How Nearshoring, Digital Transformation, & AI Are Reshaping Distribution, with Guest David Gordon

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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.

Gents, how are you? Good to see you both doing well.

Thanks.

Fantastic. Well, I'm gonna kind of dive in and we'll get into the news, but I'm David. Really appreciate you joining us. It's your second time with us. I think we probably need to get this a little more organized and get your wisdom with us. I put a note out to my LinkedIn audience just a bit ago. I called you the illustrious. So that you were joining us this morning, the illustrious David Gordon.

So the pressure is on. The pressure is big.

I'm getting concerned.

Very good.

Tell my agent about this.

Great. Yeah, well, I think we were just talking about her a few minutes ago. She was with her Amazon cart. Right, Exactly. I think we're all aware of who our bosses are. So we, those of us that have one of these things on our fingers. So good. Hey, you know what? Tom just checked Will's comment there. You know, you don't have to share it, but he was dancing along with me, so that's good.

That's good. And good morning to Bob as well. Bob. Yeah. If anybody else is out there and would like to comment on Kevin's dancing, please do.

So let's make sure that that is not the highlight of today's show. So before we drag that out too much longer, let me kind of dive in and do a little bit of housekeeping that we do every week. I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with my lifelong friend and business partner, Tom Burton. We're joined by David Gordon today, our good friend, and we're going to talk about David and his business and the expertise that he brings to wholesale distribution in just a moment. But we get together every Friday morning. We're live on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live, and Facebook Live. Later in the day, John and Lily pull their work together. The people working behind the scenes for us and our admin support and our producer and editor, and they bring all of this data together and they get it out on all the podcast formats around the world. So whether you listen on Spotify or Apple or any of the Other podcast formats later in the day today that will be available to you. What do we do while we're here? Well, we bring all the news of the week together. We look at the economy, the supply chain issues out there, mergers and acquisitions, sales and marketing, AI technology, cybersecurity. We look at the news that's going on within the industries of wholesale distribution and manufacturing. We take all that news together, put it into a newsletter we call around the Horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing that goes out to about 10,000, 10,000, 10,500 or so people each week. And we go through those articles and we try and break those down or as we say, sometimes peel back the onion on that story, finding the story behind the story, and bring its relevance to wholesale distribution and manufacturing to our audience. Again, we're going to on our live show today, we'll be reviewing that newsletter. If you don't get the newsletter and if you would like to, just let us know, there's three simple ways to do it. If you're active on LinkedIn, you can just search around the Horn and wholesale distribution podcast. The newsletter option will be there to sign up. You can do so there. You can send us an email, which is very simple, to helloadsmartech.com we'll get you signed up for the newsletter. Or we have a website for the podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. see past episodes there and sign up as well. Or even subscribe to the podcast format. So you can do that. One of the things that we would greatly appreciate though is if you enjoy what you hear, our audience grows every week. I think I saw just from LinkedIn people that were coming, I think we were three or four countries today represented podcast downloads, usually five to seven countries at least each week. But if you like what you hear, you like our guests, give us a like. And a follow on LinkedIn would be great. On the around the Horn podcast page and the Lead Smart Technologies page. If you're listening on YouTube, please subscribe. And if you're listening on the podcast formats, not only subscribe, but please leave a review when you do that lets other people see that that we're out there and we get to get this information in front of further and more people. So very helpful to us. Last but not least, we couldn't do this each week if we didn't have a sponsorship. Most podcasts and live shows are sponsored by many different companies week after week. But we do the same thing week after week as well when we're sponsored by the company that Tom and I work for Lead Smart Technologies. What we've developed at Lead Smart is an AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence platform. Very different than historical CRM and customer intelligence tools. Being a platform, the tools there can be moved throughout your entire organization. So it's not just a revenue side of your business or sales and marketing side, but the platform can be used across your business. We take data that's siloed from around organizations. We see data in ERP systems, marketing automation systems, E commerce systems, data lakes, other forms. We bring all that data together into one single platform where we can use AI tools and other types of tools to evaluate that and help make smart decisions by giving actionable insights and alerts to sales and marketing teams and others in the organization to uncover growth opportunities and even potentially identify risks to the business as well. So if your business is working on digital transformation, you're trying to find a way to get that silo data together in a certain place to get actionable insights and revenue growth within your company. We'd love to talk to you again. Hello. At Lead Smart, Tech has a great way to catch us. So, Tom, David, did I miss anything?

No, I feel very well informed.

Yeah. And so go ahead.

I just wanted to say welcome and good morning to Paul and Ted. Mr. Judge is with us, Mark. So thank you all for checking in. The pressure is really on now. We've got some. We've got some.

Be interesting to see what word they use afterwards.

Yeah, yeah.

What are we going to end up with?

Well, Ted has translated that into Illustrio within us. Indeed so. Illustrious. Indeed so. I think Catat agrees with me and the post that I made out there about you being, being with us. And anytime Dan judges with us, that's going to be a good day. Sir. Dan's one of my heroes out there, so it's always good to have him. Mark is calling in from the uk. So, Mark, I just love it when he's here with us because I just picture him in the UK because it's evening time with a gin and tonic.

You know, happy hour somewhere. So there you go.

Yeah, that's why, that's why I was dancing was to, you know, really make that remark. It's exactly right. Well, if you're sitting back with a gin and tonic in, in the UK and you want to see some knucklehead in California dance, why not tune into the podcast?

That's right.

All right. Well, hey, before we dive into the news, let's talk about, let's talk about you, Mr. Gordon, will you fill us in on your company and your background in history and what you do to help distribution?

Well, we get a lot of different things going on. Core business is channel marketing group, as you guys know. So we're consulting with manufacturers, distributors and reps in the construction industrial trades. Do a lot in electrical and H VAC across those three boards in the areas of strategy, marketing and market research. So we get all sorts of client things going on right now. Everything from some M and A stuff that we're involved in to customer satisfaction to E commerce to strategy development. So just a wide array of activities for different types. And as you know, we also publish Electrical Trends, which we've done for 18 and a half years now.

Wow.

So 2,000 articles on that.

Wow.

Yeah. And it's amazing how when I started it was kind of as a lark really to be a self controlled communications view vehicle. And I was just at NAD this past week and was sitting next to someone and we got introduced and she said, I know you from Electrical Trans.

It's like great.

And I said, heather, I've been trying to follow up with you and get a meeting on the CMG side. I know these six people in your company. So it becomes a way.

So.

And then we launched H vacr Trends about three years ago for the H Vac space. And I've got a digital publication in the lighting space called US Lighting Trends that has 29,000 people on it. And then we just launched a site, e commercefordistributors.com oh, on behalf of a client and that's going to have some other information on E commerce and we'll get some other things coming up in the next couple of weeks that we'll be launching.

Well, we, before we dive even in a little bit further to that, we're getting some great comments about people that are fans of yours. My friend Paul Kennedy says that he chatted with you earlier this week and he says I'm smarter for it. So if you made Paul Kennedy smarter, imagine what you could do for me.

You worked the other way. It's interesting. I was at the NEMRA conference earlier this month and presentation two presentations here. One was Manufacturer of the future, which is manufactured rep relationships. Another was Rep of the future. We do that for NEMRA looking out to 2020 to 2030. But I had a slide in there based upon some information I'd gotten from some guy who reached out, said take this little test to see if you have adhd. So I took it. He comes back, oh, you've got entrepreneurial adhd. Are you surprised I responded? Well, I'm a consultant. I usually run eight to 12 clients. I'm running five different websites. Does that sound like ADHD or ADXD?

Right. Yeah, I completely, completely understand that. In fact, I'd love to.

Wait. We're entrepreneurs by definition, right? Yeah.

Very good. So that NIMRA that you were talking about, that's a National Electrical Manufacturers Reps association, correct?

Correct. Yes. Yep.

Great. So I always love what when you share stuff about that because I was a manufacturer's rep for many years in the industrial segment in my earlier part of my career. So that's great. So, David, how do people get in touch with you if they want to get those newsletters? And besides connecting with you on LinkedIn, which is a great thing to do, how else would they do that on LinkedIn?

They can go to electrical trends.com to subscribe or h vacr.h vacr trends.com to subscribe or email me at d.gordon channelmkt.com There we go.

There's, there, there's our ad for the day. And that's important. We try and feature, you know, some of your articles here and there. And I try and read, I get all of the newsletters. So in fact, I shouldn't say that I need to sign up for the e commerce newsletter because I wasn't aware of that one. So we'll get that one going as well. So, Mr. Burton, anything to add before we dive in?

I think we need to be ready to dive. Let's do it.

Let's do it. So we talk about economy and supply chain is the first segment of the newsletter. And again, if you're listening on the podcast and not seeing our screen, we have the newsletter open that we publish each week. US Import Prices Rise moderately in January. An article from Reuters. Gentlemen, either of you have any initial thoughts on that one?

Unfortunately, it was kind of expected. If you look between fuel and just go to the grocery store.

Right.

You know, everything in food, try buying produce that doesn't come from south of the border. It's all gotten higher.

Well, you know, as we looked at some of those numbers and some of them to be expected as discussed, you know, they talked a lot about, about the petroleum side of things and I think, you know, it got me, got me thinking about it as I looked at the article yesterday and those looked at it again this morning and I think, you know, most people, or many people, if not most, when they think petroleum prices, they think putting gas in their car. But probably the bigger factor of that is, you know, anything you touch that's plastic is made from petroleum products, right. So whether it's the microphone in front of any of us or whatever it might be in that setting, the things in our garage that are, that are plastic, whether they're rotationally molded plastics, injection molded, those all take two things, right. They take the petroleum products and the pellets that are driven by the same prices that we see at the pump and they take the natural gas that this article describes as well to make. So when we start seeing those petroleum prices rise, then we have the other implications of the economy right now as well. Puts us in a difficult spot because so much of what we touch every day is tied to the plastic side of things.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting you mentioned the natural gas and obviously we export a lot of natural gas versus the alternative. But I was on a call yesterday relative to data centers and a lot of data centers now challenge with expanding data centers and there's 3 to $500 billion worth of data center work that's been announced so far. Big challenge is getting power to them. But the price of natural gas, I think they said per megawatt for power in the data centers has gone up by about a third in the past year. $2 and 25, I think they said from like 225 to like three and a quarter. Maybe it's not per megawatt, but they had that type of. And they see that getting over $5, which is why they're looking at renewables and different types of nuclear to power data centers in the future.

Well, structure, right. So that's going to tie to a much broader discussion. We're going to talk a little bit, surprisingly enough, we're going to talk a little bit about AI later in the day. And we've got to have the data centers, we've got to have the chips that are running that are taking that side of power. And you know, listening to a couple of experts in the past on the AI side of the world is talking even about the idea of needing fusion to power some of these things because we can't keep doing what we're trying to do. And you know, the idea of, makes great sense that potentially we can, you know, solve cancer and other types of medical problems and so forth based upon the data that's going to be pumped into those things from research and studies and whatever it might be. But if we can't power those chips to do that learning and the more data that we're plugging in the more power it takes, we're going to have to have to get those places powered properly.

So, you know, I'm, I'm thinking ahead, right, on this next article.

Yep.

Where it talks about inflation warning signs mount. And I think this is interesting is what we were just talking about. Everyone's talking about tariffs. Right. Inflation equals blame tariffs. But clearly there's a bit more to the equation than just tariffs. And we talked about this last week, right. About when we were deciding well when is the next interest rate cut going to be? And I think the minutes came out this week and they were talking about, well, we got to watch and see what the tariffs happen before we make any decisions on that. But clearly there's other variables like we just talked about here, fuel and other factors that are going to determine the inflationary factor. And this next article, again, they're just talking in general about the fact that the warning signs are mounting, although they were focusing predominantly on the, on the tariff side of things.

I think that's interesting, Tom, from that standpoint. So we're jumping ahead. This is an article from Axios. It's inflation warning signs mount, mount. And they talked about, you know, that just the initial quote, Trump administration, the Federal Reserve face a headwind in securing a return to low inflation. Concerns have escalated in the last few weeks as the president has threatened tariffs on a variety of U.S. trading partners. And it talks about the bond prices and some of the implications of all this. Bond prices now implied 2.7 annual consumer price index inflation for up to five years. That really surprised me. For how long? That was suggesting that. And then it says the only time five year breakevens have been higher in a data series that dates to 2003 were during the peak of the 2022 inflation surgeon. So the bond side of this, and I don't proclaim to be a bond expert for a second, but Tom, you often talk about that, but this is pretty profound.

Yeah. I mean if you strip it all away. Right. They're basically saying and David, interested in here, are you sharing the same sentiment as you're out there, but are people preparing for higher inflation, for higher inflation for longer periods? And I think it's going to be a way of life for the next few years.

The higher inflation. Yes, they're kind of expecting, you know, I think some of this is going to play into what's going to happen on the workforce, you know, especially as we change the whole issue of immigration or the migration issues. And you're going to have all these government employees who are being laid off and are they going to want to go into certain types of environments? You know, the tariffs you want to bring back industrial. Sorry. So these people who are just laid off from the irs, are they going to go work in industrial facilities? So labor costs, you look in the trades, there's not enough bodies. So what happens to the labor rate for those things?

Right.

That pipes construction costs and things like that. So it's all going to end up building. But I think the other part that plays into the Fed issues is you don't know what's going to go on day on a daily basis on what's even going to happen on the tariffs. There's going to be another country and another thing and how long will that be? So how do you make longer term policy? How do you make longer term decisions?

That's great, great point. I was getting ready this morning and listening to cnbc. I'm looking over here to the side because I've got a picture that I took. The Atlanta Fed president Rafael Bostic said, Tom, you'll love this from some of our discussions over the last couple of years. Pervasive ambiguity calls for caution and humility. Right. So there's one comment from from Atlanta Fed president and then this is same same discussion that they had is Stephen Davis, economist at Stanford, says high levels of policy uncertainty encourage businesses to cut or postpone investment and hiring as they wait for the operating environment to become less risky and the rules of the game to become less murky. And I think that last sent part of that sentence was rules of the game become less murky because when you don't know what's next and you're still trying to figure this stuff out makes it hard to make big decisions. Right.

Creates paralysis and businesses want certainty. It's even if you go back to the tariffs that we had in 2018, if they said that those tariffs are going to be there for at least 10 years, businesses would be able to make decisions. And on the electrical side, Deborah Phillips from NEMA shared some data that in the electrical industry back in 2018, 32% of material came in from China. Now it's down to about 19%. Back then, if it was said that it was going to be this long, if not longer, would more companies have been proactive in making decisions. It's not that that business has necessarily come here because a lot of Chinese companies have even moved stuff to Thailand and Vietnam and things like that.

Right.

But it's sort of like when when Trump first came in and Obamacare had to go away. Does businesses want to think about changing their healthcare strategies every four years?

No.

It's almost like thinking about changing your ERP every four years.

Yeah.

Had somebody had somebody tell me recently that, that they would rather have a spinal transplant for their whole spine than change their erp. So I think that's an interesting, interesting point you make. I was talking to a industrial distributor, it was early last week. And you know, in their company, they've been working on moving their supply chain out of China for the last couple years and have done a pretty good job of that moving to Southeast Asia for, for some things, and India for some other things, and Mexico for some things as well. I think we're just going to continue to see more and more of that. And those people that aren't doing that, I think, is if you're not doing that, you're probably missing the boat on some of these things. But the other side of that, those percentages and numbers you described, David, for me is kind of interesting because as you commented about Chinese manufacturers even moving some stuff out is I think what we're seeing in Southeast Asia is you've got some Chinese manufacturers that are doing some final assembly or some things like that in Thailand or other parts of Southeast Asia and putting that stamp on it versus the Chinese stamp. And I think we're starting to see some of that going on in Mexico as well.

A lot of that in Mexico.

Yeah.

I mean, there are entire industrial developments where the land was bought by the Chinese.

Yep, yep.

That's not government, Chinese government money involved.

Well, that's exactly right. And when you, as you, we were, you were pointing out in our discussion before we even got started today about the Chinese government's ability to manipulate the currency, not just in, you know, as we're talking about tariffs. Tom made a great point in our discussion before we jumped live today is that, you know, the high likelihood of the Chinese government offsetting a lot of these. I had made the comment and talking to a distributor recently that said he's actually already proactively hearing from some suppliers in China that are backing off on some prices and adjusting some rebates to soften the blow on some of these things. But to Tom's point is, you know, does the Chinese government just get backstop all of that or. And then I think you made the comment about do they just manipulate the currency? So interesting thoughts. Tom, anything further? You're, you're not, we're not able to hear you, Tom.

How about now yeah.

Will, Will Quinn told you last week to forget your microphone?

Well, I think, I think it's like 9, 20 in the morning, the microphone just decides to go out. It's, it's. But, but I wanted to hit on one thing before we move here and I. That term that you use from one of the Fed things, what was it? Persistent ambiguity or something. We, We've been doing this podcast for what, a little over two years, today's 130 times have in the entire time that we've been doing this, have we ever had a period that wasn't ambiguous and wasn't uncertain? Well, I mean, that's the new normal. Or that is the normal. It's not even the new normal. It is the normal. Right. I don't know that we're ever going to wait for a point where everything is going to settle down and there's going to be all this certainty and predictability.

Well, there's nothing to suggest the stars are going to align.

Yeah.

And that's why I said, when we, we started on these topics, I said, tom, you're going to love this. Right. Because these statements. Because we've been saying this to your point. Right. And today's our 130th time of doing this, and it's funny, it makes me think it's just. As a, as a side note, David, is you had commented about one of your newsletters, doing it on a lark is. Here we are, you know, 130th episode today. And I, I think back all the time, I was telling the story yesterday to a, an association executive that, you know, I threw an idea out to Tom out, you know, two and a half years ago that said, hey, you know, what if we put out a newsletter, just, you know, try and support the industry and be some help with some thought leadership. And, And Tom was the one who said, hey, well, you know what? LinkedIn's got this LinkedIn Live thing, and now here we are in multiple countries every week, and I still scratch my head, how did that happen some days? So it's the larks do happen. But to Tom's point, I think we've used the term simmer and, you know, tepid and so over and over again for the last couple of years. And that's a good point, Tom, about that is the. Probably the new normal. Yeah.

So I think I like the way Bob described it. Everyone's crystal ball is equally cloudy.

Yeah.

And I don't think that's going to change. So I, I don't think that you can just go into a holding pattern.

Right.

Be because of that. It's like how do you and we're going to talk I think some things as we go forward. How do you navigate on things that you can control versus trying to worry about all the things that you can't.

But well, I think even if we kind of hit the last part article in this section, it's from dcvelocity.com it talks about the articles in their supply chain section and it says tariffs would accelerate change in global trade flows. And as I was looking at this article, what stood out to me was it it just talks about all of these factors and we've got, you know, just from some of the folks who have made comments today, we have a lot of people on the distribution side of things. And and it says geopolitical rivalries, alliances and aspirations are renewing the global economy and the imposition of new tariffs on foreign imports by the US Will accelerate that process. This is from the Boston Consulting Group. But you know, I think you look at, you know, we have an administration now who is basically using business tactics for geopolitical accomplishments. Right. And tariffs are we talked about this a number of times in the last month or so is that the tariffs is if you stop and take a step back is the tariffs aren't necessarily about the economy. Tariffs about wanting to are about wanting to accomplish other things. And you know, I made this comment, I think it was two weeks ago that said, you know, when we think about NAFTA and I think it's hard to look at nafta and David, I'd be real interested in your thoughts on on this comment I'm going to make here. But if you look at NAFTA right now is I think we have to look at Mexico differently than we have historically looked at Canada, Mexico, U.S. mexico, that's one issue of what's going on in Mexico with the Chinese influence and so forth. But really what the Chinese Mexico tariffs are tied to is strengthen the border. Right. Or else and that's going to keep immigration issues in play and that's going to helpfully help with the fentanyl crisis. But that's being pressured and done on a geopolitical level through tariffs and pressuring other countries and other means to get them to do what we want to accomplish something. So I think what we've historically seen in this country is presidential administrations that have looked at wanting to negotiate things and lots of meetings and traveling around at, you know, gold plated conference tables all over the world and this administration say, no, I don't know how to do it that way because I'm not a politician. I know how to do it from a business standpoint. And I just squeeze you in different ways.

Yeah. It's used as a negotiation tool. There was a presentation at the NAD Western by someone who was initially pitched as an economist. Really turned out to be more of a futurist who looked at the Southeast, Southwest and. And Northern Mexico as really calling it the way the future prosperity is really for the world. And so many companies from outside the country.

David, where was that again? Where was that? Where were Those locations?

The U.S. southeast, Southwest and Northern Mexico.

Interesting. Okay.

Because that's where growth is. That's where there's mineral, there's resources. That's where population is going. That's the areas that have really the growth that's happening. Companies from throughout the world want to do business within the U.S. but population and the growth is driving in those areas. And she called Mexico, China with quality.

So much. That's awesome.

US Companies have moved in there too and are automating the places and are adding education and things like that and raising the standard of living and the quality of the workforce. And the ethic. Work ethic is better. Now, to Kevin's point about the tariffs is when you look at the tariffs, it's really put border control for the illicit activities, whether that be people issues that be drug issues that be criminal issues that just have been allowed to percolate over the years and no one knows how to really deal with it.

I think that's exactly right. Just to Bob's comment that he made there. No, I wasn't suggesting for second that. Not that we should not be viewing geopolitics through business lens. I think you have to at some point. My point was more tied to the idea that people are used to more of a political aspect to try and accomplish things where we take years of meetings and conferences and events and so forth as opposed to throwing the gauntlet down from a business standpoint. So I think that's great. It's interesting.

You know, it's not really from a political. I don't think that they know how to do it from a diplomatic.

Yeah, okay.

That's probably the better aspect.

I think that's fantastic. Well said. Yeah. Would. Absolutely. Their diplomacy is not necessarily a strength of the current administration. How's that? It's.

It wasn't when he negotiated the first real estate project.

That's right. Yep. So anyways, that. I think that's a Real good view of all of this. I want to just hit on the Mexico thing, David, because you really reinforced some of the things I've been saying. I've been saying for quite some time is if we're not if you're in, if you're in just in business in general and specifically in manufacturing, wholesale distribution, I I been pounding on this is Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, Mexico. Pay attention to Mexico because the leverage that they're finally, I would say starting to gain some significant leverage with other countries. And it's not just China, other countries, including other Latin America countries who are Brazil is doing quite a bit of manufacturing in Mexico where they're starting with and there's other Latin American, South American countries that are doing major manufacturing projects, but they're coming to the maquiliador regions across the border. I happen to live 60, 70 miles from the Mexican border. And in the years that I was a manufacturer's rep, I crossed the border all the time for US Manufacturers calling them aquilador plants and Mexican distribution that is just now it's settled for a number of years that whole maquiliar region, but it's now booming in and it's not just that border area. There's parts in this central part of Mexico where, where there's whole new airports being built. There's literally and I don't see this happening but in Baja California there's was been conversation off and on for years and years and years about putting a canal through there that would go or at least a larger port with a rail line that gets across to go to the Google Maps now says the Gulf of America to get across to that. So interesting kind of play. I just think that Mexico and I think you reinforced it with what you just commented about southeast southwest U.S. and northern Mexico. It's almost like it's going to become its own economy. So good stuff. Tom, you Mike, your mic broken or am I just talking too much?

I can you hear me if you can. And that answers your question.

Okay.

Kevin.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, well done. Okay, so that's good. Well, Ted. Ted commented near shoring is the most talked about term with his relationships in Mexico. And you got it couldn't be more true. Right. And. And then I think we're even going to see the, the onshoring growing as well. It'll be interesting over the next couple years to watch the statistics related to near shoring and on shoring because I'm really intrigued about this shows you how boring my life is. I'm really intrigued by the balance that we may see between near shoring and onshoring being whether we're doing something in Mexico or Latin America somewhere versus in this country. So we'll see how that plays out.

But I think a part of that though, Kevin, I think the near shoring is going to be things that are more labor intensive. The onshore is going to end up being more robotic driven.

Yeah, I think that's right. And probably more capital, capital intensive things and so forth.

Well, part of it's also people's willingness to work in some of those environments.

Yeah. Well, you commented on the trades earlier, right? I don't think, I don't think we're going to see a laid off FDA worker become a welder. That somebody made a comment earlier that they're going to go become a welder. So I think that's an interesting spot. Tom, any thoughts before we jump ahead?

Let's, let's move on.

Yep, very good. So in our manufacturing distribution section we can, we can hit this really quick, but there's an article there about a manufacturing in the plumbing and pipe, valve and fitting segment who is already published. You know, the article actually shows, and this is from impo mag.com and they were actually showing a price increase and they had a screenshot of one segment of their plumbing related Items that are 10% across the board. Increases already, already coming out. And I think that's in. David, you would probably have a lot more insight to this than I do just because of your conversations day in and day out. And I've not asked enough questions about this. But you know, most people are still sitting on, you know, middle of 2024, later, 2024 inventories. So publishing a full price increase right off the bat right now I could, to me it seemed like it would make more sense to let maybe make some announcements that it's coming. We don't know what it's going to be. Kind of laying the groundwork to it because of incoming shipments that are, let's say in the last two weeks, manufactured goods are now going to have those tariffs on it. But the stuff that's on a boat right now and the stuff that's in a warehouse right now wasn't subject to that. So that, that's kind of what ran through my mind.

Well, usually the companies that come up with these type of announcements, they're basically telling you what they have left in their warehouse.

Okay.

Because this company is really an importer. It's not a distributor. Think of it, it's a manufacturer that manufacturing it's really a master distributor, probably. And I've seen it in electrical companies saying, well, we're going to be increasing our price as of March 31st. Well, that's telling you what they got in their warehouse right now.

Yeah. Yep, Very good. Good point, Tom. Any thoughts on that before we jump ahead?

Nope, let's keep going.

All right, so suppliers shift volumes to distributors with eyes on a European prize. It's an interesting article from Industrial distribution. Any thoughts from you gentlemen? Before I chime in, I thought this.

Is an article that if I'm a distributor, they should read to reinforce back to their manufacturers why distributors are important versus manufacturers selling direct. I mean, the European model has always been different. It reinforces in Europe that these manufacturers are also probably cutting costs.

Yeah, well, it's, it's. So I think that part of this is tying to selling direct and selling the distribution. This is an article again from industrialdistribution.com or ind dis.com and it talks about strategic shifts within the European market. But it was interesting. And they were talking specifically about the MRO or the maintenance, repair and operating market, operating supply market. I was shocked at some of the statistics though, with that in them. Them talking about the European MRO market being larger than the US and it's. It shocked me, I guess, is all I can say.

How could that be?

It just the statistics it shares. I'll just quote this. Although Europe is the larger MRO consumer, the US Is a more mature market, a trait reflected in its consolidation, which is a little bit to David's point earlier. It says in the US the main MRO providers have a combined 30% market share, while in Europe the market is extremely fragmented. The top five players account for less than 8% of the market. In fact, the market leader, Rubik's makes up just 3% of the market. So I think that comparison there would be that 3% that they might have of that market. If you were to compare that to a Granger in the MRO market in the US or some of the other major MRO players, I think is the consistency there.

Would Amazon have a factor on that in the U.S. i mean, Amazon's taken a lot of the MRO type of opportunity, right?

Yeah, yeah, correct. But I think the, the. It's just what they're described. Yes, but I think what they're describing is it's so much more fragmented in Europe. Right.

Than it is gorillas. There's no.

You got a lot of small companies, family owned companies in Europe too. You don't have as many manufacturing hubs in a lot of Europe. So it may just be the way the dynamics of the marketplace itself.

Well, and I think Bob's telling us here that he may not even agree with these statistics because he says 68.7% of all statistics are inaccurate. That's a good one. I like that. So it's, I just was, I thought this was an interesting article to kind of make those comparisons. And you know, I think when you look at the EU like this, it's, it's definitely an opportunity and, and it's certainly not as mature of a market as we have here. So as it was discussing. So. Very good. All right, where are we going next?

You want to talk about digital? We're still in the same section here and distributor sale. Let me try that again. Distributors gross sales nearly half a trillion, despite 2024 headwinds. So what it's saying basically in this article is that, and this is from digital commerce. 360. Despite all the uncertainty and everything that we've been Talking about here, 400,000 plus, which I thought was a gigantic number, US distributors saw some growth in 2024. So what do you think about 400,000? Does that sound even remotely possible?

David, that's it. That brings up an interesting point that we, we battle about this and say battle about it, scratch our heads about it all the time. Just as we, the company that Tom and I run, Lead Smart. You know, we. Our largest customers are distributors just because they have a lot more people than manufacturers in that setting. Right. But what's your view on the statistics of how many wholesale distributors there are in US in the US Quite frankly.

I haven't looked at from a macro number like that because you'd be looking at every single industry. I think there are 400,000 distributors across. Who knows?

Yeah, it's, it's the reason, you know.

The small little food distributor who's only doing Peruvian food and employs five people. You know why I picked Peruvian food? Forgive me, but yeah, you know what I'm saying Sometimes, you know, to Bob's point where he said the 60, 67.8 or 68.7 numbers can lie and liar and liars can use numbers. Is that 400,000? Is that 600,000? A hundred thousand? I think the bigger issue is it, you know, they're talking about growth. It's really channel shift. Inevitably with a lot of E Commerce, is it really more sales that went into these businesses or that customers chose to do business electronically?

Unpack that a little more for us.

If you would, there's still only X amount of dollars being.

So where did it go? How was it spent?

It got transacted electronically versus someone calling or faxing or sending it in another way. Okay, so it's an order. The transaction is just consummated somewhat differently. Now if you have E commerce capabilities, that gives you a greater propensity to forget in that business. But the overall pie of what went through distribution didn't change. Order mix changed.

So I think it said here that the growth was half a trillion. I'm trying to look at the article.

Here, but Tom, that's trillion dollars electronic channel versus growth for people coming to a counter.

Okay.

If you took it in the retail world, think of it as purchases online versus purchases through the mall.

Sure.

The mix changed.

So you're suggesting there's not growth, it's just a shift. Right.

This growth in the electronic just means that it's decline in non electronic.

Interesting. Okay.

Yeah. A lot of statistics to sort through there.

Yeah, that's. I'm going to dive into that one a little bit deeper. What, what's interesting though, I'm going to go back though and talk about what we discussed at the beginning. My question about the number of, of companies out there that the, I find it, it's intriguing because you can almost find almost any statistic you're looking for related to that number. And I, I do agree with you wholeheartedly about know, the Peruvian, you know, purple potato distributor that's you know, working out of their garage. See that across every, every industry, right. Is that there's people that, you know are distributors, but they're one guy with some, some inventory that's selling on Amazon. But I think that's a. And it would be great is to figure out what that percentage is. But you know, I've never seen a. In fact, I'm gonna. This is a article that our friend Mark Brohan, who was on the show with us a couple months ago wrote. I'm gonna reach out to Mark about that number because that 400,000 number is an interesting thing to see. Cause I've never seen that before. I've seen the 200, 250,000 number many, many times. But what's interesting is even on NAW's website, one place they reference 48,000 wholesale distributors in the US and another part of their website, it's references over 200,000. So my, my, my. I extrapolate that there's probably 100, 150,000 that have relevance.

Yeah. The other thing I would do, Kevin, is go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Yep.

They're going to have under the old sic world because I can never remember the naics. Yeah, the 5O number.

Yep, yep, there.

And I. If I remember. If you dig down a little bit, it'll also stop breaking it down by volume.

Oh, okay, great. Well, I have somebody internally that has a new project to work on from that. Tom.

No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean.

Tom. I wanted to rattle him a little bit, though. Good. So let's jumping into E commerce and marketing. Article from Digital Commerce360 again is. Oh, listen, Kelly just shared. Thank you, Kelly. She just shared an article with us. If you're with us live, you can see this or watching the recording, you'll see this. But if you're listening on the podcast www.coherentmarketinsights.com and forward/industrial-reports, you'll be able to find some data. And thank you, Kelly, for sharing that. I appreciate that Kelly's a distribution industry veteran in Wisconsin, so appreciate her sharing that with us. So, Tom, jumping ahead, 97% of shoppers abandoned purchases due to inconvenience. A FedEx report talk about consumers abandoning purchases. I think this ties back into some of our broader discussions in the B2B market. Tom, you want to kick us off on that one?

Yeah, well, we kind of touched on this a little bit before we started here. You know, the question I have is it says 97% of consumers abandoned purchases due to inconvenient shopping experience. So does that mean that they abandoned them completely or did they take their business elsewhere, as you might say, to find a more convenient experience and then actually make the transaction or the purchase? In those areas, obviously the answer is probably in some cases, yes, in some cases no. Clearly, I'm sure there's money being left on the table. And you know, actually this is something David, I'd love your opinion on is I work with our customers more and more and we get more and more into their data and we use AI to do analysis. Every day I'm seeing tremendous amounts of dollars that are either being left on the table or never got to the table at all. Right. That like opportunity, you know, we call it white space or whatever, but opportunity that it was like a blind spot.

Right.

We didn't even know it existed or we didn't think that it existed, or we didn't have enough insights or awareness to know to go look for it. At that. At that point, do you think, you know, I guess there's Two questions for you here. One is, what's your take on this 97%? But then related to that, as it ties back to distribution, do you feel like we're leaving a lot of dollars on the table? I just personally believe that organic growth opportunities are really gigantic and have been kind of overlooked for a long time. When you talk, when you start talking about, you know, opportunities for growth in the, in the industry.

Well, I unpack it two ways. One is, I think that 97 number kind of relates to another article we have in here on PR versus publicity. Okay. You know, I think the 97 is, you know, we're just trying to get publicity because there's no way almost everyone who abandons a cart was actually intending to purchase.

It's a good point. Yeah.

They may have found the product somewhere else at a different price. They may have put it in and decided not to. I can't tell you how many times I put something into a cart and decide not to buy it. Shut down the site. Do I clear out the cart? No. I think so. That's why I think it's more hype than anything else.

Well, I think that's an interesting point. I included this article. This is. They're talking about consumers here, but we talk constantly on our show about the B2B side of E commerce. And the important part of this is. And why I included it, and I wanted to let both of you kind of go first here is the idea that what they identified were important to consumers is translating over. And David, I don't know if you've ever heard me share this before. One of my beliefs is we're in a gray area right now of specifically within the millennials that are. That are in the marketplace. Right. Because I think all of us here are probably. I don't want to insinuate your age, David, but I'm going to. I guess I will that. That you're a baby boomer. Like Tom and I are at the tail end of that. I think that's right. What's that? We're Gen Xers in the. From that side of things. But as we start looking about, you know, I think the number is up over 70% now of B2B buyers are millennials. And that's just going to continue to that phase. From that standpoint, their issues and consumers issues are pretty much the same. Right. We're. They're bringing that world of I want a B2B buying experience to be like my B2C buying experience because I do it from a mobile Device or I do it from wherever is convenient for me. And placing orders should not require me to be at my desk at the plant.

Right.

In that setting. So I think when I was looking at this article, you know, they talked about delivery issues, shipping issues, real time tracking and a few other expectations. And the point being with this is the. Tom Will's just telling us gen X is 65 to 80.

Oh good. So since I was born in 79, I just, I just make it. That's good. That's good to know.

What's funny is I was born in 64 and you're older than I am. Yeah.

Well, you know statistics. Right.

What are we saying?

That's right. Bob told us earlier that my don't matter. Not well as I say all the time. Right. My, my, my birth certificate or my driver's license says I'm 60. My mind thinks I'm 35. My wife says I act like I'm 12, but my knees and my ankles think I fought the civil war. So that's, that's my life at the moment. But I think the reason that we're talking about this today is no question, no ifs, ands or buts about the, the importance of wholesale distribution is in a world that we have to be thinking about our buyer differently than we've historically thought about them.

Right.

They want that experience as I might send a guy to buy at your counter, I might want it delivered and I might want to call you on the phone or I might want to see a salesperson. And we had an article last week that said 2025's trending is that in latter part of 24 was that people are more interested in seeing salespeople than they had previously. I'm assuming that's for high tech related. I won't say high tech but more sophisticated products versus a consumable. But we need to be thinking about what does that buyer want. Ian Heller has said on this show before from distribution strategy, if we have to meet the buyer, where they're at and where they're at right now is that they're expecting more of a consumer like experience in a B2B world.

Well, you need to be where they are at when they want to be there because they may change each interaction depending upon what they're buying.

Yep.

Whether that's face to face, whether that's text, whether that's online, it's all going to change. We're actually doing some research for a client right now on that and we wrote about that recently. If you're going to do it on the web, though they do want more of that consumer experience. However, they also want that experience tailored to the distribution mentality. And what I mean by that is they expect their price. Not like in the consumer world where you have the same price, essentially. For one.

Sure.

You also have credit being handled totally different because not everyone's going to just put it on a credit card because of dollar values and company policies and terms and things like that. So there are some nuances that the business customer understands when they're interacting with certain types of people. Meaning an existing supplement.

Gotcha.

To your point, for the article's purpose, totally agree with you. Where their number gets off is the whole issue of they're missing the issue of intent.

Ah, okay.

Yeah, I think you're right. Right. The shopping cart becomes like a. A virtual storage area for things. It's like you kind of like going into your garage and seeing all this kind of stuff piled up. You go into your cart and see all this stuff piled up that you think you may be interested in. But that. To your point, David, that's very different than. Than intent. So.

Exactly. Or even like on Best Buy, sometimes you can't find out the price until you put it into the cart.

Yeah.

Because of MSRP rules and things like that.

Yep.

So that's an abandoned cart, right?

Yep.

Good point. Good.

All right, Tom, let's kind of jump ahead. We've got. We're gonna fly into a little bit ahead of ourselves. We had a couple other articles about Tom to use. Slide back just a touch.

Right.

Good article about generative AI amongst chief marketing officers. It's some research from Gartner. Again, if I missed this earlier, but if you're listening on the podcast and you're not with us live today, you're not seeing the newsletter that's there. We publish this newsletter every week. If you would like to get that newsletter, just reach out to us. If you're on LinkedIn, just search either Lead Smart Technologies or Around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. You can sign up there and then you could simply send us an email@helloadsmarttech.com we'll get you the newsletter out. So then there is a marketing professionals or marketingprofs.com article about the difference between PR and publicity. We're not going to jump into that, but that was pretty good. And then kind of we're going to go right into our segment on AI technology and cyber security. Can you slide us down there, Tom?

I believe I can.

There you go. Quantum stocks climb as Microsoft's chip sparks debate. An article from Reuters. We have a smartindustry.com article after that about the promise of quantum computing and manufacturing. So I thought in the time that we have left today, I wanted to kind of get into some of these topics about AI and, and how we're seeing that moving. And David, some of your thoughts on those things that you're seeing in the electrical and H vac markets that you're so focused, so closely focused on. Tom, you want to kind of lead us off on what's the difference between regular computing and quantum.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, look there we can get into the. Okay, Bob will be signing off because we're getting into the AI discussions and I've noticed we've had a few people leave for meetings so we're going to have to make sure that we let everybody know that this is like turning into a three hour show and to, you know, Mark, calendar off. You know, don't schedule any meetings during.

That's right. Well, you know, I was talking to my wife about this last week because she, she listened to part of the show before a business call she had and, and she said, you know, you guys are going longer these days. And I said, you know, when, when, when, when industry leaders stop commenting on, on things after a certain period of time. I mean, last week we were an hour and 20 minutes and we still had some, some dedicated folks listening in, so we kept talking.

So Mark says AI doesn't exist. It's David behind a laptop.

So am I the artificial or the intelligence?

Yeah, I'm glad that, I'm glad that we've, we've nailed that down.

Yeah, well that I've been accused of that many times is that any intelligence that I have is artificial for.

So.

All right, Tom, talk about Tom and David. By the way, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Tom is the, to my, to my knowledge of the group of us here, he's the only computer scientist by education here. So we'll, we're going to let him lead us off on this and we can talk about the broader scope.

We didn't study a lot of quantum computing back in, in 19, whatever it was.

But I thought you said you were born in 79.

Yeah, so that have been like in the 90s, I guess. Whatever.

Anyway, you should have had some of that.

You talk about delusion. Right. So anyway, I mean, look, the simple answer for quantum computing is it's a way of computing. You know, computing is when you think about it is binary. 1 and 0. 1 and 0. 1 and zero. Computing has been that way since I was in college back in the 80s and it hasn't changed much. Quantum computing basically takes a different approach that doesn't rely on ones and zeros, but basically allows things to be 1 and 0 at the same time and really opens up the door to an, an order of magnitude increase in computing power, especially related to things that require mathematical analysis and deep sort of, you know, research and all of those kinds of stuff and so forth. We've heard a lot and I think, I'm glad we're talking about this because I do believe that this is going to be a much more in the news here over the next, you know, during the course of the year is, you know, quantum computing has been more of an idea than a practical reality. And with Microsoft releasing this chip and in showing that it, I guess there's some potential that this is now turning more in. And I know Google and other competitors are also researching and spending time in this area that maybe this could become more of a reality, a practical reality, sooner than later. And I guess just to say, well, so what, why does, why, why should we care? What's the, I mean there are some things, you know, you always talk about Kevin curing cancer, right? AI curing cancer, or you know, deep math problems or even looking at, you know, even from a distribution standpoint all the different potential routes and scenarios and things like that. It could take things that literally could take a hundred years to compute, right. And, and compute that in an hour or a few minutes, right? So we're talking like orders of magnitude improvement in computational power. Now you start applying that potentially to AI, right, which we've talked a lot about. And you know, you hear the word AGI or artificial general intelligence or artificial super intelligence, you combine these potential of these much higher computing power, you can start to see that things start to go to another level. Obviously again, still lots of challenges, very difficult to do. And these chips have to be used in very, very cold environments. They have to be, I don't remember, I think it said in the article, but like literally down in like, you know, sub freezing temperatures, it has to be run in these environments. So again, there's a lot of things that make it maybe less than, less than practical. But anyway, lots of conversation about it. We'll see if this starts to materialize as a more practical.

One of the things that came out of that article was that, that Jensen Wong from Nvidia had said that there Were two decades away from that really happening and that, you know, the workhorse is really tied to AI right now and with this chip coming out and some of the other things have been being announced and being shown recently is that this is going to be much, much closer to have that working in a. Specifically as the next article we're going to talk about from Smart industry is promise of quantum computing and Manufacturing. These things are much closer than we probably had thought about previously. And I think what's probably interesting is getting all in. Tom, you could probably quote about this best is I'm assuming AI is helping us just get closer to quantum computing being a reality. It's moving to evolve, moving the ball down the field faster potentially.

And I, I personally don't know is, is how much Nvidia is investing in quantum computing compared to some of the other vendors that are out there. So his statement about it, oh, it's a long way away. May be a. Again, something that's, you know, more in alignment with where they're headed. But yes, I'm sure there's a lot.

Of, a lot of.

Right. It kind of feeds on itself as it goes forward there.

Well, Microsoft said in a CNBC article that they could see 2030 is when they're going to stop being able to do something with this.

But is that going to be kind of an early stage? Yeah, you know, alpha test. Or is that something where they could see it being a commercial, you know, practically a commercial thing?

Initial commercial.

Okay.

Yeah.

Specific applications, camera. They talked about some chemicals, some pharmaceutical, potentially some military.

Yeah, so that's. That ties to that. You know, the secondary article we have here, as I mentioned from smart industry, they're quoting a recent McKinsey report and said there's four specific sectors to. David, to your point, chemicals, life sciences, finances and finance. Mobility are likely to see the earliest impact. It said it could gain up to 2 trillion in end user economic impact by 2035. So 2030, 2035. 5 to 10 years out. Major, major impacts. But that's not multiple decades which was the, you know, Jensen Huang's comment about that. But I think what's going to be interesting is, you know, is if we see that first and this article talks about use cases in manufacturers, manufacturing. It talked a lot about data analytics and AI. It says, you know, just a simple quote and it ties to Tom, to kind of what you were describing is quantum computers can process large amounts of data much faster, enabling quicker and more complex data analysis. The increased processing capability can lead to more accurate Predictions and insights. So we're going to talk about in a minute, we're going to talk about digital twins. So if you can now process those digital twins or your AI decisions that you're being made are being made that much quicker because of our ability to go through it probably defines, I'm assuming. And again, David, you might have some research on this, but Tom, you might know from your background is it talks about quantum algorithms in this article as well. I would assume algorithms are going to drastically change as well because most algorithms now are defined based upon our ability to run those algorithms. And if you can now have a quantum computer system that's managing those algorithms can grow exponentially too.

Well, the, the big difference is, right, traditional computing algorithms, even with AI and everything else are sequential. Right. Things happen. You do this, you do this, you do this, you do this. They have sequentially in quantum computing, that sequential aspect of it goes away and things start happening in parallel or at the same time, which is what allows things to obviously move a lot faster and process a lot more data a lot more. A lot more efficiently.

So where did. Go ahead, David.

Me thinking though, you know, they talk about, and Tom might have the wrong term that it sounded like 1 qubits and they go into 3 and then they need to go to 10 and they gotta go to 100 qubits. What's that do for storage size, for data centers, for power to generate all those?

Right, yeah, it's interesting on the power.

It's.

It's interesting on the power because I did a little research into this. The power is not to PR to power the computers themselves. It's the power to keep everything cool.

Cool. Interesting, right?

Yeah. Based upon the number of those cubits that they start doing.

That's right. That's right.

I haven't heard anything about like, how much, I mean, I've even heard of some like, data centers being put underwater into the ocean at.

Under the Antarctic. Yeah.

You all literally sunk it like 300ft, if not deeper.

Wow.

Because of the cold part that they need to get to. So who knows what next version of science or some of these other areas are going to really be needed. And then how do people on the power side handle that and what other type of equipment is needed? There's going to be a lot learning that's going to happen in the next five, ten years.

Most quantum computers operate from. And again, I'm getting this off the Internet, so this is subject to confirmation, but they're saying have to operate close to near absolute zero which is minus 273Celsius. So I don't know if that's true or not. But long the quote being is they need to be very, very cold in the for them to operate efficiently.

So let's kind of bring this full circle because we're getting way geeky here. Is that you're the one who put.

These articles in here. I mean, what did you expect?

Well, some days it's my role to bring us back in line.

All right, fair enough.

How's that? I'm going to just try bring this back full circle to and frankly I've learned some things from this discussion and these articles. But we spend so much time on our show. David, you're publishing articles regularly about AI and so forth on your publications with electrical trends and H VAC trends and so forth about that as well. We're just scratching the surface of AI in wholesale distribution. We're using it in tools like our CRM and Customer Intelligence solution to send alerts about customers who aren't buying things that they should be buying and quotes that are coming up to be closed and things like that. That's even some early stage AI. What we're talking about this article in Smart Industry talks about optimization. I'm just going to share a few things here. It says quantum computers will revolutionize many pieces of the supply chain from resource allocation to logistics and delivery. Now we've been talking for the last 18 months or really two years plus. Now I should say if I took that sentence and read it again and said instead of quantum, I say AI computers will revolutionize many pieces of the supply chain. Now we're just taking that to the next level. And says one of the first problems that students are learning to tackle with quantum computing is the age old traveling salesman dilemma. Bring this back to our dance. How do I get to these five stops and come back to my base of operations in the shortest time? Right now if you take that to the next level is I have and there's companies that you know are working this now, folks like our friends at ors, AI are working on some of these things right now. From a standpoint that says I've got these four containers on that ship, these two containers on another ship, this stuff coming on trucks from Mexico. And then I've got these other things planned that should be going on a truck to get to the port in Shanghai next week. Which of my warehouses do I need that in and what percentage of that container needs to go to a different warehouse because it snowed in Dallas this week.

And don't forget to add in the meteorological part of what the tidal waves are going to do.

Right.

Now we know if the ship is actually going to arrive on time.

Right. And so that's a great point. And just to my comment earlier about it snowed in Dallas this week, but what's it supposed to be doing next week at the port of la. Right. And now we can, we could, you know, go sit in a room and talk about some ideas we might have, but that's just ideas. Now we take AI can already start working on those things. But now from a quantum computing standpoint is the manufacturer can tell you what you should be doing with it and you can be analyzing those things. But it's literally we're going to be at a point in, if these articles we're talking about today are correct, in the next five to 10 years, we're going to be doing that from our phone by talking to our phone.

And it assumes that all these manufacturing companies are going to upgrade their equipment.

Sure.

So that the production worker can have it go automatically from the MRP system. Right. To the ERP system to all these things. But it also gets back then, Kevin, to that phrase about caution from the Fed.

Yeah, sure.

Paralysis. So we're going to have people who don't do anything because they're waiting for the quantum to come. So they're not going to invest in the AI as the interm. Because it's going to be obsoleted in five and 10 years.

Well, I'm going to, I'm going to throw a wrench at that. Yeah. But I don't think you can use quantum if you, I don't think you'll be able to use quantum if you haven't figured out how to use AI.

But there will be people who mentally say, I'm not going to do it. I'll just jump to that.

Yeah.

It kind of gets to the issue. I have an issue with the word transformation for digital because transformation infers something happens like that. This is all evolutionary.

I couldn't, couldn't agree more.

You need to start doing things and you need to go along and you got to do incrementalism. You don't always have to be on the cutting edge or the bleeding edge. You can be a fast follower and implement stuff that's proven and be very.

Successful, very good, profitable. Yep.

Well, and, and what's, and I know we need to move ahead here, but what is the common denominator between all of this that we've been talking about AI quantum computing. So far there's data.

Right.

So data is the common denominator of all of those things. And I couldn't agree with you more, David, is I really would like to remove the word transformation out of the vocabulary because it sounds like I do something and then I'm done and then I move on to the thing. And it is very evolutionary and incremental. But there are some fundamentals that can be put into place that you can build on as you, as you go ahead.

And really the data issue is cleaning up all the scenes that we had before.

Yep.

We didn't think through it and do it right the first time.

Right.

Data was like sawdust. Right. It could just be tossed away and not. Not important. So. All right, Kevin, where do you want to go next? I know we can't go on for two hours.

We don't. We're kind of short on time. But I really enjoyed this discussion. So there's a good article here from Industry Today about digital Twins, the backbone of effective integration. But before we either you want to comment on that article at all, before we jump ahead to our sales and M A segment, you know, there's a.

Lot, I mean that we could spend quite a bit of time on that. The, the long story short. Right. Is and, and digital twin can be used outside of manufacturing. But absolutely. Do I take something and replicate, you know, a physical thing, something I have.

Physically in the physical sales process? It could be a marketing process process, it could be manufactured business process.

And I want to be able to replicate that and then be able to run through it and look at the whs and, and all of those things that are there. So obviously maybe we'll leave this in.

Maybe we'll just rep. Add this article in again next week. Talk about a little further.

Yeah.

We've got a number of articles in our sales and M and A segment. The AI teammate, how to collaborate with Artificial intelligence and sales. If you don't again, if you don't get our newsletter, just reach out to us loadsmartech.com and we'll get that out to you. So you can read these. There's an interesting one here and I don't want to spend any time on it because there's a great article in here about PE firms that I want to get to momentarily. But that was previous article was talking about what 5 million cold calls reveal about selling in 2025. Now we don't see as much cold calling in wholesale distribution as we do maybe in, in the consumer world. But inside Sales are on the phone every day, all day. And customer services on the phone inside. Excuse me. Customer service is every day on the phone all day, every day. And so this is some good ideas about templates and things that can be used to make that more efficient. So good article there. But I did want to, while we have a few last minutes to talk about, comment from an article publication that they're pretty good, you know, I don't know, it's called Electrical Trends. But anyways, that's David's publication. Are all PE firms barbarians? So let's chat about that for a few minutes because I, I like that even the title is great. You guys want to dive in on that?

Well, I'd like to ask David, are all PE firms barbarian?

Well, you know where the term barbarian came from, but that's, you know, from the, the book, Barbarians at the Gate. The guy who actually stimulated the thought process, Quinn Carlson, presented at Hardy back in December. So he shared thoughts on a lot of the money that's sitting on the sidelines from PE firms that are looking at various industries in the H Vac environment. You've got about half a dozen PE firms that have been active acquirers enrolling up and there was actually an acquisition that was announced late last week, early this week, Republic companies who had been, shall we say, purchased or invested in Great Cliff Partners, they went out and made their first bolt on to a company called T.F.

Earhart. It's in our scuttlebutt section. Announced as well. We're good friends with the folks at Republic.

Yep. So I mean, PE firms look to build platforms. There are PE firms that are looking to do something like that and build it and then flip. There are firms that take a long term view, buy and hold. Yeah, I mean there's plenty of stuff that people like a KKR and a Blackstone have. People would be shocked how many companies in this country are owned by PE firms in the background. And you've got the other ones that, yeah, they come in and they slash and burn and cut costs and may or may not add to it and look to flip in two, three years. Typically they'll go three to seven years in electrical. We've had a couple of firms that were really good. There was a company that invested into one source distributors years ago, bought 49%, let the existing ownership run it, and that business was eventually sold to Sonarpar Electric Supply at Tampa. Supply Chain Equity Partners came in, they acquired it, they made some bolt ons, they invested, the company grew, improved profitability, it Flipped a sonar Part two. There's a couple of others that have bought mid sized companies. But then you got manufacturers who are like buy and hold or some of them, you know, they're there for three years, they grow the business using what I'll call OPM, other people's money.

Danny DeVito said that, right?

Yep. The challenge with some of these is none of these businesses are ever going to go public. The old days of PE buying something and the goal was to get on Wall street really isn't there anymore. This, if you look at.

Do you think that is because different.

Levels that they sell to each other?

Well, David, do you think that the, the, the hesitancy or the lack of IPO is because of the IPO market? And because the IPO market has been so poor over the last few years, it's just they've kind of written it off. Or do you think if the IPO market picks up, which a lot of, there's a lot of speculation that it could, you would see more of that.

I don't really think it's too much tied to the IPO side.

Okay.

Because a lot of these companies in the industries we're talking about aren't fast grow performers. If they went public, they'd rarely be cash flow companies and should really be dividend companies.

Sure. Wesco and so forth. Right, right.

You know, and Wesco stock has gone up well. But think of like a lot of these manufacturers there, you know, there was a company, Thomas and Betts, which is now part of ABB years and years ago. And we'll put aside for those in the electrical industry, some of the legal issues they went through. Clyde Moore, who was the president, said there's two ways to look at Wall Street. You either need to be a fast grow company and commit to 15% year over year growth to drive your stock price, or you need to be a cash flow company, always have a good dividend.

Makes perfect sense when you look at.

Our industries that we're pretty much all playing in that cash flow businesses, they're growing 3 to 5% GDP unless they're making acquisitions or some new product development because of the types of businesses that they're in.

Yep. Well, it's, that's why you see all of the acquisitions from a Sona park, whoever it might be in that setting. Right. Ongoing. I'll buy additional cash flow.

And when you look at Wall street nowadays, the days that I think we all grew up in, where people invested the longer term through Wall street now it's how do you do trading, it's different than investing versus trading from that venue. So the PE firms, they've got so much money from pension funds and wealth management and stuff like that.

They don't.

Need a public market. Right. There's enough capital in their, in their.

Ecosystem to, to sell it to the next person up.

Well, and I think so often right in these settings is, you know, we see this even, you know, while we talk about wholesale distribution and why we're here in the show. And it's my background obviously from my career. But you know, Tom and I run a company that is in the technology world and the multiples are different and acquisition. But so often in the technology world, just like in, in general PE world is if you're not a buy and hold, which I think there's fewer of those probably than the, the transactional ones. They already know the buyer, Right. Their next, they've got two, three, maybe five different PE firms that play in their space that are ready to pay a higher amount of money to reduce their amount of risk that goes with that and they know who they're going to sell to next. And that might, that might be the company that, you know, I mean, I could even see some of these deals for potentially. You're, you're, you're going to sell. I'm going to buy five, you know, electric companies like the Republic acquisition that we're just talking about. Right. I'm going to buy five of those, roll those up and I know the three guys over here that are going to give me 5x on EBITDA. And when I do that, my return is this. And that next guy might be thinking, well, I'm going to put 30 of these together and that maybe all, maybe I will go public. But people have different ideas and different roles in that PE world.

And to that point, I know a manufacturer that was recently sold from one PE firm to another, but the, one of the firms that was bidding on them went through that exact same scenario planning to say, all right, if we bought them and if we do this, this and this and we grow them to X through some other acquisitions, who's the next player? Well, in theory, backed out of the deal.

Yeah.

Because they couldn't clearly identify who that next player was. So we've also seen PE come in on manufacturer reps. Yep, sure.

That's Osceola Group in Florida that's doing that with some roll up to some rep agencies. Absolutely.

Yeah. We're also seeing more ESOPs.

Yeah, well, I think that's, that's Pretty significant as well. I think in kind of wrapping this up is that the. The real idea behind this is if you're sitting on the side and so not. I think that my takeaway is not all firms, not all PE firms are not barbarians. There is boatloads of money. I think the comment was trillion plus dollars on the sidelines. I would throw this out there. Whether you're an electrical distributor, industrial distributor, pipe valve and fitting, office products, whatever it is, if you were talking to pe, most PE conversations are going to suggest that you leave a few dollars on the table to participate in the next deal. The big question should be then tell me who the next deal is going to be with and what does that look like. Because they probably have the roadmap, but they don't always share it.

And also if you're deciding to stay in, think of who you're selling to.

Well, that was my point.

Yeah.

Right.

Not only from the exit part though, Kevin.

Right.

Culture part culture seller. You can optimize your price if you're not caring who you sell to.

Yep.

But there are other people who are willing to take a little less after a while. You're making so many hundreds of million dollars.

Right.

That you may care who you're leaving your legacy or your people to.

Very good. Agree. Totally agree. So we need to wrap up. I think. In fact I've got a phone call with a listener here shortly. But Tom, we've got our people in leadership segment so we won't forget that. We also talk about our channels, channel leaders on the move, couple of articles there from the newsletter and then our industry Scuttlebutt section. We talked already a little bit about that with Republic and TF Earhart Hardy Heating and Air Conditioning Refrigeration Group. The trade association reported some 14.2% revenue increase in December for their members. Good news there. We're going to kind of chum. If you would just kind of scroll down to the end with our updates that we have with our upcoming events. The reason I mentioned that is we've got new is doing their March 12th AI for Distributor Summit. It's a virtual event through the national association of Wholesalers and MDM are putting that on together. But then end of March is the ISA spring event in Nashville Industrial Supply association and I'm jumping off to get on the phone with Brendan Breen, the CEO of of isa. I think he was with us.

So is this one. Is this one correct? The March 2nd to 5th that doesn't.

That is. It's a different group that somehow made it onto our list. So we'll get that fixed momentarily. I just sent a request off for that, but the ISA spring event is March 31 to April 2 in Nashville. And so some good stuff coming up. You know, David, if you ever have any specific events that you think we should add to that, maybe let us know. So we're gonna wrap up. David, I can't thank you enough for being with us. Always insightful. Will you join us again maybe later in the year?

I will join whenever you'd like. I've enjoyed it. I've had a lot of fun.

That was great.

And thank you to everybody who jumped in. Bob, Will, John, Mark, I mean, Kelly, Ted, all of these great comments today. It really makes the show that much better. That's great.

That's. That's fantastic. That's funny. I just got a text from Brendan that he's five minutes behind, so that is good for me as well.

He's listening to the show and he's like, God, this damn thing keeps running on and on and on.

Very good. Well, we'll thank everybody for being with us again. I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with our friend David Gordon, my business partner, Tom Burton. We do this every week. We always say if we're not on an airplane, a hospital, or a planned vacation, we're going to do our show. We hope you can join us again. As we mention, all the time is. If you like what you hear, click the like button, share the newsletter with your friends, forward and on to others. We get more and more good comments, which allows us to get even, you know, greater guests all the time. Our guests level seem to be rising. David, we preach it again of you being with us, so we'll wish everybody a great weekend. Be kind, be safe, and do good things.

Thanks, everyone. Have a good weekend.

Thanks.

Take care.

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