"How Can My Wholesale Distribution Strategy Keep Up With Tariff Changes?"

Foreign.

The Horn in Wholesale distribution with Kevin Brown and Tom Burton. Sponsored each week by LeadSmart Technologies. Tom, Kevin and their guests review the news of the week and dive deep into the topics impacting manufacturers, wholesale distribution, independent sales agents and the global wholesale supply chain. Whether it's m and 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.

What's happening?

Good morning. Welcome back.

Good to see you.

That's right.

Busy week for both of us, huh?

Well, we missed last week. Yeah, that's right.

You weren't available, huh?

Yeah, that was my fault.

Yeah, that was me taking a day off. Focus on some other things for the day. We'll love some of the volunteer work that I do. Took me away for the day Friday, but it's good to be back and crazy. It's, we're coming into that time of year, aren't we? A crazy travel time, huh?

Yeah. I think for you. I'm hoping my travel is more or less done, but who knows?

That's amusing.

So I like, I'm just gonna say hello, my travel should be to Hawaii. And that's it.

I'm going to Hawaii. Yeah, I'm going to Hawaii. I'm going to do the show from Hawaii in November if everything plays out right.

Okay.

Just like I did in. Oh, that was tiring, though. I was early in the morning to do the show from Hawaii when I did it last December. But I think we're gonna go out and the, that's great. Paul Kennedy says good morning with the miss last week. Is this a double episode? Paul, you don't want twice as much of us. Come on.

I guess we just have to double the quality of what we're doing.

Well, that, that, There you go. Yeah. Yeah.

Two hours a day, drinking in the morning, I think, or something.

Well, that's, that's great.

Yeah.

Paul. Brandon, your checks are coming. They're, they're, they're in the, in the mail. Now. About a double episode today. You know, it, it is weird and I think, you know, we've created a great thing here, but also a little bit of a monster. So it's just Fridays are, Fridays are hard sometimes. But it's, it's great to be with everybody. And you know, I, I will ask, I'll put this in the, the show because John here's not only the recording but the AI review of things. And, and he's got triggers in there for certain things. So my Request for John Taylor, our producer and editor, is to absolutely make a short for the social media channels or a reel of Tom saying he's not going to have to travel anymore this year. So I have like, I think I have seven or eight trips that I'm aware of right now left this year. So you're coming on a couple of those, buddy.

All right. All right, well, let's get into it. We got a double header today.

So you want to, you want to talk about the news or something. But before we do, before we do that, why don't we do our normal weekly housekeeping? So for those of you that are with us and listening in maybe for the first time, I'm Kevin Brown and I'm here with my lifelong friend, co host of the show and co founder of the company that sponsors our show, Lead Smart Technologies, Tom Burton. We get together every week. We've got a great series of guests coming up in the next few months. Some well known names and some industry influencers and Washington influencers and so forth coming with us. But we get together each week and we review the news of the week coming on.

Did you say Trump was coming on later next month?

Yeah, something like that.

Okay.

No, we're going to have Brian Wild from naw, who's their legislative analyst and lead there.

But that's a good secondary.

Well, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, we try not to be controversial on the show. And so the Trump people keep calling and, and I've just continued to say no. And until interest rates come down, there's, there's no room for anybody from, from the federal government or certainly the Fed. You know, Powell's people are calling, wanting to come on the show.

Yeah.

And I'm like, nope, you know what? If interest rates are where they are and you're going to stay, stay digging your heels in, then you can't come on this show. So we'll let, we'll let your people know when we see interest rates come down. So you didn't know that, did you, that I've been having those conversations behind?

Yeah, I figured it was happening. I just didn't know all the details.

Very good. So back to, back to reality. We get together and review the newsletter that we publish every week. The newsletter is called around the H in Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing. It wasn't that fun.

Yes, it was.

I hope for the people that are, that are live.

All right, pull yourself together.

I will when you do.

Okay.

That's so our friend Bob, that For those of you that are listening later in the day on the podcast are just going to wonder if we had a technical breakdown for a moment, but I mentioned that Tom and I have been lifelong friends. We went to kindergarten together. Tom's a computer scientist by training and I'm a, supposedly a business guy and have been involved in. I gotta turn my camera off or yours start over. Yeah, we're gonna log off and come right back in.

Yes, as a matter of fact, Bob, I did run a lemonade stand when I was a kid. I don't know if Kevin was involved or not, but I did run a lemonade stand. So I don't know that we ever ran a lemonade stand together, but we.

Didn'T, you know, I was, I was the kid. Remember the old boys Life magazine that they might even still have it that Boy Scouts put out?

Yeah.

So in the back of that there was all the ads, like you could buy your model airplanes and your slot cars and all that, remember that? And they had a thing in there where you could buy garden seeds for tomatoes or dandelions or whatever it is. And the ad said something like, if you, you know, it's a, it's $2, probably wasn't even that much and if you sell all the seeds, you'll make $5. So I was like 7 years old and I was allowed, you know, I grew up just a couple blocks from the beach and we had one way streets that we lived on. And so I would walk door to door. I was allowed to go two blocks the two blocks to the beach and two blocks either side the other direction where we live. And I would buy boxes and boxes that I don't believe that anybody necessarily ever planted the seeds. But I was like 7 or 8 years old and I had, how do you say no to a 7 or 8 year old? And I, I understood that. And so I would just walk with those boxes and just kept ordering them. And that was, you know, before the paper route and the, the cutting the lawns and so forth. But no, we didn't have that. And I think the funny part of this was, is that Bob's comment was that was Tom marketing and sales. It was Kevin production. Right. That's if you were to look at the company we run today, 60, 50, whatever, years later. Yeah, I don't have anything to do with production.

Well, maybe we need to rethink things anyway.

I don't think so. So like can I finish with after nine? And you know, I got Brian Hopkins just having a good time Paul saying that the show's already off the rails and I think that's an understatement. So we should just call it a weekend and go about our day. So, yeah, we publish a newsletter every week. It's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution Manufacturing goes out to thousands of people every week. What we do is we gather the top stories of the week from around the world, whether it's the economy or supply chain, mergers and acquisitions, sales, marketing, AI, robotics, all of the things that can impact wholesale distribution and manufacturing. Gather that all together. We curate all of that and put it into our newsletter that goes out and that goes out. As I said, I think we're like 10,500, something like that at each week. And we review that newsletter here on the show and we discuss the impact that it has on wholesale distribution manufacturing. So we love doing that. If you do not get that newsletter and you would like to just send us a note, three simple ways. If you're active on LinkedIn, just look up around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution. You can also go to the Lead Smart Technologies page there and that will provide you with a link where you can sign up for the newsletter. You can send us an email directly to our sponsor of the show, the company that Tom and I work for, Lead smart technologies@helloadsmartech.com that's again, helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that out to you if you request the newsletter. And then finally, we have a website for the podcast. It's www.aroundthehornpod.com. and you can sign up for the newsletter there as well as subscribe to the podcast on any of the podcast channels. So we do this in the Morning live, it's 990-9 Pacific Time, where Tom and I both live. We both live in California and we do this on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live and Facebook Live. But later in the day, our editor, John Taylor will pull all this together and put that out onto all of the popular podcast formats. Spotify, you, Apple and Odyssey and so forth. So however you get that, we love having you with us. We couldn't do the show if we didn't have the people behind the scenes.

We have a few people that are.

Involved in that getting us ready for the show and then taking care of things after the fact. And all of this costs money. So we have a sponsorship of the company that Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies. We've developed what we describe as the Lead Smart Channel cloud, which is our software product, which is an AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence platform solely built for wholesale distributors and manufacturers. What we do with that is we are a unified platform where we bring siloed data or what we sometimes call silo data that needs to be corralled from across your organization. So traditional CRM is something where we typically see a Big Brother emphasis. I put some call notes in for a salesperson that nobody typically reads. We take a different philosophy of that. We look at things as probably 70, 60, 70 plus percent of that should.

Be.

Tying to the data that you have within the company that you want to feed your salespeople. So think ERP data, E commerce data, marketing automation data where we can see the different journeys that our customers are taking in this modern age. We bring all that data together. We use artificial intelligence and other tools to extrapolate how we should be spending our time. What's most important to the business, to accelerate growth within the company as well as not just accelerating growth, but improving experience of our customers. So if your company is digitally transforming and you would like to talk about how to grow and accelerate growth within your business while really gaining deep insights into what's happening with your customer, your team and your overall business, we'd love to talk to you. Tom, you were out earlier this week in Maryland with one of our great customers doing some, some training and working with them, right?

Yeah. It's interesting. I wish we would somehow could get rid of the CRM term because it was interesting. I was out training a little over a hundred outside sales reps, which I don't usually do live. Right. A lot of times it's done in virtual and I was live with a hundred of them in a big training room on, on Tuesday and I was talking to a lot of them and you know, it's interesting. They want to be able to do three things. They want to be able to add value when they show up with the customer. And as many of them said, I have something, I want to have something to talk about of value when I go meet a customer. They want to be able to drive more, you know, sales and revenue for their, for their company and they and represent their company well. And they want to make more money for the company and for themselves. And what we trained them on with channel cloud and the system that we had implemented there is the ability to do that. And it was so far away from lit. The people are like, this isn't CRM. I've done CRM and other companies. This isn't CRM. I mean, these were the comments that we were we're getting so. I just hate that word. It's like, I think it's. Unfortunately it's a, it's a double edged sword because it's the only thing the market really kind of closely knows. But interesting. And I know when you get to the news, because we're way off the rails is I talked to them yesterday and the feedback they were getting from the salespeople who went live on Tuesday is why didn't we do this before? Now that's very different than an adoption. Oh, no one's going to want to use it. No one wants to use it. As you said, when all you're doing is entering data and it's going into a black hole and no one. But if it's being said, if it's being used to enable it, it's, it's a very different, a very different experience. And even you know, the customer was kind of like we didn't expect that comment like why didn't we do this before? You know. So anyway, I just. This word CRM kind of comes across as a four letter word when because of, of the history of it versus kind of where things are now.

Well, while you were in Maryland, I was in. Where was I? I was in Indianapolis, sorry. Earlier in the week with our friends at Affiliated Distributors for one of their divisional national meetings and an opportunity to speak to a large group there about digital transformation. And part of the title of the presentation I did was about the There you go Paul says Customer enablement tool. We did a, we did a presentation for Paul's team recently talking about enablement as well and it's nice to see Brian's comment. Brian worked for a company, Brian Hopkins with Distribution Strategy Group. Our good friends there. Brian used to work for one of our large customers and had an opportunity to use our platform. So it's nice to hear and thanks for the shout out there. So it's good, good stuff. But I think we are seeing the migration of that and the big to getting away even from that term. I think we use it just because it gets a conversation started with some people. We have big banners in our booths at the events that we're at that describe exactly what we do and we even use the word, the three letters there, the acronym of CRM. And sometimes people are still like what is it you do? But my point is I had an opportunity to speak earlier this week to a large group about the data gold mine that wholesale distributors really have with all of the years and years of invoice data and the you know, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of spreadsheets and their e commerce data and other sources of data and those just live in all of these different places around their company. And as we move into an AI age, it gets even worse.

Right.

When you're not evaluating that on a single platform, it becomes problematic. So that was fun. Got another similar presentation coming up next month for the folks at Hardy, the H Vac trade association. So we're looking forward to that. So should we talk about the news?

Isn't that what we're here to do?

I don't know. I thought it was to just laugh at ourselves because that's what it seemed like for quite some times.

So, all right, let's get into it.

Although I, you know, there is something to be said for what Bob said. We should go back to Rolodex quarters and payphones.

That's right.

Bob's really old because I, I don't know that I ever had a Rolodex. But you know what I had? In fact, I saw one recently. I might have even kept it. Those old little folios, I'll call them, where There were like 8 and a half by 11 and all they had was plastic slots to put cards into. Right.

There was a name to that thing. I don't remember what it was called.

But yeah, I traveled around with that on the front seat of my truck or my SUV when I was a manufacturer's rep with a back end loaded of samples. And you know, there were the business cards and I, I was really advanced because I used MapQuest to print out my maps of where I was going. You know, I was pretty.

You didn't have a Thomas guide?

Oh, I had, I had a, A bag that I went. It's the best comment ever. It just popped up. See that? Brandon says, what's your ticker symbol?

It's going to be the uncrm. Like you know, the Uncola.

It's a. Yeah, I don't think you can put slash through CRM. So maybe it'll be cet, like when Paul's saying customer enablement tool. So there you go. Public offering. Never even, Never even, Can't even imagine that. But yes, Tom, I had a briefcase, soft sided briefcase with all of the Thomas guides available for California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii in my, in that bag. So wherever I was at. Because that's what our rep agency covered. And yes, so that is in fact, and I learned how to use those when I was the delivery driver for my dad's distribution company. So.

Okay.

All right, enough of that, huh? So look, look, apparently in the economy things are happening. What are your thoughts?

So, okay, so what was it two weeks ago when we were on. We had the job report.

Yep.

The job report came in as we talked about way low, way lower than expected.

Wholesale price doesn't like that.

Right. Wholesale prices came in I guess yesterday, the day before, way higher than expected. 0.9% increase in July. I think they were comparing that against 0.3 so 3x what was expected on that? Me being a little bit skeptical nowadays about the data that we're getting because immediately everybody said, well this is all tariff related. This is all terrible. Not well, and actually I think it.

Is, it's the hesitations with it, I guess. But, and, and some, you're right, some of the early, some of this early is. But I think we're going to see that flatten out pretty quick.

Well, yeah, but I, I went back and tried to do a little bit of homework on this going. Okay. Because the first words out of everybody.

Mouth, don't start bringing research into this. We're just here to laugh.

Okay, all right, sorry. So I, I was out at my lemonade stand and I was doing some research. But the.

Between your sales and marketing efforts.

That's right. But it turns out that a lot of the increases were related to products that were basically impacted by tariffs. We have another article here in a minute talking about this consumer price index which basically was flat. And you know, there is a history of the producer price PPI being kind of a leading indicator of what's going to occur to the CPI down the road. Which makes sense. Right? Hasn't passed through. So again the question becomes, is this more transitory, as I like to say, is this kind of a short term blip? Well, we'll find out. But it does appear again, based on whatever research I've done here, it does appear that a lot of this is driven through tariff related price increases. Tariff. And when I say related doesn't mean directly but maybe it's a downstream relationship or whatever. But related quote unquote or at least tariff is the primary driver of it.

Well, what it does is, well, we can talk a little bit more about whether that levels out or not and what happens with this. I think my, my challenge with this is, you know, it just puts, that does push pressure on inflation. Right. And that's. So if this number stays the same and if jobs settle out a little bit, then it kind of indicates Powell's focus on sticking where things are at even Though we've had two different Fed governors this week comment again come out and comment about definitely doing being timed it to.

They say that before this came out. Do you know or do you know when?

No, I think it was but I think, I think it was about the same time. Yeah, but then even last week we had this but you know, we're going to see multiple other reports in the next couple of weeks and I think we were talking earlier, I think there's only two more meetings this year that the question that has to come out of this, I think ultimately we were talking about this before we went live today is that, you know, we've got an administration that's on one side and a Fed chair that is seems to be digging his heels in. I, you know, I think it was funny. I remember in our show two weeks ago, I think Bob that's commented with us today mentioned that Powell looked squirmish, I think is what he called it. He looked pretty uncomfortable being with the president in the same room. And there is a lot of pressure on us getting to this place where we have some easing. And I think my, my frustration with it is we're going to, we're seeing this. It's just a continuing up and down that we've seen over the last well, let's just say since we have the current administration in place, the pressure's on for lowering. But at the same time we are seeing these ups and downs of these different indicators. Right. So we had with the last jobs report that would indicate potentially having a cut with what we see here today. It's like hold on, hold on, hold on. But the economy as a whole is thriving basically. And that's why I think what Powell is saying, what the stock market is saying is I don't care what you do. And so if the stock market is saying I don't care what you do, we're just going to keep following the, the statistics that we're following that are driving what the market is doing is why wouldn't you and we've talked about this on this show before. I'd love to get other people's thoughts on this if you're live with us today. But my look view of this is and we we talked about this a while back is ratchet down a quarter point or even a half a point if because what we're seeing is right now the market is suggesting that there's not a huge impact that rates are having on this. So if you ratchet it down and you can ratchet Back up. Why wouldn't you want to test that to see if you could be boost the economy even further, get some more manufacturing and more investments going with it from that standpoint?

Well, I mean, I guess if you look at it logically from the market perspective. Right. And hey, let's give everybody a, maybe a breather here.

Right?

A short term and maybe it's a long term breather or a short term breather, who knows? I guess you could definitely say there's some logic to that. I think that. But if you get, if you look at the, and I think this is what you're saying, right. Well, maybe the criteria that they're making these decisions around, it's not the best criteria. But if you look at the criteria and I want to go into the poly market, I know that's our next article here in a minute, but the criteria of okay, jobs and inflation, what's going to happen and what I believe is going to happen is we're going to get a revision on the job report in September. So it's going to go up from what it was reported in August. And we already have this data now that's showing inflation at least PPI is going up. Likely we could see CPI going up next month or the month after. So if you look at all of those things, the, if you look at those, those data and that analytics. Yeah, there's Powell is quote unquote, right, right. He's right for holding based upon the.

Statistics that they use today to make decisions.

Yeah, right. Subjective, you know, that's his objective approach. If you take the more subjective approach, you know, there's logic on what you're saying there. But, and I don't know if you want to jump into the Polymark because I really think this is interesting.

Yeah, let's. Yeah, so let's, before you do that, Tom, and I think that's good. And Brian made a good comment. Market is already pricing in a September discount.

It is already.

Yeah, that probably true. And that's the, the key thing will be able to be seeing there's so much pressure for this. I mean if they don't do anything, I'll be pretty surprised. And I think my view of this is one, I don't, I'm not convinced that, you know, 2% is the right inflation number. You know, and I think even Scott Besson at the treasury was, you know, commenting about having even that up at around 3%. But I'm not saying we need to get rid of those, the, all of the tools that the Fed uses, I think we need. They should be being more up to speed with what the world is doing and what the markets are doing. And maybe there's a series of other parameters that could be used and maybe some adjustments to the current parameters.

Right.

So I'm not saying, you know, wipe it all out, but it's, it just seems off right now. So anyways, yeah, I jump into the, the Poly Market. Describe the. What Poly Market is. Before you go too far into this.

Well, we've hit on these a couple weeks ago. Right. These, this is a platform.

Actually, Tom, we have a quite. I just looked at from LinkedIn earlier. We have a lot of people here for the first time.

Okay, okay. So Poly Market is a platform. It's a. I think of it as a betting platform or a trading platform based around certain events occurring or not occurring. And they have all kinds of things on here, you know, like who wins the super bowl or. Well, that's probably not a great example because that's sports betting. But there's a lot of different things they have on here. And one of the things is Fed decision in September. Right now it's showing that the, the market of this, the, the people that are betting 72% are saying that there will be a 25 decrease in September. Now that's down slightly 2% a little bit. It was 74% a couple days ago, but that's still pretty high. It's a pretty high bias towards a decision in September. What I find interesting is the second one here. How many in 2025? This is a separate issue here. 8% are saying zero.

Just went down.

It just went down.

Actually, it was nine when we started talking about this.

20 say 1, 41 say 2. 22% say 3. I think I told you before we went on this, 8% to me is the bet of the century. I'm going to put a hundred dollars on this. And when I, and when I win.

My thousand of the century and you're only putting a hundred dollars on it, well, that's like two rounds of drinks and some calamari.

But I figured. Yeah, but I figure if I win, right. Which I will.

Or like, you could pay off the stake from.

I can pay off the stake from last year. Right. This is my strategy for this guy.

Love it.

I think, I think $100 bet would mean if they came to zero, I get almost. They don't like to use the word. That $100 investment would 10x if they in fact do no rate cuts. But I do think that this is a very low expectation given what I just talked about is with if the numbers stay the same and they continue to use the objective view of, of the decision making and they don't get pressured from the political aspect of it, zero is a very real, real outcome before between now and the end of the year, in my opinion, much higher than 8%.

So let's just preface this a little bit. We are not endorsing people doing, doing online online gambling at polymarket. It's not the endorsement here. They're not a sponsor. They're not suggesting any of that. What words Polymarket though, if we were backwards and look, I just looked it up real quick just for my friend, good friend Brian Hopkins, that here I keep a perplexity window open because it's super fast and in their app for some show show notes. And so I just looked it up. The reason that we're Polymarket got so popular is coming into last year's elections. They were really coming out with some interesting statistics that were coming from this. What did you, what do you call? Investment versus wager? So in the 2024 presidential election, it says in the weeks leading up to the vote, polymark consistently showed Donald Trump as the favorite, giving him odds as high as 58% and then again 67% to win, which was completely contrary to most traditional polling which favored Harris or showed a toss up. As the election day unfolded, Polymarket increased Trump's odds to 95% several hours before major media outlets officially called the race. And then it goes on to give a bunch of statistics about how well it was calling all of the swing state races as well. So this tool is becoming far more than just, you know, what you think about it as. Hey, I want to.

Novelty.

Yeah. And yeah, novelty is a great point. Right. And we kind of both started looking at it because another podcast that we listen to closely references it regularly in looking at economic data and so forth. So it's interesting to see with this. So let's just go back to our. Bob commented about steaks and tacos. So we've got a taco on the line or you already won that one. What's that?

I already won the taco one. You won the steak. So.

That's right. So where are we at right now? What are you thinking on the year? Nothing.

Then I'm, I think I'm going to say that there's about, in my opinion, about a 30 or 40% chance of nothing and probably another 30, 40% of one and maybe a 20% of two. Which is very different than what they're saying. Hence my, my potential motivation to make a investment.

Okay, I'm going to jump out and, and love everybody else that's. That's with us live that wants to comment, to throw out. What they're thinking is I think we're still going to see two. I think we're going to see, you know, quarter point bips at both of the upcoming meetings. I just looked it up real quick. I think it said, where we at? We have September, October and December, not November. So three more meetings.

We have three more meetings.

Yeah, three more meetings. And I'm going to say at least two of those have a quarter point BIP in them.

Point. Okay, I did.

And I think it's. And I think the challenge right now is we're going to see this fluttering, right? It's like a heart rate that's in, you know, in atrial fibrillation. It's just fluttering. It's going. We're seeing stuff up and down, up and down. We just keep seeing these different reports. Some of them are suggesting a cut, some of us suggesting no cuts. And I think we've got to see something come out of this. And I think there's enough pressure on enough of the governors that in September will really kind of show us what's going to come around with this. But.

Well, I do think that if there is going to be a cut, or at least the start of a cut, it will be in September. So if they don't make one in September, would your tune change?

I don't know. I'm not betting on it. So probably not. Probably hold solid on that. But I do think, I do think you're right. You could be right. As if there's nothing in September. It makes it much more like. Well, it all depends on what the news is. Right. You know, so. You know what I mean? I think. But I do think, I do kind of have a feeling right now because of the bullishness of consumers still spending through all of this. Right. We've got the instability, the ups and downs that go with the tariffs. I think the jobs report is probably going to have maybe a stronger impact on this than other things. So I think with the upcoming, I, I could look real quick, but I, I don't know what the doing the next job reports comes out, but do we see that monthly? See that monthly, right?

Yeah, monthly. First Friday of every month.

Okay. So got a couple weeks before that, so we'll see. Let's have this discussion again in a couple Weeks. So let's talk a little bit about, about tariffs before we kind of move ahead. So we just had, you know, two weeks ago we had the tariffs go into, into effect. We're kind of seeing that starting to play out a little bit more. I, it's funny I didn't tell you this. I. For all of the upcoming events we've got going, we give away some, you know, I'll say nicer quality, you know, pens with Bleed Smart on it at the events we have and some notepads and little tchotchke type stuff. So we were out of pens, so I ordered some pens. And you know, Darlene, my wife, has a marketing, design and printing company and she has relationships with all that. Those companies. So she got those done for me. And when I got the invoice, there was a line on it. It was a $198 for the pins and there was a 29 tariff line item on it.

She put that on your invoice?

No, Darlene did not. Oh, no, no. She just came from the vendor.

Okay.

And I was like, just raise your price. I'm okay with that. I don't want to read this.

It's pretty cheap for those Mount Block pins that we're giving away.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. Come visit us at the upcoming events. Yeah, no, that, you know, they are nice quality pins. They got the little rubber thing at the top for your tablets. And, and. But yeah, it was, you know, the first sign of things. So I got a little bit of a taste of what our, our distributor customers and the manufacturers.

So they're passing it right through.

They pass through just a straight line item. It was the cost of the pens. There was a tax surcharge or a tariff surcharge and then the tax line.

Okay.

So it's right there. But I think the, the interesting thing, what's worth a conversation, Tom, was this, this article in about. From CNBC about the China tariff deadline being extended. And I think there's. And I just started thinking about this morning, maybe this is super rudimentary and I should have thought about it all along. But my view and takeaway on this is, you know, you might just say, well, they're just kicking the can down the street. But I think there's a lot that goes with this. And we have another article coming up about Small Business Administration talking about what the cost of this could be to small businesses. You know, I think part of this is one that negotiations aren't going to, you know, I don't think they're going bad, but there's. The last meeting they had, I think was in London and they didn't come out of that with any, you know, big excitement of, you know, moving, moving forward on things. But I think this op, what's part of this is going on is I think it's, it could be and you know, this administration's pretty, pretty savvy. And when it comes to negotiating and I think pushing that down the, you know, kicking the can down the street, so to speak, in this setting is maybe extremely wise if you were to look at the implications outside of tariffs. Because we had the pressure for, you know, as much as 145%. Right now we're just holding at 30. Now. 30 is a lot. Right. If I'm bringing in.

Is that where those pins came from?

What's that?

The pins, do they come from China?

Of course, yeah. Okay, well, let me rephrase that. The, the, all of the components and the pins came from China to the vendor. The vendor put the lead smart logo on them.

Right, right.

So but if you think about that, you know, 30, that, that's holding right now, I think there's some back side of this that might be much, much more important than we maybe are thinking about. You know, every 90 day extension or 30 day extension of this is giving and holding it lower at that 30% because I don't, I don't have confidence that it's going to come much below that.

Right.

If that gets held at that number, it's giving all kinds of companies, whether you're a manufacturer or a distributor, that much more time at a low rate in case they did go up to get your business out of there. Right. And you have in the article about the small businesses there that we have coming up here in the newsletter, they, you know, they talk about, you know, so many small manufacturers that are getting components of their products from China. Well, now's the opportunity. While that number stuck at 30%, you're just getting another 90 day window to start finding other suppliers to move your supply chain out of China. And you know, I talk to people all the time that are working on that. So I guess there was a, there was an another impact that just came to mind this morning as I was reading both of these articles that, you know, yes, it gives the opportunity to negotiate deeper and further. One of the things that this article didn't talk about though was anything about intellectual property and the things that they're looking at, you know, the, the requirements of, if you want to Do a US company with a. An operating unit in China needing Chinese investors or partners in it. So there's a lot that goes on behind the scene but I think there could be something behind the scenes that is really beneficial out of this kicking the kingdom.

I think I agree and.

No, no just say you agree. It's always easiest.

You're absolutely right. I mean you, you nailed it. I mean I don't even know what else to say.

Well now you sound like chat GPT whenever I tell ask it anything right.

Great question Kevin. Great, great response. So chat GPT5 isn't nearly as as nice.

And hey side note we'll probably talk about this later but I'll digress here for a moment and hit pause on on tariffs. Chachi PT5 is not using some of my instructions in my. I just call them helper agents. They call them GPTs. Have you seen run into any of that? And I hope Brian's still with us because he's.

Yeah, I've run into all kinds of stuff so we can. You can check on that.

I'm going. We can talk about that later. I'm. I'm moving, I'm moving backwards prior model.

Well most people are they that you can now go back to four zero.

Yeah I, I just, it's. I have, I have a couple of of help. I just call them helper agents that I've built where it's not using all of my instructions consistently and every time I'm using it I'm seeing I'm having to ask it to go back and say what are the resources you're supposed to be using for this?

We need to rebuild it. But I want to go back to the tariff thing is you know, I don't know if you're aware that the deal that with China, I'm sorry with Japan and with Europe are handshake deals. Those who not those have not have signed deals so far. Right. So who knows how long it will take to actually get a signed deal.

Yeah but you're right. Europe and Japan want those more. More probably more than we do. So those will get done, don't you think?

I think they'll get done but I don't think it's going to happen overnight to your point. Right, but now look at the China one that you just talked about. The 90 days my guess is is a 90 day delay to get a handshake deal. Now realistically could that get, could that get extended another 90 days? Probably. I mean the China arrangement, let's get it. It's Complicated. Right. And there's a lot of an understatement. Right. Okay. So let's just say another 90 days. It then gets a handshake deal. Then it has to go to the lawyers and the people that actually put all the paperwork together. I mean, how long could that negotiation end up going to actually have a signed agreement? So I think to your point is whatever these temporary tariffs are, quote unquote temporary tariffs, those could be temporary for quite some time. And the, you know, the question would I agree, I don't know that they're going to go down much more. So if you're going to hedge or you're going to make a, A, you know, a strategic call, then yeah, maybe doing some things sooner than later rather than waiting to see how these. I don't think your upside probably is as you have as much upside as they're potentially downside by, by holding out, which I think is what your point is. What the point is there. But remember that none of these deals are signed. I mean, maybe some. I don't even know about Vietnam. I haven't looked into that. But Europe and Japan are not signed. They're just handshake agreements.

I think they're, they're trying to hold out on signing the agreements to see if the courts even allow. If it gets the Supreme Court.

It's possible, but I don't, I don't even know that anyone's holding out. I just think it takes time for all of the paperwork to get put together and, you know. Yeah, yeah. So.

Well, anyways, I, I do, I, I was just, it just triggered for me, you know, not only just reading these articles and a couple others, but looking through that from a standpoint of what are the other implications and there could be some real benefits now, you know, if you're, you know, manufacturer bringing tons and tons of stuff from China already 50, you know, 30 hurts as well, but it doesn't hurt nearly as much as 145.

No, of course not. Yeah.

So good.

All right. We wouldn't be able to give out pins if it was 145%. Our swag.

Our swag swag budgie goes way down.

Way down. Yeah. We'd have to like really qualify if we give out a pin. You just can't leave them on the table.

Well, that's why all the lead smart technology shirts and, and, and clothing swag is all done with the finest Egyptian cotton from tailors in England. So.

Okay, you know, so we're only paying English tariffs.

Well, yeah, but you Know we're not. None of this China stuff for. For that. So.

Okay.

Hopefully a few people here wearing their lead smart vests today that they have.

All right, what's next?

Why don't we roll on into the manufacturing distribution segment. Our newsletter has series of different sections. We just spent 42 minutes of mayhem laughing and discussion on supply chain and the economy. So a couple articles here just both. If you don't follow the folks at Modern Distribution Management get on their newsletter updates. I think Mike Hockett, one of their bigwigs over there at MDM and now part of NAW is is with us today as well. Mike's good friend of the show, been on a number of times. They have a couple articles we have links to here about which distributors were named top workplaces for 2025 and another link to download their top 25 distributor list in general. So good stuff that they've got going on from that list. It's. It's. They do a really nice job of keeping some of these lists up. They're helpful to us. In our newsletter we have a list each week of the trade shows and events that are upcoming and Mike and his team help us with that as well. So also an updated article from Industrial Supply Trends from John Gunderson and David Gordon. Our friends over there did a for ISA in their partnership with the Industrial Supply Association. They did a nice article there on Lawson Products, the distribution company, and a little bit of their. Their announcements from earnings from the holding company that they're part of. But David did a good article and I got an email from him yesterday. I need to respond to, but published a nice article here from Electrical Trends that David Gordon did about are you satisfying your customer? And he references both manufacturers, manufacturers reps and distributors. Do you get a chance to look at that one, Tom?

I mean, no, I did not.

You didn't read David's article?

I did not, but I will now. Wow.

Why do I send you these?

I. I read most of the AI ones. Did you?

Okay, gotcha. They put this one together anyways. They had some key points to that one that was. Let me just grab them very quickly. They talked about listening and tailoring solutions to customer needs. Some of this stuff sounds.

I did read this one. I did read this one. I'm sorry. I did read this one. Yeah.

Well, jump in. Come on, tell us.

Well, there were some key points here.

There were.

They were talking about the stress.

Lily's listening right now. She's saying, tom, you didn't read it. You're Just reading my recaps.

No, no, I did read this one actually.

I think she's calling you out right now.

But yeah, there were a number of things about using digital tools, employee training, you know, again, really the focus of that strong customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction, which is what I was talking about earlier and some of the training we did this week with new company is how do they actually go out to a customer and make sure they have something really important and valuable to talk about versus, you know, hey, how are the kids and what's going on with the family and, and that kind of stuff. And again, you know, digital tools for driving the engagement. You know, things that were there. Those were the key points that came out of that article.

Yep, yep. But I thought it was good and it was interesting. They talked about delivering consistent experiences to employees, not just to customers.

Yes.

And Right. I thought that to me, I like that article from that standpoint is, you know, we, I think as executives we look at, we probably have, you know, we probably have a big list of customers that we have, but we really need to be thinking about, you know, the experience of our people. And I love this. You know, I'll shout out a little bit to our friend Paul Kennedy and his team at, at DSG Supply and you know, being employee owned and I talked to a handful of other companies this week that are employee owned and there's a different mindset with the, I'll just say the better employee owned companies and the leadership there that they just really, they really look. And it doesn't mean that a lot of other companies aren't doing a great job of taking care of their people, but you've got a, you've got a customer or constituent in your employees and your family and you've got another one with your customer. And taking care of both of those is important. And I think a lot of people get wrapped up too much in the idea I just need to take care of my customer. And if you're taking good care of your people, they're going to take good care of your customer. So good.

It's like we just went through. Right. If you enable. Right. And I'm just talking about sales, I'll just. Because that's what I dealt with this week. If you enable a salesperson to have more valuable information, more knowledge about the customer, more relevancy in what they're doing, you're enabling the employee but at the same time you're enabling the customer and providing a better customer experience. So I think the two definitely go.

Hand in Hand makes me think about that. Right? The information that's available from a mobile app at your fingertips, and products like ours become pretty powerful. I was just talking with somebody at the event I was at this week, and we were talking about the revenue expander tool that we have built in shows white space or categories that aren't being sold. And, you know, everybody that I talk to about that, you know, I always say, because I had this experience, you know, from early in my career, is that, you know, most salespeople walk by more business than they have it just because they're focused on what's going on. But if we can feed them that data, like Channel Cloud does, where we can say, hey, you know What? We sell 15 critical categories in the business and send somebody alert, an alert that says, this customer is buying three of them. And now all of a sudden, we're enabling that salesperson to really help the customer more. And half the time they're not, you know, even aware of it. And it's. It's kind of funny, I always think about it from a standpoint is like you have a discussion with a salesperson that, you know, they're. They're excited because their, their territory is up or a particular account is up 10% this month or this quarter or whatever. But then you start peeling that onion back a little bit with the visualizations that you get from a product like ours or where it's. All of a sudden you're saying, well, wait a minute, you're up 10%, but you're selling them three out of our 15 product categories. What if you got in the next three or four months you got to five categories? Where would we be? What if by the end of the year, you were selling them all of the categories that are reasonable for them, which might be 11, say, you know, what happens to the revenue growth at that standpoint? So satisfying employees, satisfying customers were my two takeaways.

You know, I know we're really off the right, but one of the biggest things that we've. That I wouldn't have guessed, but we've done for this customer is part of that. A part of what they have through the quote, unquote CRM is understanding where the customer sits with their credit limit and their credit. And one of the problems they've had in the past is, you know, sometimes the customer exceeds their credit limit or gets close to their credit limit, and then all of a sudden they go to a branch or they go somewhere and they're not able to purchase something, or they have an issue with their credit and then the salesperson, what's, you know, they get called, what's going on, all that kind of stuff. Right. The fact that they can maybe proactively, which is what we're doing here, identify potential credit limit issues and even, you know, kind of almost like a concierge reach out and go, hey, you know, you're getting close. I don't want you being a situation if you need to do something here, you know, that's a very valuable service to the customer that keeps them from getting in a bind when they need something urgently at a branch or. Or wherever they were going to get it.

Right. And I think that, Tom, I think that is that you described one side of it. I think that particular customer. I remember when I was visiting with them with you earlier in the year, we had part of that discussion and it was, you know, sometimes we think credit limit is, oh, somebody's not paying their bill.

Right?

No, no, this was not about that. This was about saying, hey, this is.

Actually they're buying more stuff. Right, Right.

And they should have a higher credit limit. And we'll give them a higher credit limit because they're deserving of it. But we don't know what their needs are. So somebody credit established a number and they may be getting ready to do a big job. And if you have a tool like, you know, you were talking about working with that particular customer this week where it can be alerting them of that, that's even saying, hey, here's all these open quotes that they have. If they, if you win those, there's no way they're going to get that have be able to get those orders. And so, yeah, great tools and it's meaningful. Right.

But from what I understand is that, you know, customers get kind of pissed off if all of a sudden they're in a situation where they need something and then they're, you know, running into that credit limit, which, you know, is understandable.

Sure.

All right.

What about E Commerce and marketing?

I didn't read any of this.

Do you ever prepare for the show or do you just do it on the fly?

No, I'm sales and marketing. I do things on the fly. Your production. I'm sales and marketing. Don't forget that.

So I do produce the newsletter.

You do, you do. So which one of these do we want to hit?

Well, there's a good article here from Digital Commerce360. Our good friend Mark Brohan there is put this together. B2B sellers trail, B2C companies and agentic AI adoption. Any thoughts from you on that? I know you read it, so don't, don't mess up.

Well, I think you have to, you know, the agentic AI, what does it mean to have agentic AI? We've talked about this before, right? This is AI workflows. And this isn't going to chat GPT and asking a question, Right. These are using AI to drive workflows and autonomous actions and so forth. I'm not surprised at all that in the B2C world, right? That is been adopted faster along the way than it has in the B2B. It's the B2B process of, and I think we hit on this a couple weeks ago, of agentic workflows inherently requires you to understand what your workflows are and, and how you would then you.

Automate them that will require you to then have workflows.

That's what I mean, right? You'd have to like what, what workflows are you trying to automate? And do they exist? Right. And, and how do they even exist in a manual non AI world or a traditional analog world? Right. How does that, how does that work together? And I think that's what, that's much more complicated in the B2B world than it is potentially in the B2C world that you're. So, yeah, I'm, I'm not, I'm not surprised. But I do think that we see this, right? I. Is workflow understanding workflow. I, you know, I've always been harping on data, but I think I erroneously should have been harping on data and workflow as the kind of key readiness areas for an organization to start thinking about more of a widespread adoption of AI. And that's what they're talking about.

Talk about that a little more though. Workflows and data. I mean, unpack workflows a little bit more.

Well, workflows are processes.

Right?

So this is what we just talked about. Right. A great example is what we just talked about with the credit limit. So what is the workflow or the process that's involved? So let's say that somebody does hit their credit limit. What happens now? I don't know. The sales rep calls the credit department.

Sure.

The credit department looks up, you know, are they paying their bills, are they current, you know, what is their AI? But I, I assume there's things that they go through there. They call back the sales rep, they say, okay, we've increased the credit limit to xyz. Right. The sales rep calls back the customer and says, okay, I just got your credit limit increase. There's a bit of a workflow there right now. People just say, well, that's just what we do. But probably there is a workflow there behind those things that are there now. You could automate that. Right? That all could be. That's a great example of something that could be automated with agentic AI. In fact, the entire process could have been automated through agentic AI with a, you know, thing back in probably a minute or two with a response on what's happening with that credit limit. So it's. But most companies don't understand that what I just described there is a process or a workflow. They just look at, well, that's how we do things.

Yep.

Right.

Well, it even rolls over to the sales side of things. Right. Is what, what in, you know, even in marketing side. Right. What is a lead? What do we do with our leads? How does that lead turn into an opportunity or get dumped off the side? Right. And what are our workforce? How do we, when we have opportunities? What, it's easy to have a CRM that says opportunity, but what is the flow of what we're doing with those opportunities? Right. What is the flow of how we're going to manage our quotes? Right. I, it's, it's astounding to me that, you know, vast majority of companies I talk to, when I say vast majority, it's 90 plus percent of companies have no process for working with quotes. It's. We do a quote in our ERP system, it's born there and it dies there. And sometimes we get the order and sometimes we don't. And maybe, maybe they have a statistic of the percentage of them that they, they got the order from. But how they got the order or why or was there, to your point of workflow that we followed that assured that we were going to go get it because it's just data that's siloed and stuck.

Right.

So all of those are workflows of how we go about things.

And we can talk about this maybe on a separate show, but one of the things I've been investigating is how to use AI to help accelerate and facilitate defining those workflows. Because it's, you know, hard for people sometimes to define that workflow, right. To go to the whiteboard and outline. I do this, I do. But if you actually can use AI to help do that for you and take some of those things that, you know, how we do things and turn them into more repeatable processes and workflows that then can Be looked at. Okay, then how would you then turn those into an agentic AI workflow right along the way?

Well, I think you could actually probably develop an agent for your company that understands your company, understands your market, understands the product categories you sell, that could look at the data as an example of the data that we would have in our platform, could look at all of that data and say, based upon what I'm seeing here, here is what your workflow should be. Right. It could help build that.

Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's, it's. And Bob saying here, right. It's not always linear. Totally agree. Right. And I think that's where the agentic part of things because the whole purpose of agentic workflows versus more traditional structured workflows is the decision making along the way. When do I, you know, veer left? When do I veer right? How do I move forward? Right. And even in the example I just gave of the credit situation. Right. There could be situations. Well, maybe they're way behind on their ar. Right. Because most companies have terms and are they paying within those terms or, or not? Well, that could dictate the decision you're going to make about their credit limit or how you adjust that credit limit or if you do it at all. Right. So there's a lot of things that go into something that traditional analog workflow tools and process tools, which have been, they all sound good on paper but hard to actually implement, can be, I believe, much more fluid and much more valuable with some of these agentic AI approaches. It's just, it's not easy, but it's okay. Once you get to the swing of things, I think it'll start to happen. It can happen much faster. It's just have to start thinking with the, with how you're going about it. Right.

I think Bob's comment, I wouldn't argue it per se, but I think there's a different way to look at what Bob is saying here because I think where we're at in discussion is that most companies, at least in the B2B world, have not done a good job of having processes of any sort in place. Right. And if you define a process, I.

Want to say one thing. They have them, they just aren't aware of them or haven't defined them or codified them. I think they have some process.

I'd say maybe they have some steps that they often take.

Okay.

But they're not trained within the organization. It's not part of.

That's right.

Exactly right. It's like, oh well, and this group of people do this particular thing. Right. But what I would suggest to what Bob's saying here, you know, he's talking about it's selling is less like a, like climbing a ladder and more like making an ascent up a rock face left, you know, right down, leaping for handholds, etc. But I would, I would suggest even if you're a rock climber, you're looking at the ascent that you're going to take and you're guiding, you're planning a route. Now you might need to make some adjustments on the way, but you have a plan of what you're going to go do. You don't just start climbing. Right. So yes, it's not if you want.

To be a rock climber for a long time. That is correct.

What's that?

Not if you don't want. Unless you want, don't want to have a long career as a rock climber.

Yes, but I, but I think starting with nothing, right. You know, even the rock climber has a path that he wants to go and they're going to make adjustments along the way. I think to the discussion that we're having here really ties mostly to the idea of saying we have to have some processes and systems in place. And ideally when we put those into technology tools, we know you're going to need to adjust along the way. But we know when we do, and I just say simply, from a distributor standpoint, I'll just use leads very simply in this setting is, hey, when we get a lead, we do these things right? This is the number of follow ups we do. These are the touches. It's emails, it's calls, it's stopping in whatever the process is. But we have it identified. It might change, it might adjust, it might adapt, but we have something in place. So just. Stefan made a nice comment here. I didn't know he's with us today. It's great to have him. So he talks about as important, roughly defined workloads for agency opportunities are clearly defined off ramps with automated feedback mechanisms to tune the agent more critical. Yeah, the workflow gives you the starting point, right? I know, you know, he's working on stuff like that in their organization with expanding workflows and processes and so forth at Stefan's organization. But I think that's it. And you know, when we use agents to do that, and I think that's kind of a great use in the discussion of having an agent that can help an organization fine tune and continuing to evaluate are their processes Right. Because if you were building an agent to help you with that based upon what it knows about the company and what it knows about, you know, maybe some of the process that you have and it knows the markets that you serve and the buying process that your customers go through, you can now take that ongoing data that you're going to continue to get is to his point, your automatic automated feedback mechanisms that that agent can continue to tune.

Right. Or the whole concept of an agentic, boy, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but we're already there, I guess. I guess. Well, like, might as well just continue down the same highway, right? One of the things about agentic workflows, if they're set up right, is that you can have an agent that his job is to kind of be the qa, if you will, of what's happening with the workflow. So they're monitoring the workflow, they're looking at the feedback as he brings out, they're providing feedback, they're looking at this, and that's their sole job, is to look at the quality assurance aspect of it versus the other agent's job, who is to execute something along the way. And there could be multiple agents that are evaluating those things and looking at that and looking for potential things that may need to be tuned along the way. That's never been possible with any sort of traditional analog process or process, you know, workflows that exist.

Well, that, that ties into something I'm planning to talk to Stefan that just commented there about in the next couple weeks to, to get some feedback and is, you know, one of the things that we've been talking about recently and with some, some folks, is that.

It'S.

Not just what the agents, but what is the model that's behind the agents.

Right.

And one of the challenges right now, you know, as we start thinking about the models that we're using, is that, you know, when you start thinking about it, at least from a product standpoint is, you know, whether it's just you use ChatGPT, right? They, they don't care how many teeth are in a reciprocating saw blade from Milwaukee as an example tool, or they don't necessarily understand or look at the depths of, you know, the B2B buyer at a plumbing contractor, right. They're big picture. And what they do is when they start looking out at that and, and it's one of the challenges of where we're at today with AI and particularly ChatGPT, and I think Claude is very similar, is they don't want you to go without an answer. So they'll go out and extrapolate. If they don't have it in their language model, they'll look at the Internet, compare it to their language model and come back with some type of answer for you that oftentimes is not going to be optimal. So I think there's a future with the potential of industry related language models for sure.

So I mean it's, it's, you heard.

It here first, right?

Well, it goes back to the data. Right. As I said before, the data. But I do think that an industry model, or any sort of industry, let's just call it industry solution is going to be a combination of having more relevant data models combined with workflows and in processes that make sense for that industry. Because you're gonna. I want to look at the data and the work and the tribal knowledge and. Well, yeah, but that's part of the, that's part of the workflow and that's part of the data. Right, but I want to look at those two together. Whereas, you know, when you look at a generic chat GPT, it's more data focused, it's not workflow focused because how can it know all the different workflows and, and processes that exist, you know, across anything and everything versus you get into an industry, then it opens the door to understanding not just having industry data, but having industry workflows and then how do you leverage those two things together? So you heard that first. You know, we didn't. I don't think we have anything that talks about the release of GPT5 in here.

No, no, no. I just knew we would get, as we start talking about AI and so forth. So let's roll into technology and cybersecurity. We've only got a little bit of time left today.

We're doing a two hour show, aren't we?

I'm not.

We're doing a double header.

I thought, okay, man, it's, it's a crazy, crazy week at our house. We've got, well, they've been here early in the week and they're coming back today. We've got our youngest son and his wife and our, our new granddaughter that's eight weeks old. I didn't know that today. So they've been in town all week. I haven't seen him because they've been out and about visiting other family. They were at our house earlier in the week. So I get to see this evening my granddaughter for the first time.

Oh, cool. And you have the blanket and the gift.

Yeah. That we bought at Annapolis Yacht Club, she gets that this evening. I've been trying to. Oh, no, no, Bob, don't. Don't get ahead of yourself, Bob. We're going to talk about AI more. Bob just popped a comment. It says, oh, bummer, no more AI. No, no, there's more AI coming. We're going to talk about my granddaughter for a minute first. So, you know, it's funny because I, in my mind, right, I'm not old enough to be a grandfather, but so I've been struggling with that and everybody that I know in business that I've been talking to that are grandfathers, I said the second you hold her, it's game over. So that'll be this evening. But we had a dear friend, unfortunately, Darlene and I, in fact, one of Darlene's best friends, it was her mother, but her mother was a dear friend of ours. Died Sunday. So we've got people coming in this afternoon from out of town that are staying at our house while the kids are here at the same time with the grandbaby and big family barbecue tomorrow that we couldn't change after the funeral. So it's mayhem here. So I will not be doing a two hour show today. All right. Yeah.

So how much time are we going to do? 10 more minutes? I don't know.

Let's go. 10, 15 more minutes. But good article from MDM here about the distributor tech dilemma. DIY versus off the shelf. And it's really interesting. I had a. Tom, I'm going to introduce you this gentleman the next few weeks had a great discussion at the event. A very large and technically advanced, I'll call them Industrial Distributor. That was at the Affiliated Distributor event that I was at. And they're doing some really cool stuff with building their own agents and doing some different things. And we were kind of talking about visualizing a lot of the work that they're doing on their own visualizing on our platform. So I'm going to invite you to a meeting in the next couple weeks with him. Really, really sharp gentleman. Nice gentleman. But one of the things he mentioned to me, he goes, he goes, I really like the idea, he said, but we have a really solid and advanced tech team. And one of the things that they're going to ask me is, well, why would we use lead, smart channel, cloud? Why wouldn't we just go build something, right? And we've met another distributor that is planning to go try and replicate some of the things that we've built on their own. And more power to them. But this was kind of a nice article and it talks about the value in time to market industry experience and a handful of different things about using industry specific solutions versus, you know, kind of building on your own. So I don't know if you had any takeaways from that on.

Yeah, I read that one. I read that one.

Well, thanks. It's nice. It's really great that you instill that confidence in our, in our listeners that we actually prepared.

I've read every one of these what I so here I think there's a lot going on with this discussion, right? And I think this is something so I don't know if you've heard the kind of this term vibe coding. Is that. So vibe coding is basically you and you can go to a tool or even chat GPT and you can say, hey, build me a software product that you know, I built one my wife was trying to put together like a keto menu. So I said build a software product that allows you to organize and build a keto menu based on, you know, the people's, you know, weight and what their goals are and so forth. And it actually built out a pretty decent product, right? I mean even with a database and logins and all of that kind of stuff. So this concept of vibe coding or you know, coding for non technical people is starting to get more and more buzz and more and more capabilities and I think there's a time and a place for that. But for enterprise software, right, Especially when you're dealing with data security and performance and reliability and workflow and all of the things we're talking about, trying to build some of that stuff yourself is I, I and I know they had pros and cons in this article, but.

I think you really a lot more cons.

Right? But you have to look at the, what is the missing critical aspect of what you're trying to build? Right. If you're trying to build something that's not super mission critical, then maybe doing it yourself with, you know, with, with coding tools or things like that. Vibe coding, maybe that makes sense. But mission critical, I mean, are you going to try and go build your ERP system on your own?

Right.

I know we have customers that are prospects that have done that. But so there's a. So, so first of all, I think it's risky. Second of all, I think the bigger problem is is you're not benefiting from the overall industry knowledge and best practices that get incorporated into a good off the shelf product.

You're siloed you're, you're using your own silos to, to feed what you want to do to grow your business versus industry best practices. And look, and I would say if you are looking at it from a standpoint of this particular gen, someone I was talking to, they had had a challenging experience in the past using Salesforce because they just bought your sales cloud. Right. And, but if you look at it from a standpoint, if you can partner with someone like us with your deep levels of, of security and the highest level of security and platform that we're built on is 99.8% or 98.9% uptime for over 20 years. Right. If you're just going to go buy something off the shelf that's a blank canvas and you need to go build inside there, then that might be the case. But if you can use some industry specific software now, you're getting it specifically in your implementation, you're going to get best practices that are, you know, that company has learned from their, you know, however many customers that they have that they're going to help bring into your organization.

Yeah, again, I think that, and you know, Bob was saying something here about core competencies and you know, by building yourself, you can potentially differentiate yourself.

Yep.

I think, I think that this is where that goes back to the strategic or to the agent and workflows we were just talking about, right? Yes. You're going to have core software applications, Right. Whether that's erp, CRM, the ncrm, whatever.

The case, it's easy for you to say, right?

Well, I just don't like to say E commerce, whatever it is.

Right.

You're going to have core applications in your business, those core applications. I don't think it's a very intelligent investment to try and do it yourself. I think you're going to get way more value. Where the do it yourself may come in is what we just talked about is really understanding your workflows, defining some of your, your agentic workflows or taking some templates that have been built that you know are more industry best practices and then adjusting those to align more to your core competencies and things that differentiate you from the competition. I think that's a much smarter investment of your engineering team or your technical team than trying to go build applications that are mission critical applications that are so dependent upon security and workflow and a lot of those things that just are very hard to replicate with vibe coding or with low code or, or things like that.

So let me ask you a question that ties to that, and we're going to jump in here just a minute to a couple more articles that while we still have some time today related to, we're still related to AI in, in the workplace. But we're going to jump down in just a moment to our people in leadership section. But why did you try and vibe code that versus just making an agent for all of that?

Well, because it needed a database, right. It needed a place. It needed a place to put data into. Right. Then we could use an agent and we could use AI with that data. But we needed a place to house data.

But, but you could have just housed that, used, put that data into a spreadsheet and put the spreadsheet into your agent.

Right? You could have done that. You could have done.

I mean, and I'm, I don't know enough about this. It's not, you know, I'm on the production side of the business. I guess I should know. But you know, I, I hate the term that I have to tell people sometimes when we're talking in the tech space with people. It's what, what I'm called is a non technical founder. Right. So I, I just, I hate that idea. But, but I'm just. Yeah. Trying to get my mind around it. Where you just wanted to play with some Vibes. Vibe coding or are you thinking.

Yeah, I mean I was, I did it because I wanted to, I was playing with it. I wanted to understand some of the capabilities that are there. But it did need a database. It wanted. It's not a database that, I mean. Yes. Could you have created a spreadsheet potentially or created a GPT with a spreadsheet or something like that. But there was multiple different data points here. There was a little bit more three dimensional data than what you would have in a spreadsheet. Right. So it required more of a, a database sort of SAS type application.

Right.

And literally I was able to build a version of it in about 45 minutes. Right. With a nice interface. I mean a really nice interface.

Oh, you got to show it to me.

A login. So we each have our own login, all that kind of stuff.

What did you, what, what, what platform did you use to do that?

I use a tool, I think it's called base 44.

Okay.

So. But there's a whole bunch of them out there that are these Vibe coding platforms that are coming out. And, and as a result. Right. People are thinking, oh, anybody can build applications now. Which is true, is, let's use that as an example.

I think this is a Good discussion point. Right. Because we're hearing that all over the place. So, you know, I, I'm a manufacturing distribution guy my whole career, but I've always tried to stay on the forefront of technology, which is why our company exists, is because we came together to solve problems that other people weren't solving for distribution. I probably know more than the average guy about distribution, about. In distribution, about technology. Could a guy like me spend a little time, watch a few YouTube videos, go in and do something like that, or would it be overwhelming?

No, you. You could do it. For sure.

Really? Okay.

For sure. Yeah. Because it's, it's, it's a conversation. Right.

By the way, everybody, Tom would not miss the opportunity to take a stab at me right now of not being able to do it.

So actually you would actually be. You're a good candidate for Vibe coding because A, you understand the business and B, you are not completely afraid of, of the technical side of things that are there. And, and the way that it works is that basically you tell it what to do, you don't write any code, you tell it what to do and then it makes adjustments and writes the codes and, and, and so forth. So, and, and you even saw this in the chat GPT announcement, remember? I think they're being building video games, if I'm not mistaken, or things like that, that build a little, you know, cat and mouse game. I don't remember what it was. But the, the point is, is that yes, it does open the door to actually applications being built for somebody who, like you, who has no coding experience or, or engineering software engineering experience, which is fine in certain cases. Right? It's not fine. You're not going to go try and do that and build an ERP system or a mission critical again, you start thinking, and maybe this is a different conversation about what is mission critical, what are things that you need to be thinking about that a do it yourself or a fast Vibe coding thing will not address security, obviously, being a big one of those. Right. Not just your data security you're going to get hacked, but security of who has access to what, who has the ability to execute certain. I mean, there's a lot of things that when you get into mission critical applications, you have to be thinking about above and beyond. What is it? Just how does it work?

What does this mean to my organization?

Right, right.

It's good. Okay. You know, it's interesting that it's. I want to learn about the tools that you've played with because a couple things I've been Thinking about wanting to build something actually related to lead smart as opposed to, you know, something like you did. But no, it's cool.

It's great.

And I've been doing, you know, and I'm glad you, you clarified for us the, the discussion about, you know, that versus building just an agent right now. I was on the phone yesterday with a good friend of mine that's a dear friend of mine that's got it early, but he's battling prostate cancer and we're talking about all the research that he's doing and all the different things that he. And he's doing some pretty cool stuff as far as diet and, you know, we're, he's maximizing alternative treatments along with working very closely with traditional medicine and oncologists. But I was telling him about an agent that I built for myself where I've got three years of blood tests. I've got the three years of blood tests and then all of the results from x rays and MRIs in my knees and ankles recently. And then in the last month I've had an echocardiogram, a cardiac stress test, EKGs, and I've had colonoscopy, endoscopy, and a bunch of other ultrasound type tests. I'm, I'm fine, by the way. Everything's good. But the, all of that data is now in that agent and I can ask it any thing I want about my health and it's now. And by the way, that's not going to feed any models. It's not being used by anybody else. But now from a mobile app on my phone, I can say, how is my collect my LDL cholesterol trending over the last two years and what should I be doing about that? And by the way, I don't like beets or whatever.

Right.

But the value of that is phenomenal. Right. So my buddy that's going through this, this journey was like, I'm coming over this weekend when you show me how to build that. Right. So it's good.

You could have created a 5 application for that too, right?

Absolutely. Yep. So, so Tom, let's just hit before we go, a couple of things real quick. There's also in our segment here about technology and so forth, was an article about Mr. Altman at From Inc. Magazine about an interview that he had done. Sam Altman is the founder of Open AI, which is the chat GPT company. You want to hit that real quick. And then there's two other ones we'll hit real quick before we go today that are Still AI related, but they're more about how it's being used in the workplace.

Yeah, well, I mean, this article certainly touched on the GPT5 release and the fact that, you know, you talk about marketing hype, right? And the, the reality of what was actually delivered was quite a bit of, quite a gap between those two. Okay. And there's been a lot of disappointment with GPT5. And I think the disappointment is, is that people expected again, the marketing and the hype around it was going to be is like an order of magnitude more brilliant and an order of magnitude more reliable with GPT5 than what you deal with with GPT4. And that hasn't been the case. In fact, in some cases it's gotten worse. I think in, in some cases that are there. So the, the. And I think there are things that I like about GPT5 for sure. And I do like the fact that it's a little bit more A to B and not so much trying to, you know, by the way, I read something about this, you know, all this like positive reinforcement. They did that by purpose to keep people using the product. Right. That was done to keep people feeling good about themselves and using the product. And you know, Kevin, everything you enter in here is brilliant and all that stuff. Well, they kind of, they've kind of tone that down a little bit on.

Just makes me think about when we were sitting in your office a few months ago. We were literally, we were evaluating the core values of our company and we were using ChatGPT to give us some feedback based upon what it knows from some other agents that I built about Lead Smart technologies. And we were just gotten the giggle fest again like we did to the beginning of the show because of all the nice things it was saying to me.

Well, every question you asked was the most brilliant. Yeah, it was brilliant. How did you ever think of that question? Yeah, anyway, so. But the point of this article is that, you know, I think then Altman was kind of backpedaling a little bit on, well, what's artificial general intelligence? What does it really mean? Are we really going to get there? And you know, of course, then this article goes in. What does that mean? We've hit a wall with AI and all this talk about, you know, AGI and, and asi, Artificial super intelligence. Not all just a bunch of BS and all that. I, I don't. My, my opinion, I don't think so. But anyway, it was just an interesting set of different viewpoints that I thought in this article.

Yeah, that's good. Well, let's hit the just scrolling down a little bit. There's a couple articles there and I think that if we, we're going to bounce right through our, our segment on sales and, and mergers and acquisitions that we do every week. There's a couple really good articles in there. About one of them is four Steps to Generate Sales in a Slow Economy from Sales and Marketing Magazine. But if we jump into our People and and leadership segment, there's two articles and they're both from HR Dive the on this but they're talking about from a standpoint of the use of AI within businesses. They're saying that nearly half of Gen Z and millennial workers said that they feared that AI could replace their jobs. So forth. We've heard and talked about that quite a bit previously. But it's interesting, there's a whole group of them that are also saying they're using AI within the business to promote themselves and do a better job, but they're hiding it from their managers. So they're kind of looking at it to, to boost themselves through it all. And I thought that was kind of an interesting piece, but it ties directly with the next article that again is from HRDive.com it says that nearly half of workers say they've used band AI tools at work. Well, this just goes back to the security discussions that we've been having. Right. And you know, I've talked to a handful of companies recently that are just, you know, encouraging their sales people or, or any of their employees to just, you know, go dive in and go, go use this and see if it can be beneficial in the workplace or other companies who have bought, you know, company wide licenses of, of chat GPT for the company and just you know, turning people loose with it and just kind of seeing if how they feel about it, are they getting much done with it and so forth. So I think what we really want to be talking about and just continuing to really encourage people that you know, we meet, whether it's shows that are events or they're here with us is really going back to right Our, our workflows and processes that we talked about earlier. So important to have that when we start thinking about AI. Right is you. The presentation that I gave this week, we were talking about, you know, seven pillars of maximizing that. What we call the data gold mine that distributors in particular have is you don't want that being used the wrong way. You really want to have policies and training and expectations of people and how they're using that data with The AI tools that are available, because you know what, next thing you know that could be data that's not only feeding models out there, but could be feeding competitors, right? And so these articles, you know, this one in particular said that a substantial proportion of workers continue to use AI tools explicitly banned by their employer. It says 40% of employees are doing that. And while there's benefits to the inefficiency and problem solving that can happen, the data security, the compliance and confidentiality is at great risk. So they're talking about organizations needing to revise policies to balance innovation and risk management. And I would say that just as well as you need policies in hr, you need policies for what's going on with your data in an organization. And it really leads. I'll say something that's self serving a little bit in this and I'm not suggesting that, you know, a platform like ours is the end all for AI, but when you have a vetted software partner that you can be accessing and using agents and so forth, which is some of the tools your team will be launching very soon is being able to use agents again within your no longer siloed data on a single platform. And that single platform is highly secure. Now we start being able to have smaller and mid sized distribution companies that maybe don't have large tech and IT teams working on this that can take advantage of all of the tools that are available because their vendor is bringing them vetted AI related tools on an existing platform. So that's good.

All right, let's wrap. You got a lot to do. You got a lot to do.

I do. I've got work left to do too. Anyways, this was fun. Sorry for the, sorry for the childish behavior of Tom at the beginning that kept us laughing so we could try to get back on the rails. As, as was said earlier that we are off but great show today. Appreciate all the comments, good articles, good feedback. Again, I'm Kevin Brown, this is Tom Burton. We get together every week here. We review the news of the week in wholesale distribution and manufacturing, the economy and supply chain and we try and bring that all back. We do that through the use of the newsletter that we were looking at today. So if you don't get that newsletter and you'd like to three simple ways to do that. You can reach out to us directly@helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that out. You just say that you'd like the newsletter. You'll get signed up for that right away. Lily will handle that. You can get that information on LinkedIn you can be at. Go visit us at the Lead Smart Technologies page there and you'll see the newsletter is available as one of the options. You can also search around the horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing on LinkedIn. Or you can go to the website for the show, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and we can update you there and you'll see the ability to sign up for the podcast and subscribe to it as well as the newsletter there. One of the things that we would ask you two of them is if what we're talking about here regarding digital transformation and bringing your data out of the silos and in your organization to getting a better view of what's going on at your customer, with your team and your overall business is appealing to you. Reach out to us. We'd love to share what we do at Lead Smart Channel Cloud and how that helps companies get a better view of their customer, improve customer experience and accelerate growth. Love to share that with you. And then additionally, if you like what you hear on the show, hit the subscribe button. Follow us at lead smart on LinkedIn, subscribe on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever it might be. And if you're on the podcast formats of Spotify or Apple, the best thing you can do for us is not just subscribe, but leave a review. And if you leave a review, that'll push those algorithms to get what we're doing out to a lot further people. We have people subscribe from probably at least 10 different countries and certainly I think we're in every different state right now that's getting that. So if you like what you hear, help us along the way and certainly support us in in doing that. So we're appreciative of that. So that's it for the day. Tom. I'll wish you a great afternoon, great weekend, and everybody the same. Be kind, be safe, and do good things.

Have a good weekend.

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, please reach out to us and let us know how you think we can make the show better or topics you'd like for us to tackle or talk about more often and even guests you'd like to see join us. We're looking forward to bringing you next week's session and hope that until then you stay safe, stay focused and do great things. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review to help others in wholesale distribution. Get access to the conversation. And finally, please check out our sponsor, Leadsmart Technologies and their manufacturing and wholesale distribution industry CRM customer intelligence and channel collaboration platform. That's Lead Smart technologies@leadsmart tech.com.