From Ports to Policies: Navigating Wholesale's Next Big Challenges

Foreign welcome to around 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.

I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with my business partner and lifelong friend Tom Burton and we get together every Friday morning. The old saying is that unless someone is on an airplane, in a hospital or on a planned vacation, yeah, we get together and we chat about the news of the week in as it relates to wholesale distribution, manufacturing. We do that based upon the newsletter that we publish. We publish a newsletter called around the Horn and wholesale distribution and manufacturing goes out every Friday morning to 10,000 plus people and growing list of subscribers who also get that on LinkedIn directly. So if you'd like to get that newsletter that we put out each week that you can get that from us in three simple ways. One, if you're active on LinkedIn, you could certainly go to around the Horn. Just search around the Horn and Wholesale distribution and Manufacturing, that page will pop up. You can follow that page and you'll get the newsletter both on LinkedIn in your feed and it'll come to your your email address as well. You can reach out to us directly@helloadsmartech.com and we'll sign you up for that as well. We get some of those each week and then you could also go to the website for the show, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com past episodes there and links to all of the popular podcast platforms as well as the ability to sign up for the newsletter. So we'd love it if you do that. Join us and get that information. Now what we do is we try and take a look at the news from the point of the economy and supply chain. We look at manufacturing, distribution news that's out there, we look at things related to AI and technology, all kinds of different pieces there. And then we look at M and A sales and marketing, e commerce and we take all of that news of the week and we try and break it down in this show that we do on Fridays where we share that information with you and we kind of relate that back to how that impacts manufacturing and wholesale distribution. So again, we'd love to have you with us if you happen to be Listening on the podcast, Apple, Spotify, Odyssey, whatever it might be, you won't see the newsletter that we'll have up on the screen today that we're talking about. But again, you may want to subscribe to that. And so we wish you happiness in joining us with all of that. And one of the things that we would like to ask you as a favor for us is if you enjoy what you hear, if you're new with us today or been coming for 100. And where are we at? 24 today, Tom? Yeah, 124 episodes. Astounding to me. Still share a review. If you're on LinkedIn, follow the lead Smart Technologies page and the podcast page that's there now. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, just click the subscribe button. If you're on YouTube, hit the subscribe button and ideally leave a review for us on any of those platforms that we'll share that with others. If you know people in wholesale distribution, manufacturing that you think you could benefit from what we're doing, forward them the link to the show. We would love it and greatly appreciate it. Lastly, kind of related to the show is we couldn't do this each week if we didn't have the sponsorship of the company that Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies. Lead Smart has developed the channel cloud, AI enabled smart CRM and customer intelligence platform. What we do at LeadSmart is we work with wholesale distributors and manufacturers and we bring data in, what we call siloed data in from across your organization. We bring that into our platform and we use AI and other tools to find out what's most important in your business, how should we be spending our time, what quotes, what orders, what different things that are we missing within the business. So we bring a spotlight into opportunities and how we can accelerate growth in your business. So if your company is looking to digitally transform as a distributor or manufacturer, grow sales, accelerate revenues, gain more insights into your customers, your teams and your overall business, we'd love to have a conversation with you. And we're appreciative of Lead Smart sponsorship of the show. So, Tom, that's kind of it for our intro. Did I miss anything there?

No, I don't think so. Hey, good morning to Brian. And you know, I. You probably have as well. People have been asking if we're in the fire zone. Neither of us are in the fire zone. We're in the wind zone. Yeah. Which means our power is at risk, it seems like. But other than that, we're I think, okay for the moment.

Yeah, really, I'm glad you said that. We really appreciate. I've had multiple text messages this morning and LinkedIn messages over the last few days and other texts over the last few days. Tom, we kind of both, we kind of book in where we live. You're up in the Ventura county area and I'm down in south Orange County. We kind of book in where the fires are. The fires are right now that you're seeing on the news, and the devastation there is really in the Los Angeles county area, one east of Los Angeles, near Pasadena. If, if you're trying to get a fix on that Altadena fire, it's just a few minutes from if you ever watch the Rose bowl or the Rose Parade and New Year's. So just close by there. I'm about an hour south of there, you're about an hour north of there in that setting. But yeah, we're impacted by these winds. But you Inventura, was it November that you had the really big fire that was within a couple miles of your house?

Yeah, I think so. November, yeah, for us it was September.

The airport fire that was 23,000 acres, flames were visible from our home. So that was quite an exciting time for us. And you lost power for what, like 12 or 14 hours the other day?

Almost a whole day.

Almost a whole day.

We haven't more of that next week.

Yeah, we've got, we've had the warnings. My older sister's barely 40, 40 miles from us and she's not had power since about 4 o' clock yesterday afternoon. Reason behind that is the power companies don't want lines to go down and start fires, which they've done in the last few years. So they're just shutting the power off. So anyways, thank you. For those of you that checked in on us, the devastation is just crazy. Our thoughts are with everybody impacted. Tom before we dive into today's news, though, let's talk about next week real quick. We're pretty darn excited about next week. Next week is the second annual, which I hope will be turning into something that we do every year. We are bringing some, I'm going to say luminaries, thought leaders, heavy hitters from the world of wholesale distribution. We're bringing in Mike Marks from Indian River Consulting, Ian Heller from Distribution Strategy Group, and Dirk Beveridge from WE Supply America Tour and Unleash wd. And we're bringing those three gentlemen together again next, next Friday, just like we did early last year. We're going to take a look at 2024 in review. We're going to talk about, in fact, Mike Mark's brought this up and we're again grateful for Mike and Ian and Dirk to join us. They've been with us a number of times. But we're going to take a look at the ideas and the thoughts that we had about what was going to happen in 2024. We're going to see how we did with our prognostications for all of us on that. And then we're going to look at the coming year of 2025, make some thoughts and ideas and projections on what will happen there. So if you were to listen to any of our shows in the, in the first quarter of this year, this is probably the one. And again, we're, we're really thankful it's.

A LinkedIn event set up for this.

Shed or no, no, but we can get that done today.

We should get that done today. Get that out there. We'll get everybody. So you can get. This is one you're going to want to hit live. Because if you remember last year, there was just a whole lot of conversation, right. And a lot of audience feedback.

So, and, and it's going to be funny. There's no way that we're going to get these three guys together and these gentlemen, you know, if you've never heard them speak before, they're well known as keynote speakers, they're writers, they're, they're educators. And I'm going to stop complimenting because we're going to, I'll do a lot of that next week. But I just feel, you know, I looking at some of the statistics, this was pretty astounding. We share this with John and Lily, who are the behind the scenes team that really makes this newsletter and show come together and kind of found out yesterday that depending on which ranking you look at that this show is either number one or number two globally in related to wholesale distribution and manufacturing podcast. So how we've come from the idea of hey, let's send out a newsletter to, you know, some, some of our industry connections to going live one day on LinkedIn to see if anybody paid attention to being top one or two podcasts globally related to distribution manufacturing is pretty astounding. So thanks for Rodney the note about to Happy Friday and Happy New Year. Glad to have you with us, Rodney. And I've got a nice group of people kind of popping in and showing up today, so we're appreciative of that. So anyways, don't miss next Friday, I guess would be the takeaway from today.

And talk about moving, man. We got to get the pressures on if we're going to maintain that top ranking. So.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Well, the, the, the dock workers and the, the Gulf coast and east coast port workers and, and port operators have come to a tentative agreement which is pretty exciting to hear because we've been, you know, as we talk about supply chain issues each week, this has been a pretty big deal. And we had 2023 and early 2024, we had both West coast of US and West coast of Canada port issues going on there. But this was the one that looked like it could have some real risk and some real walkout times with that. It felt different than a lot of the other ones that we've seen in the past.

Yeah. So obviously we talked about this last week. Right. The sticky point was the automation automation and it looks like they, as they called it, I think in there a win win, although it certainly wasn't very specific on what that win win was. But they opened the door to some automation. I believe the term they used is things that are related to the safety and you know, safe operation of things.

But they didn't, they said safety, efficiency and capacity.

Yeah. Well, okay, that's pretty broad, right?

Yeah.

So it's not clear exactly what automation items were included or not included. I'm actually frankly amazed that this got done. And even before I think it was the 15th was the deadline. Yeah. The fact that this got done and got, I know it still has to go through and get finalized, but it looks like it's going to happen.

So, so they've said that they're not, they're not going to release all the, the, and I'm not a union expert. I've never belonged to a union, but I thought it was interesting. So I don't know enough. I know that the unions ratify agreements through a member vote, but the article actually mentioned, and this was from cnbc, the article actually mentioned that both sides need to ratify it. Still. I'm gonna, I'm gonna jump out on a little bit of a limb here and mention that we talked about this last week. Right. Biden administration has been very, very much pro union. Pro union. Pro union always has been from the days of President Biden being senator and, but I was quite surprised actually when pre election that incoming President Trump had said that he was supportive of the, of the dock workers in this setting. And it kind of, you know, union and pro business don't always go well together. Well, I made a comment last week and I'm certainly not going to try and pat myself on the shoulder or the back because we don't know about this yet. But I made a comment last week that this, this could be the first time we see him pivot. A little bit of some things that we said because I don't know how you could be pro, pro business growth and pro support of business strength, which is, you know, the whole thing behind, or I should say the whole thing. But a major component of the MAGA movement is wanting to strengthen the country and, and be the, have the idea of you wanting to be strong, supporting the blockage of automation and capacity and efficiency in the country's ports. I'm wondering if there was a little bit of a behind the scenes pivot and what was realized was, hey, we're not, we're not going to win this. And I think what came out of this is, and this I'm very confident because you can see it is what they, they agreed to was that they would not have any reduction in workers.

Yeah.

Based upon this. Right. And, and I would suggest what we're going to learn over time is, and we talk about this not just related to, you know, automation and ports, but as we talk about AI and robotics that we're going to talk a lot about today, excited about the discussion about robotics that we're going to have. But I think with this is there's the, we may see down the road that there's a significant increase in the number of workers they can have. They're just going to be doing different jobs. So I think what we're seeing here is they already got that 60 was a 60 increase or 62 or 63% increase over 10 years. I believe it was. And then this automation thing is now is they're going to accept some of that. So we'll see what comes of this next. But good news is don't have to worry about the port shutting down at this stage.

Right. Well. And not, not. I don't get off on a political thing, but I believe that a big, big component of Trump's support came from unions. Not necessarily the union leaders, but the union rank and file.

Yeah.

Right. So he certainly. And who knows? Right. There's, like I said, this was a, there was a lot of vagueness in this. That's here and I think there's still a lot of vagueness out there. But. Oh, go ahead.

I'm sorry.

But certainly the, the fact that the door to automation has been opened up with some caveats you know that you could call it a slippery slope depending upon your viewpoint of how you're looking at things. But you know, things are going to change. That's the bottom line. So how it changes, don't know, but. Yep.

Well, just to kind of throw out the quote on this that came from the union. They said this agreement protects current ILA jobs and establishes a framework for implementing technologies that will create, create more jobs while modernizing east coast and Gulf coast ports, making them safer, more efficient and creating the capacity they need to keep our supply chain strong. I thought it was a good comment. I thought one of the things that hit me though was they have an automation committee. The union does.

Okay.

Gotta be careful how I say this, but the, there was some articles that we talked about months and months and months ago early on with this were about. It was related to some accusations of the, the union president talk. And they were talking about this, this enormous salary and benefits and all the things he gets that was just, you know, millions of dollars a year in compensation. This committee is made up of him, two of his sons and a few other people. So. But that was kind of okay.

Before we move on, I wanted to hit Bob's comment here because I think it's really relevant, right. He's right about unions create a consistent and predictable outcome. It may not be an optimal outcome, but is consistency and predictability really the best for our supply chain and everything else? So, you know, back to your point earlier about, well, you know, how does this fit with make America great and all that, hey, maybe just at this point let's, let's not create another problem, right? And let's keep things moving and maybe in the scope of things, this isn't really where to fight, fight the battle. So.

And you know what's interesting in this and this is I think this ties back to, you know, some of the comments have been made about the incoming president is, you know, he's grandiose, he's verbose, he's uses hyperbole and so much. And he, the comment about that was that, you know, what was that is taken seriously, but not literally. And that ties back to negotiations, right? Is, you know, look, you, you threaten to shut the ports down, right from. And this is from the Gulf coast all the way up to the Northeast, right. So this is major. And there's industries. I think there was a comment in here about the, a percentage of what retail clothing goes through those ports. So think about electronics and a lot of other things. Most of those come into ports of LA and Long Beach. But this, it was interesting, the impact on these east coast ports to some specific retail markets. But same idea, right, is you have to know these guys knew going into this there's no way they're going to keep automation out forever. So they got a 62% wage increase and the guarantee of no job. So we start high, you know, big threats, we're going to shut down the ports and we don't care, we're going to shut it down. And now we come back with we've got a settlement. You know, everybody's going to kind of get what they want. But the important part of this is related to people that tune in with us every week is ports aren't going to get shut down and your supplies are going to be coming into your manufacturers that make stuff in the US and the stuff that you import.

So one less, one less thing that we have to worry about.

Yeah, but we know we can't talk about this next week.

Yeah, that's right.

All right, quick article there about US manufacturing. PMI rises to nine month high. Little bit of concern there. That ISM Institute there for supply management, they do this PMI evaluation, excuse me, each month and it was at its highest point since March. So it's still below 50%. So 50% is the number there that they're. They're the number 50. Anything below that indicates a contraction and above that is a growth arena. So that's what, and this is, you know, interesting with this PMI thought is one of the points from that article is that that accounts for 10.3% of the overall economy. So keeping an eye on what this manufacturing segment is doing is important. We don't want to spend a lot of time on this today because we've got so much to cover. But good article there, and that's from Reuters about PMI increase.

Move on to rate cuts.

And you want to talk about rate cuts. Last year was a great year for rate cuts.

Yeah, I guess so. Well, maybe. And maybe next. This year is going to be a great year for rate cuts based on. Although the market certainly doesn't think so. So the. If you haven't heard, the job report came out this morning well ahead of expectations or what we're expecting. I think a hundred thousand jobs above what was expected. The stock market is not happy about it. The bond market is I think up a whole, whole 100 basis points.

That's astounding.

So I think it went from 4.6 to 4.7 or somewhere in that. Yeah. Neighborhood that's there and you know, the reason obviously everyone is oh my God, we've got all these jobs, inflation and you know, strong economy, no more rate cuts. So we're going to reduce the rate cuts. Yet in this article they're saying that the, a couple Federal Reserve policymakers are saying oh no, we're going to have rate cuts next year, maybe up to five, not just the two that you know, they reported in the last thing. So yeah and I agree with Bob was just saying here, give it a month or two, that job will be or revised downward. I agree. And also. Yeah and it could be seasonal workers. I mean there's just a lot of, you know, it's like trying to make a, a macro level strategic decision or distribute you know, insight off of that. Seems a little bit short sighted but nonetheless.

Well in, in all of these reports, right we see this up and down, up and down, up and down. We saw it all last year. You know, we really, really needed these and now I think what they're struggling with is okay, well we, we did these cuts right. And, and you know people want steak dinners from them and all kinds of stuff, you know, came out of that. Hint, hint. And but what's the economy doing? Right. We're still kind of vacillating a little bit or simmering as we used the term last year quite a bit. And this particular gentleman who's from on the Federal Reserve as a member of the Federal Reserve, Christopher Waller, he said that they expect inflation will move closer to the Fed's 2% target in the coming months. And in some of the first comments, these are some of the first comments by a Fed official specifically about tariffs and he said that greater import duties likely won't push up inflation this year. So we had Powell say a couple of weeks ago, you know, it's really unclear and it depends on what the tariffs are on and their impact on manufacturing and other parts of the economy. And now this Fed governor says or member is saying doesn't believe that that's regardless of what happens with tariffs are going to do have a significant impact in that.

Yeah. And, and I tend to agree with that. I don't even if we do have tariffs, it's going to take a while before they actually then translate probably back into prices. Yeah, I would believe which is what they're saying, you know and maybe they're just kicking the can down the road a bit as far as far as this goes. But look, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm Not a betting person, because I would hate to lose another stake, but I don't. I, I think five cuts is, would be. I would not bet on five cuts this year, let's put it that way.

I'll say it this way, right. I had, I was extremely confident when we made our, our friendly wager early last year about there being more than two cuts. I thought that for me, I thought that was an easy bet. But I don't have any confidence on what's going to come this year. And I think that one of the bigger impacts here right now is that the idea of Wall street and the Fed. Right. Because Wall street is baking in things that they believe and I don't. I know Powell says that they, you know, that's not what they do. And they only work by the numbers. And I don't know how you can only work by numbers. I think there's got to be some, some side of that, that there's the emotional component and, and risking the keeping things in balance. I, I have to think that the Fed is actually paying attention to what Wall Street's doing and Wall Street's deciding what they expect on their own.

Well, Wall street is pricing in. And the bond market is pricing in. Inflation.

Yeah.

Higher inflation than the 2% that's there. What they're saying here is, well, maybe that's not going to happen, or if it does happen, it's going to be much farther down the road than anyone anticipates. So you have a little bit of a yin and yang there in terms of their expectations. I think, though, that if you look at the history, the market has generally been more accurately correct than some of the Fed procrastinators. Easy for me to say.

Prognosticators.

Yeah, whatever. I meant there. That's what I meant. So, all right, let's move ahead before.

We, before we do that is. I think it's the. Look, yesterday, I think it was the 29th of this month is the next Fed meeting. So the next Fed announcement I think is what's coming. So end of the month, we'll see what happens next.

We will not have a rate cut this month that I know for sure. Do you? Yes, I do. I would bet on that. I would bet on no rate cut this month.

Almost.

Almost.

Want to, almost want to counter that with another side bet?

Double or nothing. Double or nothing.

No chance on that, my friend. I was thinking a taco.

So.

All right, couple articles left. While we're still in our economy and supply chain walking a tightrope 6 CFO trends for 2025, if that, we're going to kind of move past that. But some interesting stuff there. If you're on the financial side of your, your business or you want to share that with folks on this financial side. That comes from cfodive.com and good article there. Talks a little bit more about some tariffs and some things that go with that. And then the final article that we're going to move past though is from the Electrical Distributor magazine, our friend Scott Costa and his team about construction labor at historic lows in November. So check out TED magazine, the electrical distributor magazine, for some of that info if that's of value to you. Manufacturing, distribution, Next segment we want to jump into here. Tom. Nippon Steel and US Steel, both sides of this deal, have filed lawsuits against the Biden administration after Biden put a big block on that. Oh, Bob wants to talk about your birthday.

We, we both celebrate on the 20th.

Yeah, I was going to say isn't that, that's coming up. Okay, well, you guys need to have a zoom call or something. And so I think we'll have a.

I think we'll have a big celebration in advance on our show next week. So if you think you're going to.

Get Ian Heller and Mike Marks to sing you Happy Birthday, I think you might have another thing coming.

Yeah, well, maybe I don't want that either, so I don't want to hear it.

But yeah, that, well, that. You know what the upside of that is? I get to talk for six months about you being older than me.

Ah, okay. All right.

So that's when I was like when I was a kid and my sister and I are four years apart, but our birthdays are 10, 10 days apart. So there was a in mind's first. So there's 10 days a year where I used to make fun of her and say she was only three years older than me.

Okay.

Anyways, why don't we talk about something relevant here like this US Steel, Nippon Steel deal. This is kind of a big, big issue here when you got both sides that are suing the U.S. government over this thing. And, and you know, U.S. steel is hoping to be able to stay in business unless they get acquired. And you've got this Japanese company who has made all kinds of one phenomenal changes of what their original, you know, their current offer is almost double of what they started at, I think. Well, I shouldn't say almost. It's over double. I think they started seven point some billion dollars and now they're $15 billion. They're giving the US government all kinds of. I don't know what else to call it other than veto power over decisions that are making. They're guaranteeing a certain amount of jobs and a certain amount of production staying in the US and they also agreed.

To upgrade a lot of the U.S. facilities.

Right. Yeah. Towards a 2. I think the article talked about 2.9 billion.

Yeah. $7 billion of upgrades.

Yeah, yeah. To one plan. I think it was, in itself was 2 plus billion. So this will be an interesting one to watch. I think, you know, the incoming administration has talked about not liking the idea of it as well, but it's kind of.

Yeah, I don't, I don't fully understand. I mean, they say security and all. I, There seems to be a story behind the story that at least I'm not fully understanding. I haven't done a great depth of research on it, but there seems to be something more.

Well, I think this would be a very different conversation if we were talking about a Chinese company or a Taiwanese company or, or something like that. Whole different route. And we've talked a lot over the course of the last few months about the issue of steel tariffs and actually embargoes or blockages of Chinese steel coming in. But this is a, you know, very friendly company country with Japan. It's a very, there's already an influence from Nippon Steel here in the US they have operations here already. This is just an expansion of those things. So I, I, I think, you know, people are part of the, what they're barking about here is that the idea of a foreign company, a country, controlling potential. Nippon, I mean, very different in Japan of government influence over business than it is in China. So you have a private company, Right, that wants to own a steel company here. And look at all the Japanese companies that are making cars here in the US I want to use that steel. So I think this is a very different deal. I don't, I don't see huge risk to this, but I don't, I wouldn't proclaim to be an expert about that. But I think this is gonna be interesting to see how this plays out in the courts. And we're, what are we, 10 days away from the incoming administration?

Yeah.

So good. Well, all right.

I think the incoming administration was against it as well.

They were. But again, I. Let's see what comes out of this. And my assumption is that, you know, this is. The incoming administration will try and leverage some other, other things out of this that would be beneficial. So.

Okay. Yep.

Very Good. So cool article from manufacturing.net about smart tools could be a leap towards efficiency. So again, we're in our manufacturing distribution segment and this is talking about smart tools being used in a manufacturing setting. And, but from a distribution standpoint with our, a big part of our audience on that side of things as well is the ability to start selling. Right. Some of these smart tools. And, and I think if we, you know, an example of a smart tool that article uses, I was thinking about a bunch of different ones, but as they, they talked about the move from a basic electrical meter to a multimeter with advanced diagnostics that can identify issues before they come critical. So now if we start thinking about interconnected facilities, right. And we've got machinery that can even be talking to pieces of equipment. We're going to talk in a few minutes about robotics and we start having this Internet interconnected equipment that's they're sharing data from their own sensors. And I mean smart tools having sensors that could be even identifying when you're using them. Other potential problems, you know, regular maintenance issues, things like that that could go on with, with other larger pieces of equipment. Kind of exciting times to think about all the interconnectivity.

So I just wanted to touch on what you, what you said. Are you saying there's an opportunity for distribution to sell these smart tools or.

Well, I mean the good example was, you know, a basic meter and a multimeter, that those are everyday tools that, with that reference point that the article used that I mentioned, those are everyday things that some of our electrical distributor customers at Lead Smart are already selling those types of things. Now these are just going to become more and more advanced.

Yeah. So is the customer then going to expect the distributor then to be the subject matter expert on how to implement these tools, utilize these tools? I mean, this is different than an air conditioner or something like that. You install it and you use it. This is an IT infrastructure.

It is, but it's. We're already seeing that. So good. A good use of that was. And I think, you know, I think we saw a comment earlier from Jeff with Infor and he, if Jeff's still listening today, he could probably comment on this quite a bit because he's been involved in a lot with manufacturing. And in fact, Jeff and I have a call next week is. And Jeff's in for the large ERP company. But a good example is Rockwell Automation. So Rockwell does large facility automation programs. And we have customers, Lead Smart customers that are major Rockwell distributors and they have very specific teams within their distribution company that are subject matter experts. Now they're still going to use factory people in this setting as well. But, but they absolutely have divisions within their companies with people that have subject matter expertise on facility automations and so forth. So, yeah, I think, I don't think there's any way that we're going to be in a position where just about any of the industries that, you know, we serve. If you think about building materials, electrical, H vac, plumbing, all of those, we're going to start needing to see more and more specialists that are understanding the technology and interconnected technology of things and we're going to start seeing more and more of this. I was on the phone earlier this week with one of our advisors for Leadsmart and we were talking about Service Titan as an example and other software companies that make software and technology, the technology for contractors to work with homeowners. I'm convinced it's things that we're already able to do. Some of this already is. I'm very convinced that we're in the not too distant future that we're going to have data coming from a homeowner going through a contractor that's available to a distributor that's going to be some parts of that are going to pass on to a manufacturer because there's no reason not to share data. It's not about what, what the homeowner is doing, it's what the homeowner's needs are and what the contractor's needs are. And so interconnectivity AI, all of the things we talk about every week are just the future and we're going to see more and more shifts.

Well, and what's the common denominator of all of that is data.

Right.

So whether you're interconnected, all you're doing is getting faster and better access to data all the way through the chain. So.

Yeah, good. So we have another, we're going to kind of shift gears here. Another article that we published. This is from Electrical Trends, our friend David Gordon and his team. Understanding is the key to the future for manufacturers and manufacturers reps. Good, good article there. If, if you're either on the manufacturing side of the manufacturer's website. Great article. To talk about collaboration and understanding lifelong challenge with that is getting those two communicating better. I throw a little plug out. It's something else that we do as well with Channel Smart Channel Cloud is we have our partner portal allowing manufacturers, distributors and manufacturers reps to share data across the platform. So good stuff. Let's dive into E Commerce and manufacturing then, huh?

And marketing. E commerce and marketing. I didn't know we had an e commerce and manufacturing section.

Yeah, well, I was looking at my notes and the big word manufacturing was there. So my, my apologies. Thank you for the figuring that out. Yeah. So again, if you're. This is a good time for me to put the plug in. If you're listening on the podcast to our recorded podcast, what you're listening to is a live show. It's 9:39am Pacific on January 10, 2025 and we are reviewing through the around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution Manufacturing newsletter that comes out every Friday morning. That newsletter brings together news about the economy and supply chain and manufacturing, e commerce and marketing and sales and mergers and acquisitions and AI and all kinds of stuff with the news for the week and we review that here on this broadcast. But if you're listening on Spotify, Apple, Odyssey, wherever it might be, you're not seeing that newsletter. And if you'd like to get that newsletter, three simple ways you can do it. First and easiest is if you're active and use LinkedIn regularly and like to get data from there. You can just search around the horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing on LinkedIn. Newsletter will pop up. Subscribe to that. You'll get it each week. There's also a page there about the show. You can subscribe to that to get the updates. You can send us an email directly to helloadsmartech.com and we'll get the newsletter out to you. Or our website for the podcast is www.aroundthehornpod.com and you can sign up for it there. If you like what you see, hit the subscribe hit the review button and that helps us a lot too. So anyway, now we're into the E commerce and marketing segment. First article from marketing professionals.com or marketingprofs.com is the best way for marketers to get ready for 2025's uncertainty. Any specifics for you out of that to start with?

Well, I, I think I mentioned this to this earlier. This isn't even though this article was written by marketing profs and is marketing oriented. The, the, the information or the, you know, the approach that they took in this article could apply to anything. Yeah, apply to any sort of planning and looking ahead strategy. I thought it was one of the best articles honestly I've read in the last year from the articles that we've gone through. I thought it was really intelligently put together and intelligently laid out and basically I won't go through the whole article. But basically what they're saying is it's very difficult to predict what's going to happen, let's say over the next 12 months. Right. What you have to be able to do is make decisions right now based on the data and information that you have. But at the same time, and they talk about specifically how to do this, are there some things that you can take advantage of as it relates to the future to help define your decisions right now? I think one of the biggest things that they brought up which really hit me was predictions. Most people make predictions based on their experience. Right. I have experience. This happened to me before. I saw this once before. I predict it's going to happen again. And when, when you have a lot of change, which we certainly have a lot of change, making predictions based on past experience can be very, very deadly.

Yeah.

Right. Because the world that that experience came from is not the world that we're, you know, what got it's there won't get us there.

Essentially we got us here won't get us there. Right.

So anyway, I thought the article really laid out some, I can maybe hit a couple of these key points here, but some of the, you know, things about how do you go about planning in an unpredictable environment? And I, and I'll just hit on one of these here. Right. And these are kind of like he said. Here are five questions to ask. Number one, are you working with beliefs or data? And I think that is so important is again, beliefs are generally based around experience and what you've done in the past. And, and you know, whatever your background is or how does that really compare to the data that you actually have in the data that you're seeing. We're going to talk a little bit more about data driven organizations here in a minute. But anyway, I'll stop there. I think this was just a, if you're going to read one article, this is one that I would, I would highly recommend.

Yep. Well, I love that it talked about decision making over predictions. Right. And that ties back to your, you know, guessing isn't a strategy. And you know, when we, we think about this is that we've got, we've got a changing buyer in the B2B world. And as that buyer is changing, you know, to your point is, and you know, it's what got, what got us here isn't going to get us there and things are happening quickly in that setting.

Yeah. And again, look, I don't know how much more how things are going to change this year or how radically things will Change or whatever. But I do think it's really dangerous to base your strategy and your predictions based on things that you may have had experience with, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. Yeah, I think that's a. That's definitely kind of a risky situation. So anyway, this gave you some tools for. For looking at that better.

Yeah, there's one that I liked a lot here that I out of it, and there's a handful of key points here. It said, should you pinpoint a destination or a direction? And I think this really ties in, as we talk a lot about digital transformation.

Right.

Is you don't have to flip a switch. If you're a wholesale distributor or a manufacturer in flip a switch and be in a spot where you fully digitally transformed and you've got all the technology you need in your business. And so you need to set some goals and some priorities of where you're headed and where you're going in that. In that whole process. And that, I think, is what becomes pretty important out of this. And what I liked about what they were saying here was that they talked about pinpointing a direction. And it says, In 1850, Chicago journalist Horace Greeley urged America's young men to go West. He didn't specify where to go, like Colorado or San Francisco.

Didn't.

He didn't have to. Things were happening in the West. Right. And he said the west was the land of opportunity, strongly believed there were fortunes to be made there, even though it wasn't exactly clear how the westward migration would play out. Well, this goes back to all of the things that we've talked about today that, you know, we talk about regularly related to the technology side. We were just talking about smart tools a few minutes ago. Right. If you're not thinking about these, these digitization of your business, the use of. To your point earlier about, you know, the data that you have across your business, if you're not moving in that direction, that's what's west.

West.

What's west is buyers are changing. My employees or the sellers that I'm going to be hiring are changing. Expectations are different than they've historically been. You know, that one of the other points here I talked about as a familiar situation or emerging situation. Everything that we're talking about right now in the marketplace is emerging. The wholesale distribution arena and manufacturing arena didn't change that much between, I'll say, the 60s and the early to mid-90s or late 90s. In fact, even, maybe even early 2000, there wasn't a lot. I mean, the Internet made a lot of changes for us but it's what's going on now and what's going to be coming soon is light years ahead of the change that we've seen. So picking that destination of saying hey, I need to digitally transform my organization, I need to access and use all the data I have across my business is important.

So yeah, I want to hit a couple comments here. First of all, Bob, I agree he says prediction should be based on data and experience. Agreed. Right. But I think the, and there is first and using that data to help provide that, that guidance I think is, is super important. I'll hit Jeff's comment here as well. He's you know, demand planning and forecasting is for sure an area of change. I see a lot of distributors being well behind in this area just in terms of functional understanding. Good news, there's many good tools and recently tools leveraging AI for, for better results. So yeah it's, it's, it's an interesting area as you start to kind of unpack this right. Is traditional planning and traditional forecasting. The way that maybe it's always been done is not necessarily the way that it should or could be done as, as we, as we move forward here. And I think that's what the article was was trying to spotlight.

Makes me excited about the coming forecasting and pipeline app built into the lead Smart channel club enhancements being done to that. So it's my little plug for the morning. All right. So we have available to us as well here a couple of other articles. There was a good article there from marketingdive.com 10 marketing predictions for 2025 as a new era of productivity dawns. Any thoughts on that one quickly from your standpoint?

Well, there was one in there that speaking of being self promoting they were talking about the importance of using CRM and CRM not just as a tool to manage the sales process which you tend tend to think about but as a repository for first party data. Right. So how do you and I'll give you a specific example I worked on yesterday with a customer that is a, is a perfect example of this is they're trying the customer that we were working with the distributor, they were trying to work out their promotions and their specials that they were going to run over the next 90 days. By going into the CRM we were able to see which companies and types of companies had in the past purchased the products that they were going to put on special. And now they knew a campaign to actually go and say okay, if we're going to put these products on on promotion. Who are the companies that we need to make sure that we absolutely target based around their purchase behavior in the past with those products and or even had they bought similar products that were of a different product priceline but they would be good candidates for these products that are there. So now the marketing becomes very targeted on what they're going to do. It's not going to be a spray and pray it's going to be much more targeted. That was all using first party data that was coming from the CRM. Without that they wouldn't have been able to have that visibility.

So the CRM was using in our case what we call Smart CRM that they're using from Lead Smart is that was taking ERP data in and it was analyzing that to help them make decisions on specials and other marketing tools. Phenomenal idea. It makes me think about, you know, we have a revenue expander and Lead Smart which is being expanded out as further into into our white space planning tool or app. Because that's one of the biggest challenges that both manufacturers and wholesale distributors have is you know, manufacturers get concerned when they've got a distributor who's only buying one category of products that they make and they want to sell full line. No different than a distributor. Typical distributor that we talk to and we talk to them every day, all day Is they'll have 12 to 20 key product categories and they've got their sales guy is excited because he grew by 12% with that customer, you know, year over year but he's selling them three out of 14 categories. And so we can illuminate those types of things within a smart CRM that pops that up that says hey, we need to be selling all of these other items to this customer. And in addition to that, what you need to be thinking about is and I love the conversation and I know the lovely woman that was part of that discussion yesterday was was now let's maybe look at that white space report that we have, see where we're missing it. And now we can even market to the white space to specific customer groups out of that. And that's all coming out of Smart CRM.

So you know, like I said, I think and they point this out in here, right? Even if you don't want to use CRM for traditional purposes of managing the sales process and tracking activity, have that CRM repository and organize in a certain way so you have and can take advantage of the first party data. Anyway, that was one of the trends that was I want to hit on.

One other one, Tom. And we want to move on because I'm kind of fired up about some of the other stuff we're going to talk about. I don't, I'm usually excited about our general discussions, but not any specifics. But this one, before you go too far from there is they talked about brands must own their values as consumers feel unseen. And it's just interesting. It talks about, you know, three quarters of people of people interviewed said that they're willing to pay more for brands that share their values, while 72% don't want to buy products from advertisers they feel are ignoring them. Now, there's two components that I wanted to hit on this quickly. One is the line between and we're showing this regularly because sometimes some of the articles that we'll have might look like they're more have a bend towards B2C in this or consumer. But we've talked about this for a long time now and I just think we can't, can't talk enough about the importance of there's a gray line right now that is the shift between expectations of a B2B because historically B2B customers, we did this. B2C customers, we did this. That chasm between them is closing so fast. And we need to be as folks in wholesale distribution in particular, we need to be thinking about, you know, one meeting the customer where they're at. We talk about E commerce and other buying tools, but really understanding our own brand and what is our brand as a wholesale distributor? What does it mean to our customers to to do business with us? What does it mean for them to be using our E commerce solution, using our other solutions in our. But we have a different relevance other than a company that has a bunch of hot water heaters and some pipe out in the yard that can supply them. But the brand side of it, from a marketing standpoint, I think we've never, it's never been more important is that we are developing as wholesale distributors our own brand. And it's again, not just we can deliver by 4pm if your order's in by one that's not delivering on a brand. But be thinking about what is my, what is the my company's name, ABC Supply. What does it mean to the users and the buyers and all components at my customer base and how am I reaching them and how am I touching them. So I think more than ever brand is becoming more important for wholesale distribution.

Yeah. And I, I want to clarify one thing and I know we Want to get moved on here to, to our robot coming up. But you know, obviously selling B2B and B2C is very different in terms of the people involved in the, in the decision making process. What I agree with you on though is that the experience that is expected.

An expectation. Right.

Is an expectation. I expect a similar experience that I receive as a consumer and I make decisions with that experience in the B2B world. So it's not that B2B buying is not different than consumer buying. It is. But the experience is very, very the expectation associated with the experience. What's there. And brand in the consumer world has historically had a lot of influence on the consumer and the brand as you described, also has an influence and an expectation in the B2B world. So I agree with, with that. I just want to make sure it's, you know, people understand that we're not saying that it's the same sales process because it's.

No, no, no, of course not. But the, the expectation of how I'm as we look at, I think we're now up over 70% of B2B buyers are millennials. They have different expectation than a baby boomer does.

Right. A different expectation as it relates to.

Experience, experience, brand buying. All of those pieces all come together. So two other articles in this section that we have right now that we're talking about as we talk about e commerce and marketing. Marketingdive.com Great article about 10 marketing predictions for 2025 and as a newer productivity dons and then Forbes. This was from a Forbes member. Was it from the magazine? It was from still a Forbes.com but it was a Forbes member that are in the article AI and B2B marketing from Hype to Essential Growth driver. Good article there as well if you wanted to look that one up. So but let's dive time into our technology, cyber security and AI segment. First article here is about artificial intelligence and industrial robotics far beyond the hype. And I think you know, one of the things we probably think about mostly as and this was From Again from techbriefs.com I think one of the things that we probably have most often in our mindset about robotics is a manufacturing plant with a car going down, you know, a conveyor line and a big robot with a big arm comes in and makes some spot welds or something. Right. We don't think about the depth of what can be going on with robotics. And this, this was a really good article and we kind of want to dive into this a little bit deeper than some of the other things we dive into. But this is great. They talk about, the article talked about four distinct areas for industrial applications of AI powered robotics. And I would actually say industrial application slash manufacturing distribution. But it talks about generating insights using AI tools to analyze large data sets and generate meaningful insights that form the basis for decision making optimization that can be coming from this robotics as well. Macro level energy management, micro level path planning for robotic movements. There's all these capabilities and it says thanks to AI, robots can perform a broader range of complex tasks that were previously difficult to automate by leveraging data and algorithms, per your comment earlier. Right. Leveraging data and algorithms to optimize processes. Robots execute tasks faster and far more precisely with greater autonomy and without human supervision in dynamic, uncontrolled and unstructured environments. That's the kicker for I think our discussion today is that these new capabilities, it's so far different than what we've historically thought. So we've got a couple of videos that we wanted to show today that we want to share with you. Again, if you're listening on the podcast and aren't able to watch this, you can go back to the YouTube channel for our show on YouTube, you can very easily select around the Horn or search around the Horn and Wholesale distribution Manufacturing where you'll be able to watch the live show and see these videos. But Tom, before we kind of dive into that, any thoughts from you about where we're at and where we're, we're. What we're seeing in the change with robotics.

We, we talked about this last week. I think there was an article we were going through about predictions. One of the predictions they said was 2025 was the year of the robot. I pushed back on that a week ago saying I didn't think 2025 was going to be the year. I thought there was going to be more of 2026. I'm backpedaling on that a bit based on some more research and data that I've gotten, this being one of them in the last week. I think that there are some and, and there are some. And obviously there's a lot of stuff that's coming out that I think we're going to show a video of it. It's unclear really how well it's going to function, but if some of these things start to function even relatively decently, I think that we will see the proliferation of robot and robotics and physical AI much faster, not just in, in the business world, but potentially in, in the consumer world as well. So I'm based in a week just by doing a little bit more homework. I'm backpedaling a little bit on my, on my, on my projection of 2026 on this.

But I told Mrs. Brown yesterday, late afternoon, I was, she had, I don't even know what it's called. We have one of those little round robot discs that goes around vacuums and mops as well. And I told her, I said 18 to 24 months. I said there's going to be a robot available to clean the house. And she laughed at me at first. And then we chatted about it a little bit further and the time frame might be pushed out a little bit, but I can almost guarantee you, in fact, I'd throw another steak dinner at this one that says within 24 months there will be a reasonably priced. Oh, by the way, I told her that it would be less than, less than ten thousand dollars. It'd probably be around the eight thousand dollar range.

So are you saying that within 24 months you will have a robot and you're cleaning your house?

Didn't say I would, I would have it. I said there will be available.

Okay, available. I would agree, but I like the bet of, well, you'll have one. You will have.

So you're saying that because you know my wife and I have nothing to do with what will be available in our home. If she decides she wants one and they're doing the right thing, we will have one. Okay, but, but yeah, your, your laugh, the smile and the giggle on your face is you're knowing that I have no influence over that unless I'm told to go get one. But I think what the, the point about this is, I want, and I wanted to spend some time on this today because forgetting about who's cleaning our house, it's the impact that can happen. And so Tom, why don't we show, why don't we show the first video I think that you've got there? Yeah, that's the one. Let's show this video which is going to give us a great example of really what the cape capabilities are and the strengths of these things are in comparison to what we've seen in the past. I want to watch this one.

Is this plain. You want to do the whole thing or.

Yeah, why don't we just kick the speed up too, if it's possible. But let's, let's watch this. It's pretty quick.

It's definitely more flexible than I am.

Notice the hands, the waving. It's going to be able to Grip. Somebody came up and just tried to kick it over and they can't kick it over, it won't tip over. Punching it now and it's not falling. So this is a approximately 4 foot tall robot that we're seeing. It's gripping a bar right now or what, you know, looks like a, like a samurai sword type thing, but it's just showing what it's capable of doing. Now it's lifting a piece of fruit out of. Just opened a soda. It had lifted a fruit piece of fruit out of a basket, taking a piece of toast off of a cleaner, using a hammer, using a soldering iron. So now, you know, for those of you that were able to watch that to think about, oh, now it's showing, you know, it folds up into something the size of a duffel bag and can be carried around. But I think as we're looking at this, what we want to be thinking about is imagining these devices or these, these robots where it's full of sensors and it's moving around your facility. Maybe it has a carbon monoxide sensors or fire sensors. It has a sniffing device that can identify or notice a piece of machinery is leaking and it can go put a sorbent pad down under that leak, whatever it might be. It's, it's astounding where we've come and where we're going to go quickly now because the, the thing to consider I think right now is the idea of AI is involved in all of this. And what does AI do? AI wants to learn from itself. So the more data points that we feed it, I'm going to suggest it's just using a house cleaning idea, is that over time, if we're using AI in robots that are doing tasks and this could be packing boxes, it could be walking the robot that walks out or literally that just wanders the perimeter of your distribution facility and is a guard for your facility. But it's also scanning all of your racks of pipes and valves and fittings to make sure that the inventory levels are correct because it's able to do that because of the AI tools and it's connecting into other systems within your company. Where we're at is just, it's astounding to see these things because this particular robot we just watched was taking a piece of fruit out and getting ready to slice it. It was soldering and doing things. So I think we're at this place now and where this is, it's going to, because of the use of AI, it's going to exponentially improve Its capabilities much, much faster than we thought about, which is why I was willing to say 18 to 24 months cleaning the house.

Okay, well, the one that we just showed here was, is. Is actually a being marketed as a consumer robot. Right.

For what, thousand dollars you can have one right now.

Thousand dollars, which is half the price of a car. Right. And I'm sure you can get terms and leasing terms and probably want to lease a robot the same way you lease a car. Right. Because it's going to be out of date the next. In the next year or two. Yeah.

Well, the, the place that I had originally heard about this particular company, I can't remember the name of that company. I was just looking at it. Unitree was on another podcast that we both listened to, the all in podcast. One of one of the hosts there is the CEO of an agricultural tech or ag tech company and he's actually gone out and bought these. I can't remember how many of you said he bought it. I thought it was four or five of them that are going to be using in an agriculture environment to walk perimeter offense lines, to put sensors into the ground that identifies moisture levels or chemical levels and so forth. So this isn't about the, you know, what's five years from now. People are buying these today. Right. So that's, that's the key. These are available. Tom, let's show that other video real quick though. That kind of is that household setting. This is about humanoid robots that can clean your home. And this will give you kind of another good example of that. If you want to even bump up the speed on this and go full screen, it might be good do the.

Mundane chores that humans don't want to do.

Try and see if I can.

If you go over to the gear there, you can just speed, speed this. Let's go to maybe 1.5 or something once you turn the sound back on so we can hear the guy talk about what it does then.

If you had a Neo at home, you aren't released from doing all of your chores yet. Neo learns by watching people how to.

Do tasks, how to handle interacting with people, body language.

Hey, did you any of our friends.

Call you up here?

Yes.

Prior to Neo, one X had a rolling robot named eve. EVE gave them more knowledge to put into Neo. Unlike some AI tools. If Neo, EVE and robots like them are doing all of our dirty work, then thinking, exercising creativity and getting to.

Rest on the hit flies real quick. Can you hit pause? I guess it's over, huh? But that was another example of A robot in it was in a home. It happened to be in the offices of the company that are making it. And this was the key takeaway was because it was very hard to hear. But the takeaway on this one was the idea of it learning from itself and from you. So this one was in a household setting. It was wiping counters, it was cleaning things. It had been over in a corner of a room and the gentleman there said, hey, I think it was called Neo. We have some people coming over into the office shortly. Can you straighten up? It's all he had to say. Yep. Right. And. And again, I'm going to go back to. And I don't know why I'm geeked out on this a little bit more than normal. But it literally, I think the kicker on this is the AI component of it because if it's, if it's in your home or in your warehouse or in your office at your distribution company taking care of things because of the capabilities of AI, it's going to continue to learn. I'm going to just throw it out there that, you know, it will be. If you just think about the house cleaning idea is the. It's going to do a better job over time because it's going to learn what it needs to do better. Somebody saying, I can get by with getting this done. Right. So it's just. Anyways, it's pretty exciting. And again, to your point, earlier is available today. Now, I don't know that the house cleaning one is going to be ready for, you know that, but that's why I was bullish on the idea of the time frame and yeah, I'll throw a, I'll throw a burger and a beer, bet on 18 to 24 months. You can buy one for your home.

Oh yeah. No, I think for sure you'll be able to get one for your home.

Your joke was the Brown household, right?

Yeah. And. And might get one here. I mean just if not no other reason to test it out. I think there would be a really. For me, it would be very interesting to watch the evolution of it from that perspective. And I think, you know, if you're trying to think about business application, as long as you feel like it would be a safe situation is, you know, you can and you. It's, it's a reasonably affordable purchase is, you know, understand a little bit more about the opportunity for testing it out in a, in a little bit of an environment. I do want to hit one thing and then I know we need to move on. But you know, Bob, Asked a question here. What will happen when the robot becomes sentient? Will it defend itself? It was interesting and I think even in the video we saw that the guy was boxing with the robot or whatever. One of the biggest things they found in testing, consumer testing with these robots that we just showed is that the, the, the person needed to feel like they could, I won't say beat up on the robot, but whereas was stronger than the robot and could handle, you know, push the robot around, let's put it that way. Almost like having a little brother. Like, I want to make sure I can push my little brother around and they're not gonna, you know, be able to be beat me up or do something with that. And it was one of the biggest things that came up in their testing with consumers is the ability to feel like the consumer had the ability to have that control over the robot and that it could push it around a bit. And you know, even like I was showing there, kind of kick it and, and push it and the robot's not going to respond and go after you and try and choke you or something from, from that perspective. So obviously that makes sense. But an interesting, interesting concept.

So before we leave this and jump on from this is that the Tesla is building, they call it. I just looked that up. Optimus, I think it's called, but Elon Musk, and you can bet against him if you want. I'm not going to. Is suggesting that down the road we're going to have a minimum of one robot in every home. And you know, I was talking to Arlene about this yesterday. I said it's not just cleaning the house, but it's literally here. Let's, let's send it. Let's send it, you know, through airplay or whatever, you know, the, the tool will use to get know Bluetooth or however we'll get the data to it is, here's the pictures of my garden. Here's what's plants and here's what's weeds. Make sure you pull the weeds out by the, by the root and get going. After you.

I need one of those drastically.

Well, after you finish cleaning the barbecue, let's go weed the hillside.

That's right.

So anyways, jumping ahead, I don't know why I'm. Like I said, I don't know why I'm geeked out on this, but it's kind of exciting. So we're in our cybersecurity AI and technology segment, winding down our show for today. We have an article there From Cybersecurity Dive 4 cybersecurity trends you need to watch in 2025 I think big thing for us moving forward, we're looking at it within our company. We were having a discussion about this yesterday, you and I were as the co founders and principals at Lead Smart Technologies about this, about cybersecurity issues. It impacts everybody, whether it's, you know, clicking on a bad link or whatever it might be. I'm, I'm excited with that. Tom. I'm seeing more and more though from our so two things. I'm seeing more and more from companies that are on our newsletter list which are distributors and manufacturing where I'm getting phishing emails that are coming from them because they've clicked on something wrong. We had an issue internally with that. But the good news is I'm seeing more and more companies that are either our customers or prospects that we're talking to that are when I see a response from somebody, there is a note from their internal IT group about not clicking on things and so forth. So I think this is just something we all are going to need to pay more and more attention to because if they're, if, if the Chinese hackers from the Chinese government are getting into the U.S. treasury Department's system, getting into our technology systems within our companies is going to be simpler for them. I, I like in that setting. So you need to be paying attention to it. Good. All right, last article in that segment 5 Trends in AI and Data Science for 2025. Good article from MIT Sloan about some trends going on there as well. So we'll jump quickly. Sales and M and A segment qxo, the group that's been put together by the original founder of United Rentals and another are large other large distribution companies. Brad can't remember Brad's last name but they are moving. They initially went public as they brought this huge fund together with multi billions of dollars. They are moving from the NASDAQ to the New York Stock Exchange later this month. Got some big plans, big things happening with them. They've gone out and done some very robust first couple of deals that they've gone after have been huge and surprising in that setting. And they also recently had Jared Kushner, who's incoming President Trump's son in law join their board of directors and his PE group putting some money into it as well. So it'll be interesting to watch what they're going to be doing at qxo. Brad Jacobs is the gentleman's name came back to my mind. So good, good article there. Sales and Marketing Management.com SMM has good article that we posted today about transforming B2B sales performance by optimizing eight specific areas within a company. So that's worth taking a look at as well. What do we have there people in leadership segment? Tom, what do we got going on there?

Boy, we had five trends that will shape HR in 2025. Really talking about hiring and, and training and onboarding and, and things along those line.

Talked a lot about in, in hiring and, and job seekers using AI and their resumes and so forth.

Yep. And then Gen Z eager to start career in trades. That's you know I think we've hit on this before and I is, you know a lot of, there is definitely a lot more interest in trades. There's just hasn't been a whole lot of opportunity for getting trained on how to do the trades.

Yeah.

Unless robots are going to do all of our plumbing and all of our electrical work and everything else along the way. But anyway there was seems, seems to be a very large demand for this from the Gen Z, from the Gen Z generation.

You know, it's interesting, you know who's been behind that is I would say behind it. But a big proponent of really getting people to go think about the trades is, you know, there's a, well you, you've got a buddy that's an electrician and owns an electrical company that makes a phenomenal living. Right. You know, plenty of plumbers out there making 150, 200 plus thousand dollars a year and with very consistent work that they, they can do on their own or they can work for another company doing it. So I think that's pretty exciting to think about. But I back to our earlier discussion. I can very much see a place in the not too distant future where you know, you have what is a Gen Z or not too long behind that going to be what's coming after that Gen A, whatever it might be coming up and they've got a couple of robots that are in the, in the back of their, their SUV or their van or their truck and they pop out and they go run the snake down the, down the sewer line and check what's going on in your house and you've got this Gen Z er that's checking everything out on his technology and he's got his robot assistants that's going to help him get the job done and probably do a better job of the diagnostic an analysis side than a human would have done. All right, I'm still geeking out on this stuff. So anyway, some Good. Another article there from HR Dive about HRDive.com about hiring being reshaped by technology coming up in 2025 more than ever. So we added a new section to the newsletter that we haven't had before. It's called Channel Leaders on the Move. So we'll be kind of following some of the promotions and job changes that go on in wholesale distribution. We won't spend time talking about that. But that's a new segment again if you'd like our newsletter, let us know. And then we jump into our industry scuttlebutt where we talk a little bit about M and A and updates. We've got a couple of articles there. Just shout out to our friends. I got a text message from Brendan Breen, a friend from ISA CEO of Industrial Supply association this morning checking on the. The fires with us. I've got to respond to him still this morning. But they opened up. Shouldn't say opened up, but brought in a new person onto the board of directors and Sarah Dulski who's from MSC Industrial Supplies during the ISA board. So congratulations there. And then Tom, each week we have our segment on a great read. We talked a lot about robots and what we call physical AI. We've got a link to an article there that's talking about Jensen Huang, the Wang. Wang. Wang, how's that pronounced?

Remember Huang Wang.

I think Wang his last name pronounced. But he's the visionary behind Nvidia, which is the chips that are powering AI. He did a phenomenal keynote address at the beginning of the week this week for the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas. If you get a chance, go look at that. There's really talked about the future of AI and its use in physical. What he called physical AI. Tying all back into our earlier conversation about robots. So watching the article, he talks a lot about about the physical AI component of things. His keynote was pretty fantastic. I haven't watched it all. I'm going to try and listen to it while I'm in the car this weekend a little bit more. So good one in our great read segment and that's kind of winding us down for the day, huh, my friend?

Yeah, a lot of articles. A lot of stuff.

We went way long today. Sorry about that. It was my geeking out on the.

All right, well that. That will be your cross. Your prediction for 2025 next week on the prediction show is.

Yeah.

Is house cleaning robots. So there you go.

Or. Or warehouse management robots or whatever it might be. But I think this is exciting, exciting time to be alive. Right? That's how they say it.

All right, well, thanks everybody for all the great comments and for being here and for sticking around.

And again next week. Don't want to miss next week. Next week is episode 125. We will have our 2020 in review discussion. You have that banner handy, Tom, or did that go away? But if you're going to pick first quarter time to join us live next Friday, 9am Pacific, would be the time to do it. The illustrious Mike Marks, Ian Heller and Dirk Beveridge will be joining us to discuss 2024 in review and 2025 what we can expect. We'll add in some of the discussions we've had today into that. But great group of guys, good human beings, wicked smart. And it's going to be a great, great day with the five of us. So looking forward to that. So join us next week on around the Horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing. Again, if you don't get the newsletter and you'd like to reach out to us, we'd be happy to get that to you. And on that note, my friend, we'll wish everybody a great weekend. Be kind, be safe, and do good things.

Thanks everyone.

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