yeah, I was just gonna say at a lot of the industry conferences I've been at, you know, a lot of them put like just a big board where people can. They basically ask people to write down what is your biggest initiative, your company's biggest initiative in the year ahead. And the most common answer I've seen is get better with data or get better with data governance, because I think companies realize that's where these digital improvements start is with their data. But like you said, that takes different forms and it's why we've seen so many chief data officer roles pop up that just didn't exist before. So, yeah, the industry certainly knows it's a top priority or the top digital priority. But yeah, it's just about how do they get to there from here. And AI is definitely going to be a big part of that.

And it's good to hear that that's it more and more of a priority all the time. As far as the data here. All right, Kevin, let's go ahead here to technology, cyber security and AI.

Well, this is an article from cyberscoop. And you know, we were talking with Mike before we went live today and you know, we've not Done a lot historically. Where are we at? This is 78, Tom.

79.

79. So 21 episodes before 100. Can you imagine that? I mean I'm just didn't ever have any thoughts that we would get this far. So we got to start planning for where. What island do we want to be on when we do the 100th episode? In person with rum drinks or something like that.

Maybe in Mike's garden with some maple syrup.

Yeah, there we go. Very good. Have to think about when 21 weeks away is. But anyways, one of the things that we have not talked about up until recently and put much energy into, but we're starting to try and look at that much more closely has been cybersecurity. Right. We talk a lot about technology and AI and economy and M and A and so forth on our show each week. But you know, talking a little bit more about cyber security. And this article again is about manufacturers bears manufacturing bearing the brunt of industrial ransomware and kind of a. Oh, there we go. Swim up bar. That's. That's Will's, Will's comment of the day. That's for the 100th episode.

I don't think anybody needs to see Kevin and I at a swim up bar. Somehow I just don't think that's, that's necessary.

From the neck up.

Yeah.

Okay, how's that? I like that idea though. Will is thinking right on my track.

Little photo op was always good.

I was kind of thinking from over the water, bungalow in the South Pacific, something like that. But anyways, back to the important stuff at hand here is, you know, ransomware, cybersecurity, manufacturing has been extremely vulnerable. That's kind of what this article tips off on about. Talking about 900 incidents being reported last year, which is a huge increase over the previous years. And so it's something that we need to be taking a close look at this particular article. Lots of statistics in it. 50% increase over the previous year in the number of attacks on industrial related organizations. A distributor could easily think back and say, well good for me, manufacturing is the target. But the reality of it is one, it's industrial organizations which in most settings distribution would come into as well. And in addition to that is if your manufacturer gets hit and is shut down, can't get access to critical infrastructure data, maybe even machinery is shut down, can't get orders out. We saw the Henry Schein, the dental distribution company getting hit twice with a threat of a third time by the same company. Couldn't get orders out, couldn't use their e commerce system. So these are just things that we need to be paying a lot more attention to and focusing on it. And you know, so many of the companies we deal with day in and day out, and we were talking with this with Mike earlier, is that, you know, whether you're a 50 million or a half a billion dollar a year company, you are, well, the target for somebody to want to write a check, want you to write them a check to get access to your data again or whatever the attack is.

And you would think that they would only be targeting large manufacturers, large distributors, because they'd be the most lucrative. But at the same time, these smaller firms out there, they just, they don't have the scale of defense that, you know, some of these major distributors do. So even if you're a small, you think that you don't, you're not worthy of being attacked. Everyone's a target at one day or another. And you know, the industry sentiment is that it is just, it's a matter of when it's not if you're going to be attacked. We haven't done research on this lately, but I know that I've seen other industry research that when they ask, you know, have you experienced the cyber breach in the past year or 24 months? I think it's over, over half of respondents typically say yes in some form. Maybe it wasn't a devastating breach where you like felt like you had to pay millions of dollars, but a breach, no matter the scale, it can cripple operations. And like you said, it's not just you, it's all along your ecosystem of suppliers. You're just every partner, all your customers. It's going to impact you one way or another, even if you're not the one directly attacked.

Well, and according to some of the statistics that we've seen, not just here, but in other articles we've talked about recently in your comment there About Mike, about 50% or more of the people, I think then there's another 20% or more that are lying because they don't want to acknowledge it. And you know, I mean, who wants to go back to their board and talk about the fact that, you know, we couldn't ship orders for four days and until we. Because even if you don't have to write a check, just if there's damage done, sorting through it is hugely expensive. All kinds of external resources that go into that. So something for us to be paying closer attention to. Right. And it's, it's not just while the cloud can help make us safer. It's not just a movement to the cloud. Right. Because that doesn't change the fact that people are opening phishing emails and so forth and things like that. And I don't remember the statistics, I don't think there's anything in this article. But so much of cyber attacks come in through somebody opening the wrong email. Right. So training and it's not just, you know, email filtering, it's training and helping your team understand things and so forth. So we'll dive into this more in future episodes and keep the conversation going.

I know I'm getting like 20 emails a day from invoices that are coming out of the, coming out of the woodwork. It's like, man, Kevin, you selling a lot. Because we're getting a lot of invoices and things here that I'm supposed to be working on here. Yeah, yeah.

And you know, it's so funny is, I mean, some of them will have, you know, individuals names or accounting atLead smart tech.com or it'll just perfectly have the Microsoft logo in there and, and so forth.

So scary. It's scary to think about how AI is just giving more ammunition to these bad actors to make these emails that look like they're from a legit source and just, it's, it's becoming harder and harder to know what is spam and what's, you know, what is a bad link. So it is, it does. Like you said, it takes a culture of cybersecurity throughout the company and not just relying on a piece of software that's going to do it all for you. You have to get people to know what does, you know, what does malware look like? What do bad emails look like?

Yep, that's good. I think some of the simplest things you can do is look at the sender. Right. Because it has your company's name on it or a logo that you recognize. Start by looking at the sender is a good place to go. So, and maybe just the thing to do is just don't, don't respond to any emails unless it's from Tom Burton, Mike Hockett or Kevin Brown.

Just.

It's good. All right, let's jump ahead. MDM, these guys are pretty sharp. 4 4th Quarter 2023 Mike, why don't you take us through that since I think you either wrote this or participated in it.

Yep.

So this report, it is exclusive to MDM Premium members, but we do have other recent blogs that just kind of recap the year that was in 2020. 3 and even though depending on who you ask, the broader wholesale distribution like I think M and A activity was a bit down. But in the hard goods sectors that we cover for MDM, we saw activity go through the roof in 2023. I think, I think when we tabulated how many individual M and A news items we wrote in 2023 it was 403, which was way up from. I think it was 263 in 2022 and about the same in 2021. So from the industries we cover, you know, it's MRO, it's electrical, plumbing, H vac. Jan saying a lot of these hard goods sectors deal making went crazy in 2023. And you know we. That 403 number counts distribution plus manufacturers that sell in the distribution. But the vast majority of that 43 count was directly involving distributors. So we saw a lot of activity. We kind of asked different private equity firms what's driving this. They said lately distribution has just looked like a safer, more long term, just return on investment when it comes to private equity investment at least. So there's still a lot of appetite out there from private equity especially driving a lot of MA activity in distribution going forward.

Thanks for that kind of recap, Mike. You know it's. It is a. The depth of the article is for premium members of mdm, but I was appreciative. The reason I shared this was not just that you were with us today. We always try and put this out when you've got M and A data out, which you do on a consistent basis, but just the free version of it had a lot of really good data and I'm appreciative of that. The term was used as you talk about 400 plus articles that were written. The term that was used in the article was it blew away our accounts for 20, 23 and 21. So it wasn't just we had a little uptick. It was big, busy, busy year. I'm going to be interesting though. The article made the comment and I hadn't thought about this but it does make a lot of sense with this being a presidential election year. There's a reputation the article says about businesses going conservative on capital spending, kind of not knowing what's going to happen. So none of us have anything other than our gut feeling on this right now to base this on. But what's your gut take, Mike? Do you cover this closely? And Tom, I'll ask you the same question about M and A for this year. What's your gut tell you?

Yeah, from who we've talked to and we even did a podcast with, I think it was Kevin Sargent from Brown, Gibbons and Lang company. They're a private equity firm very involved with advising distribution deals. I asked him that question, how does a presidential election year typically impact M and A spending or does it at all? And he said that, you know, from an industry demand aspect, you know, capital projects, that it does seem to have a noticeable effect. But in terms of M and A, he said that he has, over his 20 years, he hasn't really seen a direct corollary there.

Like.

Yeah, I think if anything, companies see that other companies are going a little conservative on their capital spending during presidential election year and they might look at M and A as a way to leapfrog or just gain some market share while everyone else is going conservative. So in terms of, you know, product demand, I can see that an election year having an impact. But yeah, as far as what I'm hearing is that there's not expected to be a major slowdown in M and A just because it's an election year.

Mike. Tom, your gut, quickly, gut take.

Yeah, I mean, I, again, I'm not anywhere near the industry experts that you two are, but I, if I look at my background and working with technology companies for many, many years, I look at, I think there will see an uptick for the reasons we've already talked about today is companies in order to kind of shore themselves up, whether it's security or it's AI or data. Right. It's like you want to get bigger. It's no different. Right. With mdm, you want to get bigger, better and stronger by, you know, potentially, you know, merging or getting acquired by our bigger company. And I think you're going to have to get bigger, better and stronger. And so I think that's also inherently going to drive maybe some M and A activity that maybe normally wouldn't have occurred. Yep.

I will just say I don't think anybody's care about that much about the election. I think it's kind of like what we're seeing on Wall street in the financial markets related to inflation and other factors of the economy. I think there's money on the sidelines that are going to go into good businesses. And personally I don't think anybody cares. So I think this is a comment maybe from Brendan Breen that's there is the idea that just an announcement this morning that went out about a Valen and Wesco. And so I think there is a. I just caught the article. I didn't read it all I actually forwarded to myself to go into the news next week, but there's some good news there. So there we go.

Just real quick, it was Valen Distribution acquiring the Wesco integrated supply supply unit from West Coast. So yeah, I think I wrote that up just shortly before logging on to the. To the podcast here. Yeah, pretty big deal in the industrial MRO space. It's. It really gains Valen Distribution. They, I think the purchase price was $350 million. And that business unit in the press release they put out, I think they said had 2023 revenue of about 780 million. So that adds about 780 million to Valen Distribution. So it's gonna definitely move up our top distributors list based on that.

That's the. Hadn't thought of that part of it. So you know, man, we kind of digressed here quickly and we were going to talk about this article more next week, but I'm glad we're doing it today. My assumption with that then says is Wesco being big on the electrical side of things, probably looking at maybe divesting a. The integrated supply piece maybe isn't perfectly fitting into their, you know, stick to their knitting philosophy. And it fits right in perfectly for Valen. So I have a call actually next week with some Valen folks. So I'm gonna look forward to hearing a little bit more about that. So that's good. Tom, did you want to highlight RP's comment there?

I guess I have to. Equal opportunity highlighter. Good.

All right. We won't spend time on that because. But thank you, Ron. We need to jump ahead so we cover these last few articles here. Quick article in the newsletter today about in our people and leadership segment, 2023 was the year of the strike. Here's what could be ahead. Irregardless of your position. Union, non union. Great read. Biggest year 43% jump in 2023 of the number of strikes that went on, dramatic amount of people impacted. They went on for long periods of time and they impacted wholesale distribution and manufacturing. It lists some potential very large strikes that could be happening this year. Good to pay attention to, good to be aware of if we're in the wholesale distribution and manufacturing world. Next article though came from LinkedIn is about our remote workers sacrificing long term knowledge gains and I thought we could spend a couple minutes talking about that. We had a comment earlier about somebody saying they're being long on remote work and that's a reasonable thought process these days. There's a little Bit of data here that throws some questions or some things to be considering. This was a recap of a research article that had been done. The research article had been done for the National Bureau of Economic Research. And this was recapped by Sean Dubervack, who's PhD, a futurist trend caster authority. Sean's a good friend of mine and anytime Sean writes something on LinkedIn or else, in fact I've got his book called the Digital Destiny is next to me here on my desk. But Sean talks about in his recap of this article some potential impacts and things to be paying attention to about both remote and hybrid work. Any takeaways for you guys?

Yeah, I mean I thought it, I thought it made some good points. I mean on one hand there, there just is no replicant for just the, I don't know what to call it, just what you gain from physically being in the same room with people and learning from them and just the little nuances that you pick up on from, I don't know, things that go beyond just shooting each other messages or emails or teams calls. There is definitely something to be said from that. But at the same time, you know, I'm biased. I've worked from home for I think the last three years now and I feel like I'm more productive and things like that. But in terms of what they're specifically getting at here is knowledge gains. I think there, there's just a very delicate balance that companies that do are fully remote or even hybrid that they have to walk of. How do you, you know, still create that culture and especially from the. Yeah, getting knowledge from seasoned employees. How do you do that in a hybrid or remote. Remote setting. And it's difficult. I don't think there is any perfect answer here in terms of that balance. But I thought it did hit on the difficulties involved with, you know, getting knowledge from a seasoned person to a newer person. How difficult that can be in a remote setting.

Tom tells me all the time when we, when we meet in person, I leave smarter.

So yeah, I would hate to be a new employee coming into a company and starting a job and a new company and a new role, especially if I'm early in my career without and being remote, that would be brutal. I think, I think you learned if you go back to some of your early jobs, a lot of where you got that sort of tribal knowledge was being there and working with them and kind of the hands on situation that's there along the way. The other thing. Sorry, go ahead, Mike.

You think of like today's college grads and just Gen Z employees, some of them may have only known the remote work like since the time they left college, 2020 onwards. So they're entering a world where they've only known remote work. So it's just I can't even put myself in the shoes of those people.

Yeah, it seemed and the other I think we talked about this last week is the impact of AI. Is AI going to take jobs? My comment at the time was as we get more AI centric, we're going to have to be able to know how to facilitate things versus just doing things in order to facilitate things in a business. You got to know the business, you got to know how the business. You have to know more than your job, you have to understand your business, the business processes. That's hard to learn remotely, especially again when you're new in that. So I think there's, it's, it's an interesting scenario. Right. We talked about productivity gains potentially with remote work. Obviously every job, every situation, every company is a bit different. But I do think there's going to have to be some hybrid framework. I don't know for model may be too strong but hybrid framework where people can get some of those knowledge gains even though if they are at least part time working remote.

Yep, yep. Well, let me, let me hit a couple. As we're kind of winding down time wise, we got a couple more things to review. So let me hit a couple points from this that I thought were really valuable in recapping and it was, you know, Sean's again if you don't follow Sean, I highly recommend doing so. He's great guy and he'll be with us. He just confirmed with you this morning he's going to be a guest with us this summer. So we're looking forward to that. In fact, Sean has done some work with Dirk Beverage who's been one of our guests as well. But the point was from this research, right. The findings from this research suggest working from home offers mixed outcomes over varying timeframes with immediate benefits potentially undermining the long term professional growth of employees. That's the trigger for me, right, is a lot of companies have moved fully remote because it seemed to be working well in the pandemic and we're seeing short term gains. I know a number of companies who have gone fully remote who are now working on whether it's quarterly or monthly, even getting people together and having specific meetings, hotels, whatever it might be that may prove to be the answer long term if you're fully remote. But the article reinforces some of the things that both of you said. Right. This was 22% increase in feedback, particularly benefiting the younger and less tenured workers. Impact on mentorship. They talked about career trajectory impacts. Proximity led to fewer early pay raises due to reduced output resultant in higher long term pay raises as there was more human capital developed. Right. So we're learning more from each other by being together than being a way that results in a positive outcome. Even talked about some gender specific issues that go with it. So point being is what we like to do here is bring attention to things that people should be thinking about. Story behind the story is my big takeaway. Working from home offers mixed outcomes over time frames and short term gains might not be long term benefits. Something to pay attention to. Good. So industry scuttlebutt. We'll move on there. There's some information about motion industries expanding into Canada. Something kind of cool. Staffed at the Specialty Tool and Facet or Distributors association. Partnering with Texas AAM on some educational opportunities. It's so great to see expanding opportunities for distribution workers to get formal education on the business that they're in. So many folks and it's a great way to do it. But so many folks start coming in the back door and end up in their career in the front office, which is a great thing to see. But there's these great opportunities at Purdue, Texas A and M, number of different programs that are great. So good to see that. So Tom, let's kind of jump ahead to our last article of the day. We'll bypass our second look, which is a little more information about what's going on in the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. But each week we have a topic called Good reads. This one is seven crucial qualities of ethical leadership related to AI coming into your business. Takeaways from either of you on that.

I just thought it was. I mean I thought there were some really good points in there about how to apply leadership in an AI world. So it's all great to talk about honesty and transparency and a lot of the things that you would talk about here. But how does that apply in the world of AI and how you're using AI in your company. And of course people have a lot of questions and what does this mean to me? And all of that kind of stuff. So it's. I thought it was some very good, a very good framework I think for rethinking about leadership in this kind of new world. Good.

Hey Tom, before we jump ahead on that Any further? Just real quick, I just saw in the notes request about could I share the. I think it was related to sharing the previous article. If you're connected with me or follow me on LinkedIn, I'll post that article there. I'll also post it to the lead smart technologies LinkedIn page so you can see Sean's article about and that recap of that research because I believe that's where this question was. So go ahead Mike. I'm sorry to interrupt. You just wanted to acknowledge that that.

AI ethics article was really interesting. MDM we just hosted on February 7th an AI summit during which we had an hour long session on AI ethics because among the whole AI discussion and distribution, I just don't think there's much discussion on the ethics involved here. And you know, the biases that can go into AI coding that's you know, determining what ChatGPT is spitting out back to you and everything. And just other on the ethics front is, you know, there's not a lot of just rules that distributors know how to articulate to their salespeople for, you know, what customer information can you put into some of these AI tools? Some of that data is very sensitive that you don't want to just throw out there into the ether. So yeah, I think there is a need for discussion on guardrails that distribution executives can help articulate to their staff, their managers on how to use AI in a, in a, you know, in a safe way, in a way, in a productive way, but in a way that's not going to open yourself up to more risk.

That's great. Good, good, good recap on that. I think there were seven points. Honesty, accountability, care, courage, fairness, gratitude and humility. I think people are nervous about AI and the business world in general. Certainly the idea about having my job replaced or whatever it might be. So some good points out of that great time today. I think we've got some updates in our newsletter to some upcoming events. Mike thinks that you guys do such a great job at MDM of posting where all those events are and we repost that with a notice that it's coming from you, we add to it. But you guys do a great job and we're really appreciative. One of as we kind of wind down today one you being with us, we're grateful for that. Looking forward as I mentioned to Tom and Eric and Dan and others from both MDM and NAW joining us soon. I'm excited personally. We're just preparing at Lead Smart our expanded involvement with NAW and going to participate with some of their events later this year. We had some conflicts to do the January event with. Naw. But even with you and Tom and MDM involvement there, all the better. It's going to be good for the industry. It's going to be good for both organizations and getting messages out to broader distribution networks as well. So that's good stuff. Great time today. Wonderful comments today. We really appreciate Broad Spectrum. By the way, we've had a number of comments today as well from the our good friend Brendan Breen. Thanks for being with us. We're gonna get Brendan on shortly as a guest talk about their upcoming events. A lot of events earlier this year. I think one of the things, I don't know, Mike, if you noticed this historically we get a couple very beginning of the year, maybe one or two in the spring and then the fall. Just, you know, we don't get to see our wives for the fall. And and there's some events getting popping up middle of the year and even summertime, which I'm appreciative of because we can spread stuff out. So anyways, thanks to both of you. Appreciate today. Any comments in closing, Mike or Tom?

No.

Have a good weekend.

Part of your maple syrup? Yeah.

Oh yeah, I got. I got to get back to it. I probably gotta check to make sure it hasn't burned the house down at this point. But yeah, this is my second time on here. It's just great to chat with you guys about these issues that some of them aren't specific to distribution, but they're going to impact it at one point or another. So it's great to touch on a lot of different topics.

That's great. Well, thank you for being with us. Thanks everybody that joined us today. Again, if you don't get the newsletter and you would like to just reach out to us@helloadspace smarttech.com or on our www.aroundthehornpod.com website. Be kind, do good things and have a great weekend. Have a good weekend, everybody.

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, Lead Smart Technologies and their manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry CRM Customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform. That's LeadSmart Technologies@Lead smart tech.com.