How Does the Government Shutdown Affect the Q4 Playbook for Distributor Growth?

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.

Good morning.

Got lost in the music.

Sorry to disturb you.

Got lost in the music? Yeah. What's the word on your end?

You know, I'm irritated this government shutdown is messing with our show.

Right. It is.

I was all prepared for job numbers and, you know, we could get all these revisions that, you know, of course, would have been made for the last three months and you know what it was going to do. And you're on mute, so I don't know why you're on mute, but you're on mute.

I'm here just listening to you.

Okay. Well, you were talking, your lips were moving, but.

But nothing was coming out. Yeah, yeah, it was great.

Great. It was good. It was good stuff.

You like it that way?

Yeah.

So you're talking to Alexa, actually.

Okay. Anyway, so, yeah, I'm irritated about this government shutdown. It's messing with us.

That's the only reason that the jobs report didn't come out.

That's the only reason. Yeah. Government shut down. There's no one to do it.

That's right. Well, you know. Oh, look at that. Bob's calling you out there. First comment of the day.

Right. Look at that.

Boom. You have to be eared. You know, I'm screenshotting this and saving this for future reference. Thanks, Bob. Bob says to Tom, you have to be irritable to be irritated. So that will be a. That might go on the wall in the conference room with a picture of tomorrow value or something.

That's a core value. Right.

Don't be like Tom today. The. You know, I did, I saw. You know, we're going to dive into this in a minute, but I did see something in a post, trying to remember now, who put. Was Josh from Arkansas Mill Supply posted on LinkedIn. He said, if you're traveling today, thank the TSA agents because they don't have to be there.

Yeah, I'm wondering about that. I mean, we're traveling next week. I don't know what we're going to get into.

I leave Tuesday for five straight weeks.

You better get that private jet going then. Because I don't know.

I just informed Dear Mrs. Brown that next week, next weekend, I'm home for 36 hours. So she just shakes her head and walks away. So why don't we introduce this show rather than just two knuckleheads showing up and starting to talk, huh?

All right, let's do it.

Well, I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with Tom Burton. We get together every week on Friday mornings. It's 9:00 or 9:03 now, Pacific Time, where we're at in Southern California. We've been doing this for 161, a lot more than that because there's been some weeks that we've missed. But this is episode number 161of around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. We try and get together each week and bring in some guests here and there and chat about the news of the week as things related to the economy and supply chain and manufacturing, distribution, sales and marketing, human resources and leadership. I say M and A. Mergers and acquisitions, all different types of things. AI, technology, cybersecurity. We look at the news of the week and we relate that discussion back to what is happening in the world of wholesale distribution and manufacturing and how these news items are impacting wholesale distributors and manufacturers. We do that through the newsletter that we publish and that is also called around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing. If you don't get that newsletter and you would like to three simple ways to get that. First, you could just send us a simple email@helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that out to you right away. Two is you could, if you're active on LinkedIn, just search around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution and it'll pop up. Or go to the Lead Smart Technologies page and there's a link there. If you stop by the Lead Smart page, please hit the follow button as well. That would be great. Or third, we have a website for the podcast. It is www.aroundthehornpod.com and you can sign up there. You can also for the the newsletter and you can also see all the links to the podcast formats of Apple and Spotify and so forth and get registered there. So if you're listening in on the recorded podcast that will be up later in the day, if you're listening into that on Odyssey, Apple, Spotify, whatever it might be, you won't be seeing the newsletter that we'll be looking at today and talking about, but at least you'll know what we're doing in that setting and you can certainly get Access to that at any time. We do this, as mentioned, every week. And it's not a free thing that we do it. Quite a bit of expense behind the scenes. So we're fortunate with having somebody on the front end that prepares all the show notes and gets everything ready for us and then an editor and producer on the back end, John and Lily, that work on this show for us and that costs money. So we're appreciative that we have the sponsorship of the company that Tom and I both work for called Lead Smart Technologies. And what Lead Smart does is we've developed a product called the Channel Cloud. And Lead Smart Channel Cloud is a AI enabled customer intelligence, what we describe as smart CRM platform solely developed for wholesale distributors and manufacturers. We take siloed or corralled data, or siloed data from around your business and corral it into a central platform where we can use AI tools and other smart tools to gain deeper insights that companies have never seen. See products that aren't being sold and should be cross selling, upselling opportunities, missed revenue opportunities, leaks of revenue, invoices that aren't being paid. And, and we do that by connecting the erp, marketing automation, E commerce, data lakes, other sources of data from across your business. And we use our platform to gain those insights which helps you understand your customers better, your team is better and your overall business. So if your company's digitally transforming and would like to look into how to use technology in a deeper way to accelerate growth in your business, we'd love to talk to you. So Tom, did I miss anything with that? I think we got that.

It's really interesting. We just got off a call as you know, with a large new customer, multi division, lots of complexity. Their president was on the call and it was so interesting to listen to him go, oh, I had no idea. This is what CRM is about nowadays.

Right, Right.

It's like, it's like he had this, you know, preconceived notion of CRM and when we started to kind of show some of the things that we're doing now, it is, it's. Unfortunately, that word has such a four letter connotation sometimes.

No, it does. And I think, you know, it just reminds me of that old, you know, Buick commercial. Right. This is not your father's Buick.

No. Right.

And when we live in a world of AI and machine learning and advanced technology tools and things like that. Right. We want to, especially where we're going with AI. Right. We really want to remove any of those silos in Our business. And the best way to do that is bring that data across and not just into CRM, but into a smart platform where you can use all of that data to benefit the business as a whole. And that's where we sit at lead smart.

And that's how becomes the opposite of Big Brother, right? It becomes the. Or maybe if it's a Big Brother that's shepherding you versus a Big Brother.

That'S watching you, it's a guide and a coach, right?

That's right.

That's proactive versus reactive.

That's right.

Good.

Cool.

So the government shut down. There's some. There's some kindergarten fighting going on in Washington, D.C. right now. You got a administration that's got strong plans and high expectations of things that's happening, and you got another group that's perhaps using this as a way to block some of the things they want to do. So we're on day three now, I guess.

Yep, we're on day three. And yeah, I mean, we don't need to go into all of the different sort of political fighting that's going on. As Bob says, it's political theater. And he says TSA is simply security theater. You know, it's. Not to go off a complete tangent, but I was. When I was in the airport last time, you know, a week or so ago, I kind of thought that it's like I'm going through security and I'm like thinking about all the technology and where we sit right now and how we handle security and like taking off our shoes that it's like just even anybody even understands, huh?

You take off your shoes.

I do at some airports, I take off my shoes. Not all of them. Now. Some of them you do. You know, it's just. What.

What's with the TSA pre? You don't have that.

I can't afford that pre check stuff. I. I'm just a regular guy, not.

Like you, you know, so I don't check your expenses.

I know you're over in the private. In the. In the private terminal, but I'm in the.

I guess if I was ever in the private terminal, I'm sure you would be there too, so. No, no, I just. Just can't go without that pre.

But the. I guess the second article here, right, where it's talking about the prediction markets and we've, you know, shown Poly Market to hear related to relate cuts and that's where this came from, is that most prediction markets are seeing this lasting at least two weeks. And I. I don't I don't disagree. I think that this could easily last two weeks. There's some major issues on the table that I'm not sure that I could see both sides digging their heels in with, and I'm not sure how they're going to get resolved unless they do a temporary resolution, which I know they've talked about basically kicking the can down the road to Thanksgiving. But, you know, all that does is kick the can down the road another month or six weeks.

It's. It's interesting, right? We've, we've used this poly market platform to look at some of these things a handful of times in the past, and now, you know, for the first time, the article that we have here is from CNBC about prediction markets. See government shutdown lasting nearly two weeks. I don't know what they show today, but the, it's interesting, CNBC now quoting that and putting pictures of the charts in there as well. So obviously those prediction markets are starting to do some pretty cool things to, to give us insights into what's happening with this. But, you know, I, I think one of the, the big challenges that we're seeing right now with this is there's maybe the magnitude of what's trying to be accomplished by both sides is maybe a little greater this time around. Because, you know, I was even thinking last week, it's like, oh, here we go again. You know, it'll be, you know, you know, 1159 on the 31st or the 30th, and they'll, you know, they'll come to some conclusion and, you know, everything will be fine. Well, now it's a little different in talking about the fact that not only are people not supposed to be coming to work, they are not supposed to be or not supposed to be. There's the potential of them being laid off and not being rehired. So great graph here that you're bringing up right now to look at going back from the government shutdowns and funding gaps from 1976 all the way up to 2019. And the longest one is that one in 2018 into early 2019. Right?

Yeah. Which was 20. Almost 30 days. Well over 30 days.

And notice who was president.

Yeah. Yeah.

So he's not afraid of it. No. So it's interesting that the shortest ones were a day, basically. And so it's quite, quite a few different ones. But look at all of them you had during the Reagan era.

A lot of short ones. Yeah.

A lot of it looks like every time.

Yeah.

Right through. Through the Reagan area. And Only one with Bush and a couple with Clinton and one with Obama. So interesting timing. I think, you know, there's, there are, it's this, I just think we're living in an interesting time with all of these things because I don't, I've never followed politics real closely, but I just look at this as that. I think we have an administration that is just going to do whatever it takes to push through what they want to do to grow the economy and make the US A better place. And they're not concerned about, you know, what other countries think or what the other side of the other side of the aisle, so to speak, as they say things. It's, these are the things we believe we need to get done to make this happen and we're ready to fight the battle, you know, what, whatever it takes. And have said over and over again that there might be some uncomfortable times during that as well. So.

Well, I mean, obviously they've talked a lot about, as we have in this article here, layoffs looming. And basically it'll be interesting to see how that plays out because I, from what I understand, and I won't say I've researched this in depth, from what I can understand and tell is, you know, there's a lot of talk about cutting jobs or appropriations that were passed through Congress in previous years. And when they get passed, they're legal. Right. They're law. And you know, the Trump administration is now basically threatening that, hey, we just may just cut those out, you know, we don't want them anyway, let's cut them out. We'll use this as a reason to cut those out as well as remove, you know, people and jobs that potentially were funded through previous appropriations. It'll be interesting to see how that fares and how does that get into legal ground and what legal ground that gets into and so forth as well. But a lot going on here.

Well, before we jump ahead, I just pulled the poly market up. They said there's a 1% chance that between today and the 5th things change. The 6th through the 9th, 17%. The 10th through the 14th, 36%. And post October 15th. So the second half of the month is 47%. So almost half of the money right now is riding on it's going to go 15 days or longer.

Or longer. And that's. And that's open ended, right? That's same longer.

So October 15th or later is the phrase that's used.

Yeah.

So kind of interesting.

I would take that bet. I don't like it, but I would.

Take the Bet no.

Right.

So anyways, there's the following up article again from CNBC and this one is a government shutdown is likely to. This meant more Fed interest rate cuts. You, you tend to have lots of thoughts on interest rate cuts.

How are they going to, you know, have their meetings if they don't have all this data? Yeah, they need.

So maybe they should just. Maybe they should just listen to me and, and find some new data that they could use.

Well, and there is a lot of. In fact I went and looked around. There is a lot of private data available even around the job market. Right. And as I think we mentioned on the previous show, they're. According to the Fed chairman, they're using data outside these major macro level of reports that are coming from the government.

Did he say. Because Kevin suggested it.

Yeah, of course, of course he follows your leash at all possible. But the. What this article is talking about is. Well, this just gives all the excuse to make a cut.

Yeah, they use the phrase cement. Right.

This month is there a meeting. I thought the meetings were in November meeting this month. Okay. Because they were talking about this month.

So I believe the next meeting is in October.

Right? This is October.

I'm sorry there. Yes, thank you very much. Tuesday, October 28th and October 29th.

Okay, so this month.

This month it is October. What's wrong with you, Tom? It's October.

I mean the shutdown could still be happening by then in theory anyway. What this article is talking about is it basically just eliminates any sort of.

This one's baked in, right?

Yeah, well, in any consideration that. Okay, yeah, we have the shutdown, we don't know what it's going to do to jobs and the. And so forth and we need to going to be negative most likely. So yeah, let's go ahead and make that next cut.

Well, this article says that the markets have priced in 100% probability of an October cut and an 88% chance of another in December. So.

Yeah, yeah, about a half a point cut. I think. I think if the. I think if we're still in this we could get a half a point cut. If we're still.

Do you really.

I think there's a chance. I don't think it's a high chance, but I think it's a 25 chance or so of a.

Let me just see if I can. I was trying to look at the polymarket on this, but all I'm seeing is stuff about Taylor Swift and her.

New album yesterday that got released.

I know you bought it already, didn't you? Is it good?

Yeah, I listened to it three times. That's great.

Yeah, awesome. I would have thought, never thought anything less of that. Let's see about this. If we can Fed decision in October there is a, they say 3, 3% chance of a 50 bit decrease.

Okay.

90 of a 25 in October. That's what this poly market is saying right now.

I, at 3% might be a really good bet. That might be a really good bet. I would, I would take it. I might. Well, you can't do it yet, but it's coming, it's going to be in the US here soon. You just can't, you can't do.

That's right, I forgot about that. The. I look at it from the standpoint of that difference getting. Maybe there's somebody on here that listening in today that can comment, they can focus on this a little bit more, understand a little bit better than I do. But I look at this and just say the difference between the, the risk versus the reward of a half a point versus a quarter point in a one month period. Right. If you're going to get it, if you're going to get the other half a point in December, get it in October and see if we can, you know, push something ahead faster. The risk is, is probably far, far less than the reward that can come with that.

I agree.

You know, I, why not? Why not?

It gives them the, the catalyst to pull it forward. Right, right. And, and see where things happen. But it does give the catalyst to pull it forward if in fact the shutdown continues through, you know, as the, as it's saying for at least another two weeks.

Pump the money into the economy right away.

Right.

Get the, get the rates down. Right. Borrow money at a lower rate for the banks. Get it out into the economy. Start building some warehouses and some distribution centers and adding some jobs and so forth. And even if it has to go back up, you got that money at a lower rate and nobody loses. Right. So anyways, that's, that's, that's my take on it.

I'll make sure that that gets passed along so they know what they need to do at the meeting. You skip the meeting, just do what you say.

You know, as I tell you at work all the time, if we just do it my way, it's going to be easier.

Yeah.

And then we do it. Then we do it your way.

That's so.

All right, well, what's happening with consumer confidence?

So consumer confidence declined more than expected in September over mounting worries over the availability of jobs. And it is interesting and I, I don't know that this, I have had more conversations with friends, family and so forth in the last week or two about this over overshadowing concern about no employment or not being able to get a job or losing a job. So and even we're interviewing people and I've been interviewing people a lot over the last weekend. There is a, this undertone or of hey, I'm either if I have a job I'm at risk and if I don't have a job I'm very concerned that I'm going to get a job. Especially maybe at the level that I was getting paid before. I think we've seen this even in the people that have applied for Lead Smart. You have these people that have I think made quarter million dollar, you know, $200,000 plus type jobs. They got laid off. Their lifestyle was built around a $200,000 plus job. And you know, let's face it, for what I can tell a lot of them were way overpaid in the situation that they're doing. But there definitely seems to be a real undertone of this that is, that is growing. I don't know that it's true. I think it's more of a, of a, of a you know, a psychological mindset that's developing versus is it supported by the data. But there's certainly that concern.

Well, yeah, it's interesting too. You know I, I, I just was listening to a couple of the.

Pre.

Interviews from some of the, one of the roles that you're hiring for right now and so seeing that one of the ones that are HR Gal angel was doing on those and heard a couple of people whose companies are moving out of California and, and they don't want to go with them and thinking man, if you could follow your salary to, to one of them. I just remember hearing was heading for Texas is if you could take anything similar to the salary that you have here and go to Texas and everybody's rooted differently. I couldn't just pick up and go to Texas but you know, start thinking about no, no income tax and you take that California salary or something. My college roommate did that. He moved with Toyota and took his tenure in his salary and worked the last like seven years of his career before he retired last year from, from Toyota with no taxes. Pretty good.

Well and so your options right are we being as an, as an employee. Your options are an employee candidate are being reduced because remote work is becoming less and less of a possibility at best. You're at hybrid. Well, even if you're going to be a hybrid, you're going to have to be in the location where the office is more or less. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, you, you know, again, look back four or five years ago, the options, the employee options, the remote work, all of that kind of stuff, lots of hiring. Right now we're seeing this sort of consolidation and I think, and you take AI, which is sort of this other undertone, and there's a lot of nervousness that's not there and that's dropping the consumer confidence. Now, that all said, there's no evidence that the consumer is not spending money. Right. And it continues to spend money. So that's, it's kind of a paradox. And from that perspective, you, you talked.

A lot last, last year in particular and early this year, Tom, about concerns with credit card usage and there being a big bubble there. What are your thoughts on that? Have you.

Well, we've had two economists on. Right. That said, hey, yeah, there's the percentage of credit card debt compared to income is not a problem. Right. That's where. Yeah, that's where they both said that we're not. It has. It wasn't a problem. So I think that's a good point. The question becomes, is when the credit card balances compared to income starts to get higher and if people don't have jobs, that's a risk, then maybe it will manifest itself more. But they were not concerned because the percentage, the relative percentage of debt to income was still in a very, very safe zone. Yeah, but I do think there's still a lot of debt out there. It doesn't change that there's a lot of debt, but it wasn't a problem relative to income per the guest that we had on the show that discussed this.

So, yep, both Alex and Tyler St. Germain, I think actually Sean Duberbeck talked about that a little bit earlier in the year. I've got to get all three of them booked again here with the show with us soon.

The same show.

But yeah, that would be wild. Bob says he'd love for me to move to Texas. So, Bob, can I just put my taxes at your house and, and I'll stay here and, but I'll come to visit regularly and I'll buy the steak. So I would love to get my taxes out of California, but myself here. So let's. Tom, let's talk move and talk about something we've never talked about. I don't think that I can remember at least on the show. Is this an Article here from IMPO magazine about the US invests in one of the world's largest lithium mines. Any takeaways on that? What's your gut tell you about government investment? Not non crisis time like you know, auto industry or banking investments that the government has done in the past, but starting to look into broader. The, the intel deal and then this lithium mine thing. What's, what's your take on all of that?

I have a lot of questions. I don't, I don't know that if I have any conclusions yet.

Yeah, I'm vacillating on it.

Yeah, well, first of all, why. The question is why, right? The, the other question I have is, okay, what does it mean to have an investment? How do you get a return on that investment? And if you do get a return on an investment, where does it go? Right. So you know, there's been talk, right, of the government investing in crypto and other things and kind of creating a sovereign wealth fund.

I was going to say that I think that the, the big picture on this is this administration looking for wanting to develop a sovereign wealth fund, much like you'd see in some of the Saudi nation, or not Saudi.

But why would you do that when you have all this debt to pay down? So is, and again, I don't know, is the plan, is the plan to. Again, what is, what is the return on investment? What's the time frame for that return on investment? When it happens, what do you do? There's just a lot of questions that I have involved. And why, right? I mean, lithium is in a lithium mine I would think would be a very, very high profile, necessary piece. Why isn't there private investment that's going into that? Right? Or why would the, why would they do a deal with the government other than, I don't know. There's just a lot of questions that, that I don't have.

Well, I did a, I did a little, had a little conversation earlier this morning with perplexity about that. And you know, I just, it's, there's a, so I think the intel deal that they did, intel needed the capital and I think what the, what the administration is saying in all of these right now is these are national interests, right? Keep the, if you think about, from a lithium standpoint, that's batteries, right? We need battery control of things. We have this huge energy needs that are coming. By the way, we got some good news where I live yesterday because the end of my block, I live up on a hill and down at the bottom of that hill There's a, they're wanting to put in a 250 megawatt battery storage facility, which would not do well for my property value or my insurance rates. And they had the energy company that wants to put it in there, which is crazy because there's a rail line right there. There's Interstate 5 is, you know, a mile away from that. And there's a high school, a college and a senior living center all right around there. And so big, but a big fight right now. But the, the donation that the energy company that had made to the local junior college, that's, that's our community college. It's just across the interstate from us. We can see from our house they gave the money, they gave him $750,000 and they just voted yesterday to give the money back. So we need these battery storage facilities. We just don't need them in people's neighborhoods. But enough of my local, local issues going on here. But I do think it's interesting, right. So that some of the, the components that I was looking at in the chat I did this morning was about government or economic and market impacts. Right. Of propping some, some companies up. But the other part of it is, was the influence component of it. And, and I think they talked about it as corporate governance and influence. And that idea, I think is, I think where we're seeing these, is one making sure that we have the, in this lithium issue is that the government has, or that the country has the necessary capacity for battery building and so forth that we're going to need and so propping it up financially. But then at the same time is having some influence on where does some of that the resources go.

Right.

Are they staying in the country? Same thing, I think, with intel. And I'm sure we'll see other investments from the administration or from the country and being able to make sure that staying ahead in the chip race. Right. For AI dominance. So it's interesting with that. But the other side of it too is then you've got the, the conflict that goes with it potentially as well. Right. And, and to your point is if we're, you know, unless you have a clearly defined way to get a return on that investment, other than propping something up, is the investment the right piece or not? Certainly the investment is better than just giving money away.

Sure. Right. Sure.

So, but with it, with the deficit the way it is, which is more important. Yeah.

Like I said, I have a lot, a lot of questions and I'm sure others do as well. And we'll probably hear more about this and what's your if you had to.

Narrow down to one or two questions, what would they be?

Well really just, you know, how much under what terms, when you know, what's a return on investment, you know and you've maybe outlined some of the why on what you just said there. But I would be more on the what and the how. So.

Yeah. So this just says just we'll just hit this terms is. I don't. It's not all but the government is getting a 10% stake in intel through the conversion of billions in previously granted government funds and pledges. Then with this MP materials, the government spent $400 million of taxpayer money in July on their stock to make the US Government the biggest owner of in the Las Vegas Rare Earth miner. So Trump also made deals with Nvidia and AMD to give the US government a 15 cut of revenue from selling certain chips in China.

So where is that money coming from? I mean where does that fit in the budget? Where do we, I mean it's just. Yeah, it's just that's not insignificant.

No, no, no.

I do think it's great, right that it's not just a bailout or some sort of, you know, loan or whatever. There's actual real terms. I think that I, I do overall, I mean given what I know I think that's great. But it's just like where does this come from?

Yeah, it comes from you and me.

Yeah.

Right. Is where it's at.

Taxes. Yeah.

California tax as well. We're going to talk in a little bit about somebody else that wants to spend those. So why don't we jump into our manufacturing distribution segment. Tom? So which, which of these caught your attention first? Any of them in particular?

Well, I think we talked about the, did we talk about the robot one last week and the adding tariffs on robotics? I think we already kind of hit that last week.

A little bit of that. Yep, yep. There was a, a good article though at the end how tariffs are reshaping the global supply chain. And I thought this article talked really nicely. This from a gentleman, that industry strategist with a company called Reflex. But they put together some and we've seen, we've used quite a few articles like this but talking about kind of re engineering tariff survival and so forth within organizations and planning, you know, deep planning versus reactive decisions. I was just talking to somebody was I talking to yesterday that was running into. And we've not seen this in our business at Lead Smart. We've not seen any Projects at least nobody has acknowledged projects being stalled because of all of the work that they needed to be doing on tariffs. But you know, I remember I was talking to, but I was talking to another gentleman in the technology space. But they have had quite a few very large projects with some very, and these are multimillion dollar projects with some very large organizations where they've stalled out on because of the tariff resources that are being taken in their organization and probably because some of the technology they provide is more on the supply chain side. So it was kind of interesting to see that. We've not seen that on our end, but obviously a lot of that going on. And you know, one of the things that all of these articles talk about is building resilience for the long term. And I think, you know, if I could say one thing that should come out of all of this with tariffs, right. We're starting to see and feel that they're real, they're going to be here. It's just what are they? Well, now what do we do to manage those within our businesses so that we're building, using that term again, resilience for the future so that they might be shifting up and down. But we have an organizational, an organization that's structured in a way that can manage those because, you know, in the past we've never been as concerned about doing those things.

Well, I think in the phone call we had this morning, I think was a good example of that. Right. I think, and this is probably positive for what we're seeing is companies are realizing, hey, how do I squeeze? I've got all this variability on the back end on the supply chain and the tariffs and all of that. Okay, that's we said kind of the new normal. Right. All this sort of. But then how do I proactively get more out of more organic growth out of what I'm already doing on the front end of the business? Right. How do I get more, how do I have more cross selling and upselling? How do I have more white space that I can enter into? How do I make my sales teams and my customer facing teams more effective?

This turning to a lead smart commercial.

Well, but, but those are things that you can do something about. Yeah. And they're not subject to all this variability that you have on the back end supply chain. So it's a way to get ahead of some of this and not be so impacted. Right. And how do you, how do you intelligently get more gross margin? How do you intelligently get more sales and so forth that can make up for some of this back end piece of things.

Right.

And I think we're seeing that more and more. I've certainly seen that is that as we talk to our prospects and customers is we have a two hour workshop we're doing with another customer to do this on this exact topic because they just started their new fiscal year. How do we take organic growth to another level? Right. To offset maybe some of the issues that we've had on the backside of the, of the supply chain.

I like it. Let's jump ahead. Let's move and talk about the, the exciting stuff.

I wanted to talk on this one real quick.

Okay, go ahead.

This is an article. Auto parts supplier, first brand brand files for bankruptcy. And maybe you could look at that and say no big deal. But actually there's an interesting something and it'll be interesting to see if this is a canary in the coal mine is this company was predominantly funded through private credit markets. So they weren't funded through banks and things like that. But there's more and more hedge funds and more and more private credit companies that are funding companies through private credit. And from what I understand and like most hedge funds. Right. There's a lot of leverage on that credit always. So if you start to see some of these companies that have been funded through private credit start to go, is there a domino effect there? And what is there a risk that exists out there with the volume of private credit? I won't say similar to the mortgage crisis because I think that's at a whole nother lower level of magnitude, but I think it's something to keep an eye on is know the private credit markets and the risk there because they're so highly leveraged.

Well, isn't that the whole, isn't that the whole model? Right. We come in, leverage your balance sheet for other debt, we lose you there.

I'll say something.

What's that?

Oh, my speakers just decided to go away for a minute.

Oh, gotcha. Okay. Usually it's me that's all of a.

Sudden switch to my AirPods even though my AirPods are in the case scene on the desk.

Huh. Okay.

Anyway.

I rely on you for those technology support pieces, so. Good. Let's. Let's jump into our e commerce and marketing segment and talk a little bit about what's going on with the folks at ChatGPT and OpenAI with their new checkout experience that they've offered this week. Do you want to take first stab at that?

Well, didn't we show this two weeks ago? I think on the show or three.

Weeks ago we said it was coming, but then now it's out there and it's being talked about a lot more and a lot, a lot more depth now. So I think we, and we didn't. We've got some window to, to talk about a little bit further today. I want to talk about, you know, this is. We don't, I don't think we have a ton of listeners or people in the wholesale distribution world that are worried about what's up at Etsy. But there are people that are leveraging Shopify in some instances and I don't.

Think it's Shopify and Etsy that is a thing that those are just the pilots that they're working with.

Exactly right, Yep.

But if you remember two weeks ago, right, we did the example, what is the best safety glasses or something? I think that's what I brought up on Chat GPT and it gave me actually specific safety glasses that you could safety goggles, pictures of them and then if you clicked on the picture it gave you a place where you could purchase this. Right. And the pricing and everything else. What this new feature is on ChatGPT is rather than purchasing and going to a third party site or going to another site to, to make the transaction, the transaction will take place right on OpenAI. So what it appears though is that the money is not taken. In other words, OpenAI is not taking the full amount and then buying it from, you know, acting like a distributor basically. But at this point anyway, there will just, they will do a pass through and they'll do a pass through to the, through the, whoever the person is the, the company and then take I think a 10 percentage off the top. But they're starting this with Etsy sites and Shopify sites as a way to integrate on this. But look, to me that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I mean that's, let's, let's talk a little. That's why I wanted to chat about this a little bit more today is, you know, I was, I was talking to a gentleman yesterday about this that's in the AI world in depth. He's a, the European AI company and we were talking about the, the risk that goes with this. Right. Because there is a, there's the first component of this that says, oh, this looks exciting. I can get more access to more customers and, and I, I can have, you know, better visuals out there and I can probably drive some more revenue and so forth. But there is a complexity that goes with this. Besides the, you know, and I think about it about how traditionally wholesale distributors have looked so negatively for the most part. There's two camps. There's a very large camp that is Amazon is the devil and then there's a very small camp that says, oh I can leverage my brand and do some great things there. But there is a very different component now that's coming as we start thinking about what we want to feed into and share with the people at OpenAI.

Right.

The, the risk of losing, I'll even say losing control of your brand, losing control of your content and having it then feed somebody else's machine to make their machine better to your potential detriment has never been greater.

Yeah. And I think that even though right now they're doing it as a pass through, I don't know, that'll always be the case. Right. And so what ends up happening is.

A half a trillion dollar valuation as of this weekend that's only going to rise.

Yeah. And they're not profitable. Right. Right. So they're burning money like crazy. And you know, they have open, this is an open AI has what, 700 million users. But the majority of those, literally 650 million are free users. Right. So there's a lot expensive which are expensive because all of the, every time you use it, it's. So they have to come up with other ways to make money.

Yep.

And this is one of the first. Right. Is okay, well I've got a free user, maybe I can capitalize on this, you know.

Well, I mean, and ultimately they, they want to end game with this is bye bye Amazon. And not that Amazon would go away, but we can do it here and we can do it better because we have the better AI tools and we can build a better marketplace and so forth is what's behind that. I think what, what, what Amazon was never putting out there as a risk was the idea of hey, and I can guarantee you what's going to come out of this is not just this nice marketplace to sell your wares, but Amazon's model has always been, I'm probably going to say this all too simplistically, has always been let's drive transactions that drive revenue. It's not a component of let me be the world keeper of all data regarding all products out there. And I think that's where this comes together. And I've talked to a handful of industry people over the last month or so about this is and I think there will be some articles written and probably podcasts or webinars, not podcasts but webinars and things about this is just really understanding when you and OpenAI is really the one main one doing this. Although perplexity is probably close behind doing some similar wanting to do some similar things. I don't see this from a cloud standpoint anytime soon or an anthropic standpoint, but is the understanding and having some clarity of what I'm doing with my data and where am I sharing it and what's being done with it? Because we've never been anywhere remotely close in a world or a place where how you're managing your data and who has access to your data. In these instances, when I say data, it's transactional data, it's PIM data for your e commerce system, it's your marketing data, it's your keywords, it's your all of those things. Amazon wasn't necessarily using those. And nefarious is too strong of a word at this point, but Amazon wasn't looking at them to draw things in a way that you have to assume open AI is at this time. Yeah.

And look, I, you know, you have Amazon, right? You have. If you're an Amazon seller or. Right. You can either do fulfilled by Amazon or you can fulfill the order yourself.

Right.

I don't ever see OpenAI doing a fulfilled buy, in other words, having warehouses and things like that where they have product that they're shipping. But I do see them trying to take, you know, and whether it's in the B2C or B2B world. Right. Making companies more of the fulfillment center of the equation versus building the customer relationship. And what does that do on Amazon is you get very. And you're not allowed. Right. If you have a customer and you. You're not allowed to promote to that customer outside of Amazon, you don't even.

Know who they are.

Well, you do. When you fulfill it yourself, they'll give you the customer information, but it's. It's the bare minimum that you.

What percent is FBA versus self fulfilled? Right, Right.

But either way, you're not supposed to use that for promotional purposes. You're not supposed to market to them. Your. Your job is to fulfill. And so I think the risk here is the slippery slope potentially is. I mean, Amazon, I'm sorry, OpenAI, right. With all the intelligence that quote unquote, it has becomes the front end and the customer experience aspect of it.

Right.

And then on the back end as a distributor or even a manufacturer, you could end up becoming the fulfillment aspect of things. That's right now, is it going to happen overnight? No, you can sell, they're doing a crawl, walk, run, but you, you know, look, just, you can look and see what's occurring.

Well, I think the key thing now is to be aware and look at this. Don't, don't look at this as another Amazon model. Go in eyes wide open about what could be happening or what could be the risks of your data and so forth. And I think to your point earlier about the long game with all of this and the idea of how much money that they're losing. Stefan makes a good comment here. We saw this before, right? How many years did Amazon bleed before they started putting. In fact, Amazon didn't ever really make any money ever until they had the data centers. Right, right. So good, good point. Appreciate Steven's comment there. So where do you want to go next?

Yeah, we can hit this next one here. Boost B2B conversions with optimized landing page tactics. That sounds awful sexy. Yeah, it sounds exciting. Everyone's going to be out of here. But no, it's, it's. Hold on, don't leave yet. There's so, you know, we've talked about, Right. Personalization and I was thinking about this is. So what this article is talking about is when somebody comes to your website or a landing page, how do you personalize that?

Right. So this is Web Web Pro News put this article out, which I thought was interesting. Go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but see.

This is the flip side. I think of how AI could really, how you could use AI like an OpenAI engine to really add value to yourself as the trusted advisor and.

Yep.

Because if OpenAI or, or an AI engine fed you the information, the conversation. Right. So let's say you're having a conversation about safety goggles. If they then fed you that conversation data or some of that data, and then you use that to drive the actual landing page that you to the customer. And you use that by using, you know, intelligent customer CRM data. Now you could really deliver a personalized experience to that person going to the landing. Right. Because think about the beauty of AI as the conversation is very personal. Right. I'm going back and forth, I'm asking questions that are relevant to me. Now all of a sudden you end up on a generic landing page or a generic website. It's kind of an abrupt shift. But if you could keep that continuity of moving from the AI conversation into a more personalized experience with the track it properly. Right. Then I think. And that's a little bit about what they're talking about here. And I think that's going to be, I think the world of generic landing pages will go away in the next next few years for sure.

Well, there's going to be so much behind everything we do online. Right. I mean, everything I think is going to shift and modify a little bit. I think what we'll probably, probably see is some of those tactics will be refined and improved and so forth. Yeah, it's good stuff.

I thought this was a good article to be thinking about. Again, customer experience. If the customer experience on the front end, on the top of the funnel, right. Is moving away from Google and, and moving away from just traditional search and moving more towards AI. We talked about this last week, AI search, AI Search engine optimization.

Let's. We have another article about that, you.

Know, here and how do we, how do we carry that through as it changes the experience as it gets to our own site?

Yeah, yep. So this is, this kind of drives right into the next article there about this. Our friend Mark Brohan wrote this article about B2B marketers lagging on AI content creation. Right. So we've spent all of these years now with developing search engine optimization and now we need to be thinking about this last few articles here that we've talked about. Right. Is the agentic side of things is how do we prepare content for that? And it's very, very different.

Right.

If what, what needs to be done? It said, said marketers are shifting their priorities more than a third side of generative engine optimization. Geo as their top measure of success. And that was slightly ahead of brand awareness, which I thought was really interesting. So, you know, forward thinking, leading. This was a survey of 400 senior marketing executives across the U.S. and Europe. Only 11% had said they had optimized most of their content so far, but all of them were working on it and knew what they needed to go do.

Well, yeah, I don't know if I buy that because when you're optimizing your website or your content for AI, Right. In the keyword world or in the SEO world, we did it with keywords. So we looked for keywords and we stuffed keywords in there and we tried to make them as relevant and as possible and so forth. And then there was the authority of your site. But keywords were what it's doing in the AI world. You can't base your content around keywords. You have to structure blocks of content and then you have to show the AI how those blocks of content relate to each other. You have to give It a schematic basically, right to the AI and not only then and now, rather than just having authority on your site, you have to show AI as the content schematic that you're creating. What's the authority of those contact content blocks? So if you have information on there around your safety glasses, well, what, what, what makes that credible information that you're passing. So the AI is looking at these content. So the way that you optimize a site for AI is very, very different than the way you optimize insight for SEO. And it's not just. And what I'm hearing people do, oh, I'm going to just throw more content on the site. No, you have to think about how that. And you have to tell the AI how that site or how that content is structured and the framework of it so it can intelligently use it when it's going through the process. So I do think this is going to be big business. Big, big business.

Oh, yeah. Well, you got to figure all the agencies are shifting over to that.

Right, right.

But, but I think what's interesting is, and this is a whole nother discussion and you've, you've been involved in a marketing agency before and on this type of stuff, but is the agency model is all shifting now too? Because, you know, in theory, I'm sure there is, there are nuances. There's, know how there's prompt building and so forth. But the reality of it is, is you can do a lot of this work using AI tools. Yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah, you could have, I mean, you could have AI look at your site and tell you how to better organize it, how to structure it, how to put some of those things together. What are the things you should do? Yeah, absolutely.

Sounds like an exercise for us elite.

Smart. Yeah, I need another exercise.

Exercise in general or another exercise?

No, I need exercise in general, but not that exercise.

All right, why don't you throw the newsletter back up and let's, let's look at where we go next. Let's cover a few more articles before.

We go today hasn't been up. Okay.

Yeah.

Here's the article you were just talking about.

Yep, yep. All right.

Where do you want to go next?

I was going to follow your lead. Let's just cover a couple more. There was a couple in our technology and cybersecurity segment I think you were mentioning too. Right.

Well, this first article, the, this is a, you know, we put McKinsey article ends from time to time and they're always really, really, I think, well thought out and. Well, very, very comprehensive.

Our content curator does a really nice job, doesn't he?

Yeah, he's brilliant, dude.

Just, just ask him.

It's amazing that he knows so much about economy and he knows how to curate content also. It's, it's quite a renaissance.

Yeah.

So the, this article is about the agentic organizations contours of the next paradigm for the AI era.

You could say that three times fast.

Contours are the next paradigm for the AI era. Well, that part wasn't so bad.

Yep.

But it's. I thought it did a decent job of starting to lay out a framework for an AI centric organization. And what are the things you have to be thinking about both from a business plan, from workflow? I think there's some really good stuff in there and they go into enough detail versus it just being a, you know, 500 page article that has some.

And there's a great chart. There's a great chart in there. Right. Talking about leading the organizational paradigm shift. So largest since the industrial and digital revolution. So they literally go back and look at the, you know, 1800s they called, described it as, you know, craft and agricultural economy and then moving to industrial and then digital and now to AI. That the chart was pretty powerful.

Yeah, Yeah. I want to hit Steven's comment here. Just real quick here.

What's Stefan saying?

Yeah, sorry, Stefan. He says I would challenge it structuring the content correctly for, for AI with short term optimized experience. And eventually this will be conversational and the next generation will not be dependent on screenshots. I agree with you, Stefan, completely on that, that it will be conversational. But even if you look at the conversational data that's coming through, if you use OpenAI or chat GBT with conversation, it's still getting a lot of that data sometimes from the website and processing it and put it into place. So you want to be included in the conversation, whether it's on the screen or on the conversation. You want to be included in both of those scenarios.

I think those are both good points. I think it's, it's a today and tomorrow and what, what does tomorrow hold? Will be interesting. You know, I was. It just. There's just so much happening so fast. I was talking to a good friend of mine up in Sonoma on the phone yesterday evening. He has those. And I'm just describing this about how, how, how we do things is shifting quickly. He was just, he was just talking at. I've been thinking about getting a pair of the meta glasses not the ones with the, the heads up display but the previous ones it can record and so forth. And, and my buddy Cliff that had has a pair of those and he'd been down visiting with his wife and visiting Darlene and I and we were talking about him a lot and so but we were on the phone yesterday chatting and, and this my, my buddy Cliff, you've met him before Tom. But he was saying he had been at Bible study the night before and one of the guys just doing a presentation was instead of having notes or an iPad, meta glasses were flowing his bullet points for his notes.

Like a teleprompter on his glasses.

Exactly right. And he had the little haptic thing on his wrist and he just moved his wrist a little bit to scroll through. And I'm thinking about you know, some of the talks that I've given earlier this year at trade groups and so forth. It's like I don't know if I'm ready for that. But to Steven's point is where we're going right is I mean I think about it even with some of the agent work that your team's working on right now where our customers won't have to worry about which model their question is being asked of it, the system will decide that is just having a little pot in our ear all the time. Then we just have conversations with the information, the data that we need. Maybe it's a heads up display. You know I just, I think it's. We have to optimize for today, the near future and the long term future I guess is the takeaway. So before we jump ahead, evidently the governor of California has decided now with a new bill that was just signed about taking AI leadership that he is one more slam back at the president. When the administration is saying we want to have a national AI view and I think we've both agreed on this show that that is the right view is to not have companies be concerned about should I be even doing business in California or Colorado or wherever they have some of their own AI legislation and having a national standard. I just this whole the governor in the state that we live in and the president are having this battle which is pre next election battle happening already. So it's just in my mind having state by state regulations regarding AI is just going to be slowing down the.

Process and I hope this isn't starting a trend. Right. The one thing that I is seems to be, I won't say positive but at least it doesn't seem they're really focusing on Frontier models, which are, you know, base core models, large models.

Right.

And what are going into those versus talking about AI applications? So I, I'm hope it seems pretty broad and it seems very, very limited right. On who this would apply to. Which is good because what I don't want to see or we don't want to see is much more broader stroke legislation that starts getting into all the applications of the, all of those things. So hopefully this can be fairly well contained to the large, you know, the big, the big, you know, the Googles of the world and the open eyes and, and so forth.

That's great. Where do you want to go next? Let's cover a couple more with the time we have left today. Make it your call. There is if you, if you're rolling in, you're scrolling into the sales and market M and A section here. There was a kind of an interesting article I thought that was there from sales and marketing management.com and talked about why global sellers should steal a page from the British playbook. And really what it was talking about is frankness, openness and honesty and that, that builds emotional equity because. And they were referencing it just how you know, sometimes curt and. But open and straightforward buyers are in the UK and the seller, seller and buyer conversation in the UK is just very different than it is in most other parts of the world because it's. Get to your point. I'm going to tell you whether I have any interest or not versus a tap dance. So I thought that was a kind of a good one.

Yeah. Look, we've talked about this over and over, right. About the building the trust in the relationship and all of that and really building that into the DNA of the sales process. And I thought that was a decent article kind of explaining the British approach. Let's go have a, let's go have a beer.

Yeah. Well, they say, right, it's, it's rooted in honesty, patience and substance.

Yeah.

That proves long term value. Right. It's not a, it's not a hit and I'm gonna get a sale. It's, it's that relationship building things. Right. So it, the bullet points that hit these are things that seems pretty straightforward. But I think, you know, oftentimes Tom, we talk about things that if we were to in my mind at least is like, oh, that's kind of common sense. Well, guess what? I don't know about you, but I need to be reminded about simplistic stuff because I get too busy with the deep stuff. And so this is talking about investing and Building real relationships that starts with the consistency and honesty in the relationship, offering genuine value, not just I've got a sale or a better price. And I tell you what, there are still, the world is still full of logisticians out there that are just what is the price that you need for me to get this order? And I'll process it properly, that goes with that. So this went along with then having respect in the local process, tailoring outreach and engagement strategies that reflect your local buyer behavior. And I think this really is kind of funny because we're thinking maybe old school British tendencies here is what comes out of this article. But the reality of it is it translates right into the world that we live in right now with technology about tailoring messages by market, by business, by category, by buyer type. We can do all of those things. So I thought there were some good points in that one.

I like Bob's comment. He says when he coaches salespeople, he makes them present without using any source of electricity. But unfortunately very few are capable of doing so. Right. And you know, that's an interesting point. I'm wondering even if they can do it without electricity, is it really building relationship or is it just regurgitating something that they've memorized related to the product or the. Or the company? Yes, there, that's good. Yeah, I think it's a good start, right? Getting people to communicate without having all those other things there.

Yeah. Good, good, good. Anyone other ones you want to hit on? Let's just real quick as we're scrolling through this. There was approval this week for getting ready to participate. Not next week, but the week after. Three straight weeks of events with our friends at Affiliated Distributors. They've got their in Denver. Week after next is their first event which is their industrial and safety division national meeting. And the week after that is their PhD or their plumbing H vac and pipe valve and fitting event. And the week after that in Chicago is our electrical event. So if you're going to be at that. I will be at all three of those. Love to see it. But they just approved a merger with the, the folks at the Commonwealth Group which is bringing over hundreds of new ad members, which will be great. And then this month marks the a year since their last big merger with electrical division of iMark. And you know, this sounds like, you know, if you were to just look at this from a cursory standpoint, if you're in the market of any of these B2B trades, electrical, industrial, plumbing, python fitting, building materials in those markets, these are major shifts that are happening. It's not just, hey, you know, these two companies got together. This is large groups of distributors that are now coming together with buying power in the market means a lot for our company as well, which is great news. More people that we have, our close relationship with AD that we can bring that to. But I like to pay attention to these things because they are shifts that are happening within the marketplace that are pretty valuable.

Do you think you're going to see more shifts and fewer smaller buying groups and larger.

I don't. It will. I here. I'm vacillating here because I don't really answer your question. And it concerns me. I don't say concerns me. I think there's some cautions with it, Tom. I think there are historically, if you look at some of the much larger buying groups, they are the. And I think AD is a good example. I don't want to quote this exactly. I'll just give you my opinions. But historically, before some of the additional mergers that they've done, they've typically been. I'll just, I'm going to generalize this and say in most markets they've been the top one, two or three players in that market and in both revenue and size and dominance. I think as they've added some of these other groups, they're now starting to get maybe some more middle range groups and. And they're starting to attract some of those as well. I think when. So let's just. I'm going to. Probably shouldn't even say this. I was going to throw some revenue numbers to it because. But I'm cautious to do it because I don't want anybody to turn this into a snippet that says me quoting somebody's revenues. But I'll just say the hundred plus million in revenue companies, there is probably a place for that. We'll see consolidation and I'll maybe even say quarter billion to let's say 100 million to a billion dollar. You'll probably see some more of those coming together, whether it's with AD or some other groups. But then there is a place as well which is well deserved and much needed for that 10 million to $100 million distributor to have a place to gain industry insights and because there's so much more.

I would think needs are very different, actually.

They're different. They're different needs, but they are. They're different but the same. Right. So. And I was on the phone yesterday with a, with an AD member as an example. That's a Smaller company, you know, three branches. They could probably, you know, but they're growing quickly. They could probably. They came through one of the mergers and they could probably very easily fit in some other buying groups based upon size. But they're really looking at. This particular gentleman's a great conversation. They're going to be new lead smart customers soon is he's taking over the business from his parents and he's joining up with the not emerging leaders, but the young leadership program in distribution that AD has. So the value of buying groups and trade associations. I was texting last night with our good friend Brendan Breen from Industrial Supply association, their CEO there, and he'll be on the show with us here this month before their event in early November and messaging this morning with some of his team. The value that both buying groups and trade associations bring, it just astounds me. I've made a number of videos when I'm traveling to these events, which I spend so much of my time doing, whether I'm speaking at them or just. Or we're exhibiting or participating in them. The value that they bring is so far beyond, especially the buying group is so far beyond just being a buying opportunity. Right. The networks that they put together, the support that they have, it's. It's really powerful. To not participate in them, I think is a miss for people, especially your trade associates. You need to buy a buying group if you don't want to be. But to not participate in trade groups like ISA or Hardy or NAD or any of those silly. All right, let's do one more and wrap it up for the day. You pick it.

Oh, let's see. Well, here we go. Let's do this one number. This is a good headline magazine.

Go ahead.

HR Dive magazine. Nearly four in ten companies will replace workers with AI by 2026 survey shows. Okay. Now, of course you look into that and understand what they really mean and what is it? What's the breadth of replacing workers and all of that stuff? Not really clear. But I think this all ties into the overall sort of philosophical message that's going around, which goes back to our conversation earlier about people being concerned about employment. Right. As there's all this talk of somehow some way AI is going to replace workers. I, you know, I'm. I am every day more so believing that the role of AI is augmenting and empowering and enabling the workers. MH versus replacing them. Will there be some people that are not willing to leverage AI that will lose their job? Probably, but they're not going to lose their job because of AI. They're going to lose their job because they don't know how to take advantage of AI. I think those are two very different things.

Right.

And if they're going to take advantage of AI, they're have, going to have to have some willingness to even take advantage of technology.

Well, you're, you're, you're kind of quoting Jensen Wong here, right, from Nvidia, right? AI is not going to take your job. Somebody using AI well, is likely more like, more likely to take your job. Now there's some bots that are going to replace some things and so forth, of course, but in general, I think it's the person that's using AI is going to get the better job.

Yep, yep. So anyway, I just think these types of headlines, right, are the things that are fueling a lot of the concern that we see out there. My message would be is, and even they talk about this inherit. So we're going to place workers that don't have, you know, they don't have experience with AI. Well, it's not that hard to start getting experience with AI and figuring out how it works. And I mean, you can learn everything you ever wanted to learn between YouTube and, and everything else about how to incorporate AI in business or even ask AI to help you learn how to incorporate AI in business.

Well, if you think about that, the comment you just made, right? I, I think over the next couple few years, three to five years, we're going to see a major shift in what, what education is, right? The idea of, well, you and I went to school and you know, you go to school for four years, then you go get a job because you have this piece of paper that says you're qualified. You could get probably more qualified now in six months than you would over four years on a topic now you're going to miss all of the other things that you learned at college. And I would think I would still always want to send my, likely send my kids there, but from that standpoint, but from the broader exposure they get to things. But I think we're going to see a big, big shift for that. I think the challenge is, you know, Bob made a comment here, but he said, didn't they tell us you weren't going to lose your jobs? And I don't know that that's really what's been said. I think what's been said is probably more relating to a net, net loss of jobs. Right? Because there's going to be. And it's just like the Internet and other. Right. When the, you know, the assembly line was created. Henry Ford. Right. The, the world was going to change and everybody's going to lose their jobs. Well, guess what, we just created more jobs doing different things related to that. And I think that's the net net will come out of this in that standpoint. I do think the challenge is though and I think we're going to see some big backlash and this is just one guy's opinion but I think we're going to see some big backlash. I'll just use as an example the folks of the big technology company Salesforce, right. You know, laying off, you know, or either shifting the jobs of or replacing like 4,000 people. I think in the last month or so because of the agentic or agents that they're able to start using. I'm just going to tell you I've used agents with rental car companies, airlines and two or three other related, not travel related but other companies in the last couple of months. And I just think the experience is still horrific. It is horrific. I think the AI search on consumer facing apps and so forth. I literally, I ordered the new iPhone the other day through T Mobile and I tried to ask its bot this morning because it popped up on its mobile app, ask me anything. Had no clue what I was asking about checking on my order. Right. So I think there's a long way to go on getting and I certainly am a, I not only am a believer, I'm betting my company's future, our company's future on some of these things with agenc AI but, but I think we've got a ways to go to really get there.

No, but it's only going to get better. Right Than what it is. And I do think, and we see this, we see this in our industry a fair amount that there's almost this pride that I don't like, I don't use technology, I don't like technology. I think that is going to be a. Something that is kind of a foolish pride. The question is how you take advantage of technology and use it in a way that's going to make you and your team or whatever you're doing going to be that much more effective and efficient in what they're, what they're actually doing. Yeah, I don't, I don't think there's, I agree that there's been a lot of use of technology in the past that may have been promoted that was just for the lack, just for the sake of using technology. But I think understanding how to use Technology in a way that provides that better customer experience provides. The things that we talked about is, you know, digging your heels in is not, not the right way to keep your job.

Well, those instances, Tom, that I just described in my use recently was. And one of them was with United Airlines and I spent about. I just let the bot keep trying to figure things out for a couple of hours because I was at my desk working. It was on a screen next to me that was going on. I just let it try figure itself out and it couldn't do it. And I think it's. People are trying to respond to where, I don't know what's that skate to where the puck is going. Right. But you better have skates on. And in this case. Right. These experiences, my, my recent ones have just been horrible. Just, just horrible. So we got to get that right before we go. So let's wind down for the day. And we've, we've got our normal segments that Tom scrolling through here right now with some things going on with our industry scuttlebutt and channel leaders on the move and so forth and our great reads. But then our last segment that you've got up right now is upcoming events. I mentioned some of the events. Fixed Trump. Scroll through that a little bit too, because I'm just looking at how many of these I'm actually going to. We got. I did.

I wanted to hit this.

Great.

This is. We should.

We're not ending.

We're not ending.

Go ahead.

I was just going to say this great read article is actually really complementary to some of the things we talked about. It's. Most companies stop at good service, but the real growth multiplier is something else. And I think again, as we talk about AI and then. Okay, for the things that I am doing that are personal and human and relationship, how do I level that up to a whole nother, you know, level. And we're seeing a lot of that as we go through some of these things here.

Yeah, no, they talk a lot about in that article. They talked a lot about the feeling of hospitality.

Yeah.

And moving hospitality from, you know, home and, and, and travel experiences into the business and how people feel strong. So it's good. Good. I'm glad you brought that up. Anyways, I mentioned some of these upcoming events in our. We try and keep a calendar on the newsletter. Again, we didn't mention this halfway through the show today. Like I like to try and remember. But the discussion you're listening to us having today is from our newsletter called around the horn in wholesale distribution manufacturing goes out every Friday morning to 10,000 plus people. And if you don't get that newsletter and you would like to, we'd be happy to send that to you. Three simple ways to get it. Reach out to us@helloadsmartech.com we'll get that out to you. Two would be. You can certainly just go to the Lead Smart technologies page on LinkedIn at which point you would see the link to the newsletter there and you could search the newsletter on LinkedIn as well. And then we have a website for the podcast www.aroundthehornpod.com and you could certainly get the data you need there. One of the great things we have there is we have this industry contact or calendar and upcoming events. So there's some great ones coming up. As I mentioned, the affiliated distributor events that are coming up that we've got as well as we have another event that I'll be at in Memphis at the beginning of November. The Industrial Supply association is having their big event. I wish I could be at all of these because they're all valuable, but there's no way. What is that? About 20 plus of them in the next two months?

Yep.

So good. So anyways, that's a great resource for you. So as we wind down today, I'm Kevin Brown, this is Tom Burton Again, we do this every week. Greatly appreciative of the people that spend their time and help us with this.

We're not doing this next week, are we?

We are not. No show next week. We are going to a technology executive conference that we're going to together. We usually divide and conquer at these but we'll be in the mountains of Utah for a few days at this technology exec conference and then you get to come home. And although I did get a little laugh out of a meeting we were in this morning, it looks like you're going to be going in November to Buffalo. So great.

It's football season. They're great, great people.

I laugh about it because I when we were actually on the phone with a customer the other day about a meeting with them in. In British Columbia and they were saying, well, maybe we should have the meeting in California where you guys are. Because of the weather and weather is just a factor of where you go to. In my world, weather is just a factor of what's going on, where I need to go to get business done. If it's snowing, it's snowing. If it's raining, it's raining. If it's sunny and Hot. It's sunny and hot. Let's just go get stuff done. But yeah, so lots going on. I've got, like I said, five weeks in a row. You've got to travel next week. But that's the nature of what we do.

Right, right. But we're not missing five weeks of row in the show.

So, no, we will not be. We will do be doing. I think we only have the one that we're missing. I'll be back most of my travel. I'll be back on Thursday nights and leaving again on Sundays over the next few weeks. But all good stuff. So thanks for being with us, everybody. We appreciate it. The one thing that we always ask at the close of the show is one, if your company is looking to digitally transform and bring innovative technology, artificial intelligence and other great things and help you accelerate growth and understand your customers and your teams better, we would love to chat with you about that journey that you're taking and see if the solutions we have at LeadSmart might be a support or a fit to that as you're trying to bring silo data from across your organization and place to make better decisions. Two is if you like what you hear each week, you're listening on Apple or Spotify, just hit that subscribe button and then do us the favor of leaving a review. If you're on YouTube, hit the subscribe button. It helps us a lot. We're getting hundreds now of hundreds and hundreds actually of YouTube videos a day. Just got some statistics the other day that go with that. And then if again, if you're with us on LinkedIn, hit the subscribe button to the newsletter as well as following the. The. That's at Lead Smart there. So Tom, what are you laughing at?

Well, Bob says he's going to cry himself to sleep on Thursday night. So I think though there's going to be a newsletter coming right there.

We will have a newsletter and so.

You'Ll have the newsletter. So maybe, you know, I don't know, it's not as bad as it sounds. The newsletter will be here. It just won't be.

That is. That is amusing. The other side of that as well is that all 161 episodes are on YouTube and LinkedIn.

Yeah. You could go back, Bob, and listen to some.

Yeah, we should work with John on doing that about putting some. John, our producer and editor, about putting some best of segments together that we could play. Let's fact. I will absolutely do that. So anyways, everybody be safe, be kind, have a great weekend and we will look forward to next time.

Thanks everyone.

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