ISA’s Brendan Breen on the Biggest Trends in Wholesale Distribution

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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.

How are you, my friend? Brendan, Good to see you, Tom, Good to see you as well.

Doing great afternoon.

Yeah, afternoon to you, Brandon. Cold and cold and white outside in New Jersey or.

Well, the groundhog was not nice to us this year. So, yes, it is still a little bit cold, but we're, we're keeping our eyes on the buds on the trees. They're coming.

Very good, Very good. Brian says he's spinning in his chair as well. So that's, you know, it's catchy. It's a catchy thing. So, hey, before we dive into the depth of our show today, let's do a little bit of an intro. We just introduced Brendan Breen saying hello, CEO of the Industrial Supply Association. I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with my lifelong friend and business partner, Tom Burton. And we get together every week and we talk about the news of the world and North America focus typically, but a lot around the world as well. And what we talk about is the happenings in mergers and acquisitions, the economy, supply chain. Obviously a lot to talk about with that, sales, marketing, AI technology, and all the things that are going on around us. And what we try and do is unpack all of that, as we say in our intro, as well as we peel back the onion on what is going on, how that relates to wholesale distribution and manufacturing. So we do that through the means of a newsletter that we publish each week. That newsletter, again is called around the Horn in wholesale distribution and manufacturing, goes out to over 10,000 people each week. And if you don't get that and would like to three simple ways to do that, you can get that from us by sending a simple email to hello atLead smart tech.com you can, if you're on active on LinkedIn, you can just search around the Horn podcast and that will get you right to that as well. And then you can sign up for the newsletter there and get it through LinkedIn. And we also have a website for the podcast and that is www.aroundthehornpod.com and that'll allow you to reach out that way. So Again, we do this every week. If you're listening on the recorded podcast, you won't see the newsletter that we'll have up on the screen, nor will you see these handsome three faces. So again, if you don't, if you're listening on the podcast, just reach out to us directly and get a copy of that newsletter coming to you. So we couldn't do this each week if we didn't have the sponsorship of the company that Tom and I both work for. That's Lead Smart Technologies. We are a developed an AI enabled smart CRM and customer intelligence platform that allows wholesale distributors and manufacturers to gather data from around their organization. We call it Siloed data erp, Marketing automation, E commerce and other places bring that together, make intelligent decisions on how to accelerate growth in their business. So that's what we do at Lead Smart, that's our main sponsor. But Tom, let's dive in and talk to our good friend here, Brendan Breen.

Yeah.

And hey, I want to say good morning, I think good morning to Bob, good morning to Brian. We have Paul Kennedy here, we have Will Quinn here. Brendan, Paul is sitting there excited to hear what you have to say. So the pressure is on. No pressure. And I'm sure if there's others, if there's others of you out there, I'm sure please could put, could say good morning and let's put some pressure on Brendan.

There we go.

I'm ready.

Friendly of you.

That's right.

Hey, you know, well, let's, let's kind of dive in and just start talking about that as well and, and dive in here with, with Brendan. So Brendan is CEO of the Industrial Supply association with wonderful organization that's leading the way for industrial supply distributors and manufacturers on the industrial side of the world. And Brandon, why don't we kind of dive in and maybe you can tell us a little bit, one about the organization and two, about you. And then of course we want to talk about the big upcoming event which is a big reason that we wanted to have you with timing today as well. And we've got another event coming up where we're going to get together and solely talk about Isaac today. We've got you as a around the horn guest but we're going to do another broadcast here very quickly where we're able to talk to you specifically just about isa. So we're going to do that in the next week or so. So why don't you dive in, share a little bit, but not just about the organization. What about you? Sure.

My two Favorite topics, right? Talking about me and the place where I work. So thank you guys for having me. Love this show. It's a great format and a good opportunity for people to talk about a bunch of topics. These are the types of conversations we all day anyways, so you're just aggregating a bunch of smart folks in the in one place so we can all listen to it at the same time. So appreciate what you guys are doing. But isa so the Industrial Supply association, we have been around in some name, shape or form for 125 years, almost 123 years. The purpose hasn't really changed. The reason why we are here to exist is to bring together supply chain partners in the indirect materials MROP channel to collaborate, to learn and to grow this industry together. And so when I say supply chain partners, we're unique because we have both manufacturers and distributors as equal stakeholder members. So we're not a distributor focused organization or manufacturer. We are about the health of this channel and we want to create a platform or multiple platforms for connections between channel partners, be it decision makers or even your employees, so that they can connect and grow their own networks and learn together about where this industry is going. So we do a lot at the association. You mentioned our convention coming up and I know we're going to touch on that in a little bit. But we also have a bunch of great educational content, some really solid professional development, both in person at our fall summit and then also virtual and on demand. We've got some great business analytics tools. Topline Pulse is one that I love giving demos for. So if anybody out there is interested in understanding how to navigate business cycles, it's free with your membership and it's super easy to use and very powerful. We also aggregate some industry information through partnerships with ITR Economics and Cleveland Research and a few others to really, you know, give you a well rounded look at what's going on in the economy, what's going on with your peers and really a way that you can confidently make your next move. So that's a quick snapshot of isa. We're also going to be talking about a brand new initiative that we just launched and I think Kevin, you've got a prompt for me there coming up. But quick note about me. I've been with ISA for about seven years in my role as leading this team, this small but mighty team. We have eight and a half individuals. You have a seasonal employee that accomplishes all that stuff I just mentioned and they are truly a phenomenal team. But I've been leading them for the last three and a half years and I'm truly in the best position I've ever been in. This is my dream job. I love working with my team, I love working with this industry. And I get to wake up and try something new or talk to fine gentlemen like you every day.

Called you Tom.

Wow.

Awesome.

You can come back anytime.

That's the first time somebody said, Kevin.

You are just not about me, about Tom.

Yeah. So my background. I am. I am. Before isa, I was an association guy. So this is probably my seventh association working with. I used to manage multiple associations. I worked for a consultant company and that's actually how I found isa. They used to be managed by a management company and I was their, you know, account person. And so once they went solo and decided not to be managed by a management company, that's when I was brought on and left the management company. But it's been a great ride and looking forward to the rest.

Have you been CEO for three years already?

Yeah, so I've been leading small title changes here and there. I know it happens quick.

I mean, I remember having breakfast with you in Princeton when you were interviewing for the job.

I mean, that was all during the pandemic. And that's a wash of amount of time. I mean, it's that. That was. The pandemic was five years ago, Kevin. Isn't that crazy to think about?

No, no, no, no. I'm still 35, so. Okay, well, tell us. You've got some amazing speakers and panelists I know coming for the. The event coming up at the end of the month.

So, like I did that.

Why don't you talk a little bit about Isa, 25 and. And I'm going to share a few of my thoughts before we dive into the news and get into things today as well.

So. So I think what Kevin is alluding to is there is a phenomenal speaker coming out of the west coast these days who just is one of the most insightful people I've ever met. His name is Kevin Brown.

Jack is on the way.

Are you drinking at lunchtime, Brendan? What's going on here?

This is good.

In all seriousness, Kevin is going to join us on a panel discussion to talk about, of all things technology and how that's evolving through AI. He's going to be joined by two. Three other technology leaders. No, two other technology.

Two others. And. And Mike Hockett, which.

Mike Hockett is going to be facilitating that conversation. We just got his notes of the question. We had a. We Had a tech check with these guys just to. And it was supposed to last I think a half an hour. And I think after an hour and a half we're like, all right guys, let's save it for the show. But this is going to be, that's just going to be one of many sessions that we have that's going to be phenomenal. And we're happy to have Kevin help us out with that one.

It's a good group too.

It's a fantastic.

Chris and Paul Veruzen and Chris from Connexium.

It's going to be a good group and it's. And it's three different technologies doing different things which allow you to have a pretty well rounded perspective on things. So that's going to be a good education session. But you know, other sessions we have, we have a State of the Channel given by John Gunderson. He's going to be looking at this in a couple different ways. John Gunderson from Channel Marketing Group, formerly or still does editorial work for MDM and was with the dorm group for a little while.

He's going to be on the show here soon too.

Yeah, Industry vet has a ton of, you know, original research to share and he's going to be looking at the state of the channel through two perspectives. One, assessing how end user trends have evolved and where they are going. And then two, in his second session he's going to look at scorecarding between manufacturers and distributors and to understand how stronger relationships can be built given all the complexities that we're facing in today's model. So good education sessions there. We're also going to highlight some of our programs. This is a newer thing for us. We've got this great audience and a captive audience there and we're doing some really good things at isa and so we want to talk about them. We want to bring on panels of experts to talk about our networks. This is our Women in Industry group, our Emerging Leaders group and our newest group, our Veterans Empowerment Network so that companies can understand how they can get more benefit from engaging in those. We also have a panel session on our Emerging Leaders Channel certification which has been a home run of a new program for us. This is taking your very best and brightest in the industry and getting them ready to take that next step. And it's not soft skill development stuff. This is industry specific channel framework and alignment coaching and in depth education, instructor led education that really gets those folks ready to take that next step in leadership. We also have, count them, four keynotes this year that you used to run two, now we have four. We're kicking it off with a name everybody knows out there, Herm Edwards, coach. I just talked to him the other day and man, he's super down to earth, but he has amazing million great stories, if you enjoyed. He reminded me of Bill Walton. You know, we had Bill Walton and same type of vibe. You know, he just, he, he speaks from the heart. It's not a rehearsed thing. He just tells stories and he connects with the audience really well.

Walton in Phoenix a few years ago was probably one of the best keynotes I've ever sat through. And it surprised me, but I, I was hanging on every word he said.

It's just he's a magnetic kind of guy, you know, and, you know, rest in peace for sure, Bill. But, you know that' he set the standard, really, of what we're looking for in new keynote. So really excited about Herm Edwards. We also have an end user roundtable. So we are inviting on the stage for end users. And these are real live manufacturers in the United States that are buying our products through distribution. And we want to understand what's moving the needle for them, what's keeping them up for night at night, what's influencing their decisions to buy. So that's going to be a really good one. Um, so, you know, after that, we have Brian Wild coming on to do a legislative update and then we.

That's not one to miss with Brian from NAW is going to. I can't wait for the questions.

Well, and that's another one. We checked in with Brian the other day and said, well, what should we talk about? He's like, we should probably talk the day before because, you know, yeah, he wakes up every morning with his inbox being filled with new news and new stuff coming out of the White House. And so we did the legislative update for the first time last year and it was really successful. We got great feedback. So that's going to be a staple. And then to end the event, as always, we're going to end with ITR Economics with a little bit of a twist this year. Not sure if everybody caught the news, but Alan Beaulio has decided to retire a bit earlier than he expected due to some health concerns. And so although we were contracted to have him come out for his last and final show with Isaac, we had to go with his successor, Taylor St. Germain, who is phenomenal. I mean, if you've not heard Taylor, he is, he is almost as good. If not, you know, it's all still the same presentations. It's all still the Beaulio brothers stuff. So but that's going to be a great way to close it out. So tons of education in there, lots of great speakers and topics and we're covering it all. Lots of value. That's just the education portion, the networking and all the other stuff. Always good. That's always a good, good thing. When you get 800 of your, your closest friends all in the same place, this is where you want to be.

Wanted. Looking at sponsorship stuff, the one at that event I always wanted to avoid was the, the host in the bar or hosting the happy hour.

So don't give us a bad name there, Kevin.

We are very. No, no, it's just a great group of people all getting together and enjoying some time together. And I commented to a couple of people in the fall event, I got more done between sessions, not even at the receptions, just between sessions than I had expected for the whole event. And just running out to sit down and do a few emails and someone walks by and sits down for a minute. It's a fantastic event. So if you're remotely involved, even tiptoeing in the edges of the industrial world, this is a not to miss event. So yeah, gents, let's jump into our news because there's so much to talk about and we'll revisit the upcoming event. But I think we've got, obviously we're going to start off with talking about tariffs because I just don't think there's any, any way around that. Right. With what we're, we're looking at, we're facing. It's been a crazy few months and I say few months because of the, the idea behind hearing about these things even prior to the inauguration and then this fast and furious last 40 days or so. So we just saw some significant changes this week with a big push at the Canadian and Mexican markets. They were delayed. Now they came back and now we've got another pause. So either, any thoughts from either of you on what's gone on in the last couple of days?

I, I mean I knew that this was going to be the topic we were going to lead off with and we could probably spend the whole time, but I know that there's other things we're going to talk about, but it's, it's 90 of the phone calls I'm getting from my members is, is related to the frustrations and the just wanting to talk it out. They know that I, like anybody else, don't have really great answers you know, first of all, you can call Brian at NAW, who gets White House briefings every single time they come out, or a lobbyist who is sitting down there on the Hill and they don't have the answers. I think that there is a, a lot of uncertainty and a lot of frustration around that uncertainty. That is, that is a challenge. I mean, and this is just another example, I think, of, of an administration that just does things so differently than what we were used to. And maybe they're going in. Although we heard that the scalpel approach might need to be used a little bit more from our, from our President, which is encouraging. But up until this point it's been that big, huge chainsaw that has really attacked some of these problems. And that's hard when you're trying to predict your business or when you're tied to, very strongly to these, to these trading partners. And in North America it's hard because the contingencies are just too great and they have ramifications on relationships too. You know, if you have Canadian trading partners and their long held relationships, but that is rocky right now and you need to fulfill demand, you might need to go to a different source partner. But the reality is is that agreement might snap back. You know, it could, everything could go back to somewhat normal. We just don't know. So it's, it's hard.

Yeah, we talked about this quite a bit in the last couple of weeks on this. I, you know, I think it, it doesn't change the, the, the fact of what is happening. But you know, when we look at this is, and it's interesting, there's a nice comment from Bob there. It says tariffs are a tool, not a state of being. And I think, you know, the reality of this is that traditionally what we see and in, in administrations is that I was joking as we were talking before we started the show today, you know, as we fly around the world and we go to amazing resorts or you know, the, the palaces or whatever it might be and we sit at the, you know, 30 foot long conference tables and there's you know, gold, gold leaf Kleenex boxes and everybody sits around the table with a name card in front of them and they talk about a lot of stuff. And that's diplomacy. And this administration is their diplomacy is tariffs. As one of the tools is I will beat you into submission. And I mean that's a huge statement I just made. But at the end of the day, right is I'm going to hold an iron fist with tariffs. I'm going to Find an equal playing ground for those countries that we're not equal with, but those countries that I expect you to do something with. Right. And it was said in the. Not State of the Union, but the address of Congress the other night was that, look, you know, this is ultimately about balancing. Trade is a component, but the bigger picture from a diplomatic side of it is tighten up the borders and stop the drugs and the people from coming into our country illegally. And this administration is choosing to use that hammer in that setting. Yeah. The struggle that I see for manufacturers and wholesale distributors is we've just spent the last, know, three or four years with, battling with interest rates and a simmering economy that makes it very difficult to make decisions. And now we've got the tariffs issue on top of all of that, which makes making decisions even harder. Right. Yeah.

So I think that it's not that people are agree disagreeing with Bob. I think he makes a really good point. But, you know, on this show, we're here to talk about wholesale distribution in the B2B market. And the collateral damage is there. I mean, people have to run a business and US Manufacturing companies are worried, you know, and so.

And their distributor partners are as well, because you've got the, you know, they're the ones that are touching the end users that are being impacted by all of this as well.

Right.

On this.

Yeah, I do. Brendan, do you think that the anxiety and worry is more about the uncertainty at the moment or the volatility at the moment, or is the worry, oh my God, these are going to be tariffs that are going to be around for a long time and are going to majorly affect our pricing piece there. Is it the uncertainty or the actual financial, longer term financial concern?

I think it's the uncertainty. That's what I'm hearing more of.

I tend to agree with you.

I don't want to. I'm not saying isa's position or my even my position. I'm saying what hearing from people is that, look, you can build a model around something you're certain of. If you know something is going to be a certain way, you just build that model and you understand how you go to market that way or how you figure out how to incorporate or talk to your channel partners around pricing and whatever you need to discuss in order to make sure that there's some predictability in the business. But it's that uncertainty that, you know, people are thinking that they have to make a move right now or do something when there's uncertainty on whether this really will happen or not. I mean, we've delayed it now twice. They're making exemption for automakers, but again for my members out there, not all of my automakers sell directly to Ford or gm, but they sell to people who sell to them and those are not exempt. And so I think it's those nuances that I think keep popping up for this administration that they're like, maybe we need to break out that scalpel and understand the carve outs here because maybe the collateral damage is piling up a little bit too high.

Well, you look at that, it's that, you know, Jack Daniels when you think about Canada, right. Jack Daniels said they could lose 5 to 10% of their overall sales because Canada's pulled everything from the shelves. And I think what's interesting, and I haven't talked to any of my contacts in Mexico in the last week or so. I may reach out to some later today now that I think about it further. But I've talked to a number of people in the last 10 days or so in Canada and there's varying degrees of what would I call it, I want to be careful here. Of concern all the way to vitriol or venom to the US and it's really quite interesting. We already have a big issue for people doing business in Canada with the discrepancy between the dollar and the Canadian dollar.

Right.

That's already a big factor that goes on in that setting. But it's very interesting with that. I wanted to share a few points. I was text messaging yesterday with a good friend who's a senior executive from a large national industrial and industrial safety distributor. He was sharing with me. He said they started getting some price increases as soon as this came out from China. But then they had some Chinese companies that were coming back and giving them some concessions already in other places to balance things out. So some Chinese manufacturers are raising prices. Some of them are coming back with discounts and rebates and and other reductions just to do a balancing act with it already, you know, we've talked about it on the show and I'm trying to remember we had a guest a couple weeks ago that brought this up. You know, there's the likelihood is on the Chinese side is that especially with this probably going to drag out much longer with them than it might with Canada and Mexico is we don't know what the state there is going to do, right. Are they going to backstop with currency? Are they going to backstop manufacturers there and support them in a different way than you would see in Canada and Mexico. What was interesting though is this particular gentleman was sharing that they had all of this activity going on with the Chinese suppliers. And then this week it started with the Mexican and the Canadian suppliers, you know, changing some and adjusting some pricing. They, he talked about the struggle though is that he's got some manufacturers that are being super transparent and some of them who are raising prices even though they've not justified or explained how and why. And it appears that they're just doing it to raise some margins. And that gets a little bit frustrating when you're a distributor from that standpoint, when you're doing everything you can. And the one piece that we've not never talked about with this is, and you know, we've got some great guests here that you know, are in the distribution world that are, are listening in today is, you know, what we, we've not talked about, I don't think people really talk about at all, is there's a huge administrative cost to all of this when you're, when you're managing price and you know, adjustments and so forth. And this particular distributor I was talking to yesterday was saying they've had to go back and do all kinds of work now. Probably it's good long term value to them. They've had to go back and recategorize a lot of vendors that they've not necessarily categorized of country of origin. So because now they're having to share some of that country of origin stuff with their, their customers to justify the price increases they're passing on. So there's a lot of administrations, administrative pieces that go beyond that.

Yeah, I think that, you know.

If.

He'S tuning in and listening President Trump, my advice to you is, you know, try to share some transparency. I mean, there's been moments in US History where the United States manufacturing economy has supported our administration's efforts to rebalance the world or to support a national initiative. Um, and, and I think you'll find a receptive community. It's just the uncertainty to Tom's point is, is not being in the loop and maybe being fed some information that isn't the whole picture is, is a challenge. And so these guys have employees, they have employees, families that they care about, you know, and so they, some of them are, are, are so tied in to maybe one or two customers that if, you know, like think about automotive, for example, you know, if you have a big automotive customer and they're just coming to you and saying, I have to cut, you know, 25% or I have to, you Know, I'm not going to buy because it's 25% more expensive. You're firing some people and that's, that's really important for the small to medium sized manufacturer.

So the job report came out this morning and it wasn't what it was supposed to be.

Yeah, yeah.

I think this is just my opinion, but I think, Brendan, and I think we are going to see more transparency. You know, the one thing about the Trump administration, there's a lot of business people surrounding him, right. These are not politicians, these are business people that are surrounding him. And these business people know from firsthand. Right. What uncertainty can cause for a business and what you're in. So I think there's going to be a lot of internal pressure to get more transparency. I know it may be hard, right, because a lot of this develops in real time. I do think this is going to happen. I guess my question is, and God, there's a lot of great comments. I wish we could hit some of these, but I don't know if we're going to have time. Kevin. But is, you know, in, in 30 days, are we still going to be talking about this? In 60 days, are we still going to be talking about this? You know, I think that's, you know, I think right now it seems like we're in the middle of the, the Category 5 hurricane. Right. But is the hurricane going to pass and the sun going to come out here sooner than we think? You know, obviously that's, we all would like to know that.

What do you think, Tom?

I think in, it's hard to say, but I think in 45 days we're not talking about this anymore.

That's a big statement.

I know.

It is a big statement. It is a big statement. I feel like he's found a tool that catches a lot of eyeballs right now. And this president, like him or not, loves eyeballs Right now. He's bringing a lot of people to healing, to the table, to talk. Because it's like Bob mentioned is, is that this is a tool to bring people to the table. And as long until this gets sorted to his levels of satisfaction, I think we're going to be talking about it.

I, yeah, I'm, I'm, I would almost take the exact opposite and say that we could be having a similar discussion in a year.

Ooh, hot. Take the lead.

Smart guys are going at it.

Yeah.

No, no, I mean, hey, look, Thomas, you know, lost a stake last year on interest rates, so it's, I, I, I think I would agree with Tom, in that setting, if it was all about economics. But there's, there's a political component of this and the political component is probably more powerful than the economic component of it. And so, you know, it remains to be seen. Would, would I like to see something balanced because our customers at Lead Smart and the people that listen to this show on a consistent basis need some, you know, I don't need this to be fodder for our discussion on this, on this podcast. Right. We have plenty to talk about each week. But I would like to that point.

Is it is political. Right. Which is why I can, what I would say that if it was economic, I wouldn't say that. I think that if he gets a lot of these people to the table and in China, I'm, China is its own animal. So I'm, I feel less confident about China. But as it relates to Mexico and Canada, I believe if the discussions and what the Canadian administration is what changing here in two days or a week or whatever the case may be, I think if there's discussions and things happening that are moving in that direction, then either it's going to be delayed or there'll be transparency. That. Okay, this isn't, it's not going to be 30 day delays, but it's, you know, we'll evaluate it in a year or six months or whatever. I think the leeways are going to get longer. So I do think my, my point is based on exactly what you're saying, Kevin, is that it is political and like I said, if you surrender and he is surrounded with some very bright business people. Yeah, right. That know firsthand the problem that this is causing. Right. And obviously the stock market is having a tantrum around all of this as well. Right. So I don't, anyway, I hope you're right.

Like, right.

By April 1st or whatever it is or not. April, May 1st. Right. That would be.

And I do, I do hope you're right because if we find some balance and some, you know, centered, becoming centered on some things, it's going to be good for, for the economy in general. The part of, the reason I take the other side of that is, you know, we had a month ago, right. The big squeeze went on Mexico to hit pause. And as soon as the, as soon as the threat of the tariffs or the announcement was there, I shouldn't even say the threat, the announcement was there. It, what quickly happened is that things went. What did Mexico do the next day? 10,000 soldiers permanently assigned to the US border. Right. And yet we still came back with the tariffs. Right. So I, I wonder if into your point, the, the, the balancing act is probably the good, the, the, the sharp minds around the administration and the business people that, that have input to this. But I think we may not be talking about it with Canada and Mexico like we are today, but EU is coming next. Right. So I think we've got to get through more of this than just what we're talking about today. But we'll see. Like I said, I hope you there.

Right. There are other geographical areas that could pop into the equation.

So we, we don't have a wager in this. But let's just be clear. Are you saying we won't be talking about Canada and Mexico or we won't be talking about tariffs?

No, I was really saying, I was really focusing on Canada and Mexico when I was talking about that.

See how kind I am, Brendan? I just let him walk it back without, you know, calling him out on it fully. So.

But I, I certainly don't think it's going to be the turbulence, if you want to call it that, that we're experiencing today.

I would agree with that fully. I would fully agree that we will.

Not have, it's not a black and white issue. It's a lot of shades of gray but right now it's very turbulent.

The Mexico, Canada thing I believe will settle, be settling in. I, I don't know if it's 30 days, 60 days, whatever it will be. But I think the tariff discussion we're going to be having for a long time so. Good. Well that kind of ties into kind of next article and we're, you know, half hour plus into the, the show here and we're on our second article of the day. But this just really ties, this is.

An all day show.

Yeah. Clear your calendar because we're going to do it.

Yes.

We're going till dinner time. So. But there was, there's obviously big talks now not just about tariffs but what tariff, what comes out of tariffs. National association of Business Economics talked about in an article, this is from cfodive.com they talked about the risk of inflation accelerating again. They said minimum of 2027 above the 2%. I've said on this podcast for two years now. I'm not sure that 2% is the right number anyways but what they're describing there is that with all the, the things going on that we have some risk of recession and we have some risk of inflation numbers going up significantly. So any thought takeaways or thoughts from either of you on that, you Know.

You, it's interesting that you brought up about the conversation you were having where prices were being raised, because they can. Yep. Right. I'm wondering if, if the inflationary pressure may come more from that scenario than it comes from the actual tariffs themselves. Obviously, the tariffs are creating the excuse, if you will, for it. But I do think that, let's face it, right, people will exploit situations. And definitely I'm interested, Brendan, and you're taking this, but is that going to be more of an inflation driver, you know, than it is? I mean, it's just, you know, think about what we had before when coming out of COVID and some of the other things, right. It was always an excuse to raise prices whether or not your, your costs went up or not.

Yeah. I mean, look, people will. The term exploit is. This is a hard, hard one because it's, it sounds bad, but I mean, this is, this is, this is a, a capitalistic society. And, and really, you know, what, what people will pay is the fair market.

Right.

And so what it does, though, is it does create a lot of opportunity for share gain. And I think that's the activity that you're going to see ramp up this number. I think that everybody. To me, it wasn't a big surprise when this came out, when the miss was there. I think that it was even on a very personal level, go out and try to buy a car right now or go out and try to buy a home, either of those things are outrageous. I think that the median car price right now is over $50,000 or something close to it. Like that's outrageous, you know, and so when you look at this, it's not a big surprise for me. And whether it's driven by greed or in, in some cases that taking advantage of the situation, I couldn't tell you, Tom, but I know that it's, it's. People are going to do it. Nobody's going to be altruistic about this and say I don't have to raise prices when my competitor does. I'll just raise it a dollar less, you know, than they have to, and then I'll steal some share.

You talked earlier too about, and I think it was more related to U.S. canada or U.S. mexico relations. But I think all of this stuff right now, and it ties to interest rate, it ties to everything going on, is we're in a world in, in, you know, this. It really impacts your members a lot as well. We're in a world where, you know, that. What is that probably been 30 years now that Friedman Wrote the. The. The World is Flat book. Right. Well, between the Internet AI now and other tools is there's a lot of transparency now that wasn't there before. There's a lot of ability to shop and find other sources and so forth. That whole world that we've lived in, and Tom and I live in this every day with our business at Lead Smart are talking about distributors and manufacturers. Because at Lead Smart, we have a portal that we've developed that allow distributors and manufacturers to communicate there and can bring in manufacturers and reps and IMRs into that as well. And the walls are starting to come down a little bit in that level of communication, but nowhere where they should be at this day and age. And so I think that the comments that the distributor I was talking to yesterday made and what we're talking about now is this is an opportunity for partnerships to get stronger. And the people I think that right now want to try and maybe take advantage of things or aren't communicating. Well. Now is not the time to hide. Now is the time to communicate on these things.

One of the most insightful things, Kevin, I think I've heard you say on this show, it's really well done. It's really a great take.

Like, you like him. You guys like, like you enjoy each other's company, right? You guys are mean to each other. This is fun. All right, so.

The last 131 episodes, you've just had me along for the ride, is that I just said this.

Was one of the best ones. This was great. That's what I was saying. It was a great take.

So, yeah, I'm glad you brought a compliment.

It was a compliment.

They don't come very often, Brandon. They don't come very often. Take it.

Take it and run with it. Bank it for later because he's going to say something that is not nice.

This is recorded for perpetuity.

There you go. And it's recorded. Yeah, this is great. Exactly.

So when you do the editing on this, let's make sure we have that clip.

It's going to be all over social media. You're never going to be able to get away.

All you're going to see.

Right, right.

Kevin was right. That's. That's the. The banner that comes up right now. So to your point, Kevin, I think that this kind of was illuminated for us, too. We had an end user roundtable, a virtual one, about a. Maybe a little over a month ago or under a month ago, and we had like eight end users from a bunch of different channels and we talked to them about tariffs for the bulk of the conversations and, and about, you know, the ability to absorb a price increase. And none of them, I mean, they joked a little bit, I'm like, just don't bring me a price increase. But all of them, to a, to A, to A1, said, look, it's all about transparency. It's all about coming to me early and often and talking to me about what is happening and then working with us to navigate it together as partners. So that, that ability to be transparent and show exactly the impact that this tariff has on your business, on your own supply chain, I think that's what the end user is accepting. So a price increase with all that information, they're saying, at least the eight that we had on the show were saying, that's okay, we don't love it, nobody wants price increases. But we understand that you've got to put food on the table and so do we. So we can go to our customers and say we have to increase your prices because everything is more expensive. So I think that it just highlights the importance. And I think our friend John Gunderson said in an article he wrote recently, this is the year that you want to meet early and often with your channel partners. So come to ISA 25, they'll all be there.

I mean, isn't that really what you're saying? And Kevin, you were saying it's more collaboration, not less.

Yeah.

And then you've never been in a place where it's easier to do it, right? Yeah. You know, I mean, and you've got, you know, distributors have these, you know, especially the ones that are doing with, you know, dealing with, you know, whether it's an auto plant or it's a utility or it's a, you know, aircraft manufacturer, whatever it might be. Those long term supply chain supply contracts, they have buffers in there for price increases and a lot of them are tied to economic factors but also have to be proven. So if, if you're a manufacturer that's just trying to take advantage of this situation right now, there's a relationship issue that goes on with this. And you know, one of the things I didn't mention that this particular gentleman shared with me yesterday as well is he said they had a manufacturer, and I think it was a Canadian manufacturer that had raised prices two weeks ago, but then were able to find new sources that weren't impacted by the tariffs, going to be impacted by the tariffs the same, and came back 10 days later and lowered the prices again. So two components with that the first one is bravo. That they, that they did that. Right. But the second part of it is you gotta be thinking too about the impact it has on your distributor partners of the administrator. I mentioned this a few minutes ago, the administrative components about that. Right. Somebody is now going into a system and they're typing that new price in. Right. 9, 10, 9 out of 10 times. It's some being done manually. And so there's a, there's a lot of impact for this. So anyways, you know this, the next article, these things just all tie together, right. So we've got tariffs, we've got some political instability on a handful of things, we've got geopolitical factors going on. So now we're talking about the survey that was done that said that the inflation could get to as high as 4%. Right. So we're certainly not going to see any short term interest rate cuts. Tom, any, any prognostication on what we're going to see this year? You did well last year with what your thoughts are.

Yeah, well, I know, I know. I was.

I'll wait and see what's going to happen.

Pretty amazing. Well, I had said earlier, right. I'm. I had said earlier no cut before September, if you remember. I think we better. Mexican taco dinner where we did tacos on this one.

Yeah. You know, until you pay off the steak, we're not.

Bet all this inflation.

Right.

Times are tough. Right. We have to go from steaks to tacos. But. Right. But it's interesting, I'm not ready to change that yet, but I'm less confident in that prediction. I think we may see actually a cut sooner mainly because I think we are going to see a continued softening of the job market for a lot of reasons. Right. I mean there's certainly a lot of cuts that are happening. There's a lot of companies hesitant to hire can I use AI or all of those things. I think we're going to see a softening in the job market. I think we're going to see other factors other than just the inflationary one that I think will potentially result in some cuts. And let's face it, the administration wants some cuts on top of everything else that's here. So am I ready to change my September? I'm not ready to say yet, but I'm less confident in it than I was whenever we did that a month ago. So.

Well, the, the interesting take on this article talked about soonest would be June, so I don't know. Brendan, any take on that yourself?

Well, I mean, I think if, if we go back to the, to the question that Tom asked me about finances versus uncertainty, if we're leaning on the uncertainty being the X factor here, that's driving a lot of the instability and maybe even some of this inventory jumping. If Tom also believes that some of this uncertainty will be solved, then potentially some of the things like jobs come back, inventory levels out, some of these things happen. I mean, the inventory article written by the folks over at mdm, I mean, their, their conclusion I tend to agree with it, is people stocked up because they didn't know what was going to happen. People are not hiring because they don't know what's going to happen or they're letting people go, I mean, as well. So people are battening down the hatches because they are unsure what's going to happen. If that, If Tom is right and we're not talking about tariffs, maybe we're talking about something else. But if we're not talking about these Canadian and Mexican tariffs, maybe some of.

That.

Influences that inflation rate. But again, still so uncertain. I don't know how Tom is so confident, but good for him, man.

Yeah.

I'm just.

So many things to share with that.

Yeah, you really set him up for that. And he is biting.

I'm just gonna get ready to move on. There is a clip in there somewhere that we could get out of this. It says Brendan saying Tom is right. I, I heard him actually. So we got to be careful with what you say.

You gotta thank these guys.

That's right. That's good.

What is that website that you can make bets on? Polymarket or whatever.

Polymarket.

Yeah. We need to put some of this stuff up on polymarket.

It's funny. That's good. So across the board, look, we look at, you know, inventories, you know, issues. We've got job market issues, we've got interest rate issues, we've got tariffs. It's a tough time and it's, It's. Bob says that Tom is risk tolerant. Let me, let me share one.

I'll tell you one my way through college and then you'll understand.

Yeah, it includes a deck of cards and a stack of chips. That's right. But Bob, I will tell you as Tom's longtime business partner, Tom, is that risk adverse or not risk tolerant? That maybe when it's just talk, but not when it's money. So lots going on, lots to watch, lots for us to be paying attention to even. There was a. Another article that we posted that talks about and it goes into our manufacturing segment that's next for us today. But it talks about Chinese factory output and so forth. And I think that what we see coming out of that is that there's a lot going on there because there's been so many orders coming in. 1. There's always an uptick coming back from Chinese New Year that comes out of that. But we've seen this, this, this factory change there because there's been so much ordering in advance. So, like going on, the other thing we did, we talked about last week that we didn't mention today, but it looks like this is going through too, about there being a per port tax or fee that's going up to as much as a million and a half, $1.5 million per Chinese ship coming in. And so when you start thinking about that, I commented on this, I think, on last week's show, is it you, you get a ship coming from China, it's going to probably hit San Diego, Louisiana, Long Beach Harbor, Oakland harbor, on its way to Seattle if it didn't stop somewhere along the way. I mean, if you think about the cost that go with this now, container rates are down a little bit right now, which is going to help with all of this. But a lot of impact going on there. So, Tom, let's, let's jump into and kind of move past that. There's really the only article we need to catch in that manufacturing distribution segment, segment, segment was the Chinese factory output higher in February. And I kind of hit that real quick. Let's kind of move and just completely shift gears and go into our E commerce and marketing because we've spent so much time talking about the economy and so forth today. Great comments from the people that are here with us live. I do want to hit real quick if you're listening to the recorded podcast and not here with us live, which we have a much larger audience that's growing each week. I think last week we were seven countries, we had the podcast downloaded. And I think we have people live with us today from three or four countries that were coming in today, which is just great to hear. But if you're listening and you're wondering what we're referring to, we publish the newsletter every week. It's called around the Horn and wholesale distribution manufacturing. Three fast ways to get it. Helloadsmartech.com we'll send that out to you right away and get you signed up for that. If you're active on LinkedIn, that's a great way to view it. We just put that up Onto as a newsletter on LinkedIn recently just search around the horn in wholesale distribution podcast on LinkedIn. You'll see that you can follow that the newsletter. You can follow the show there. And of course each week the show is the recordings from the show are on the lead Smart technology page. And then we have a website for the podcast which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. so we want to make sure that those of you that are listening know what we're referring to because you don't see the newsletter that's up. So we're going to dive into e commerce and our marketing segment of the newsletter. Tom, this is near and dear to your heart, so I'm going to ask you to drive this particular discussion. This is from Martech.com Brandon. You've got a great team behind you doing really. I been impressed with the social content and the content in general coming out from Isaac in general recently. And it wasn't that it was bad before. It just seems to be moving to a higher level. But this talks about MQL or marketing qualified Leads is failing B2B marketing and what to use instead. So Tom, you want to fire off on that?

Yeah.

I mean, so what is an mql, Right. I guess in the tech world it is a lead that somebody, you know, think about somebody coming to your website and downloading a white paper or downloading an article or maybe even attending a webinar. I think the MQL that I see a lot with our customers and wholesale distribution and manufacturing is they go to a trade show and they hand out, you know, maybe some candy or some swag at the booth and some they go and scan badges. Right. And then that becomes quote unquote, a lead. Well, that would be a, an example of These quote unquote MQLs or marketing qualified leads. I think a lot of us in the marketing world or a lot of the, a lot of companies in the marketing world have judged themselves based on the volume of these quote unquote marketing qualified leads. Right. I mean, you've seen this right. At shows where people are literally running out in the aisle with a scanner, a badge scanner, trying to scan as many badges as possible when in fact, you know. Right. There's absolutely no intent or interest whatsoever for the products that are being being sold there. So anyway, this is something that has been certainly in the tech world being discussed a lot over the last year or so is how do you measure your marketing investment and is it based on the volume of these MQLs or is it based around the true opportunities and the true revenue generation that is being created from it. And it's, and I mentioned Brendan, in your take because I'm seeing more and more, especially on distribution side, more and more distributors putting an emphasis on marketing than maybe I have in, in the past. But I'm seeing some of these sort of, I guess, habits, if you will, that have carried over from the tech world and from other industries about more MQL versus really looking at, okay, how are we driving actual sales and business and so forth. But I do think we're in the early stages and I do think there's a lot of opportunity to improve in that area. But anyway. Interested in your take on it?

Yeah, I mean, look, this is, I should start this whole thing by saying I'm a person who believes in marketing, you know, is somebody who didn't work in marketing myself. So I didn't, my, my journey to where I am today didn't go through marketing, but I have a respect for it. And that said, it's super hard to justify, you know, spend and to understand what's valuable versus what's not. Especially since marketing departments are one of the more capacity constrained departments that exist. I think everybody who is just trying to say, well what does marketing really do for, for us? How do they add to the bottom line? But by the way, marketing, I need you to do these 15 things by tomorrow morning. You know, and so I think that it's balancing that and understanding the role that they play. But as far, I really like this article too because it's, it's something that we're studying at ISA is, is trying to understand exactly what, what the value of a lead is, you know, from a sales perspective, what's the value of what's been given to them. And then from a marketing perspective, is it a check the box exercise like you said? Is it a, you know, I captured it. It's, it's I, you told me to get 100 leads and here are the 100 leads, you know, and I don't care whether you convert them, you know, I hope that you do and you should. If you don't, it's sales fault, you know, like that's, I'm not saying that's what, what's going on in my.

That happens. Sure does.

It does. So I think that what I like about what this exercise and what this article laid out is it's opening up a different way of looking at this that really scraps this model and saying what can we unify on in sales and marketing to help us get better aligned or in finance or in all of these it because it's all playing into this and everyone should be governed by that almighty revenue dollar. That's my feeling is that your business model has to thrive and you know, you might do things that have a hard time having a straight line to revenue, but you have to at least all be aligned around that or else there will be that infighting and there will be that attribution matrix that is a nightmare, you know. So yeah, I think it's. It is early stages and maybe the code hasn't been cracked. But it's encouraging to see that both technology and professionals are willing to explore a new way of doing this because I agree it's broken.

That's a great.

Those are great points. So there's a few things that go with this I think that are important to kind of look at with this is one is, and Tom was referring to, you know, tech world does so much more digital marketing, right. And there's a mix in wholesale distribution manufacturing of digital and in person person marketing that goes with that. So we've got events to Tom's point, we go through where people are scanning badges. We've got, you know, distributors. You know, we have a lot of lead smart customers do, you know, barbecues and branch type events and so forth. But they're tracking and they're managing that well. What we know too now is that things and this is another has become a van. The term vanity metric is really where this ties into, right. Is the days I don't even look anymore, you know, at the open rates of the newsletters that go out because it's just you can't track these things well because the apples and the Googles of the world have kind of gotten in the way of that and through that standpoint so that we've got this vanity metric thing. But I do think Tom to. I'm going to push back on you just slightly on this. I do think there is. The tech world does a lot more of it from the digital side. But I think very impressed with some of the. Some of our customers in particular with some of the digital marketing that distributors are really starting to do. So I do think we could lump all of this together.

But I think it's important, Kevin though to say that the problem is not the marketing. Right? The problem is not doing the marketing. The problem is how are we measuring and evaluating the marketing that we're doing and are we leveraging the marketing? Right?

Yeah, so. So great point. So I think what this really boils down to. Tom, get ready because I'm going to say something extremely insightful right now. You ready?

This might be a one, two in one show.

Yeah. And it's something that we talk about internally because we don't, we have some, maybe some titles related to that in our company of sales and marketing. But the mission, the mission that we need to have, and this is, I'm going to see the soapbox. I'm going to stand on here for a second. The mission that wholesale distributors and manufacturers, because that's our audience here. But I'll say businesses in general need to do is shift away from sales and marketing and have a go to market team or a revenue team. This article calls it go to market teams.

Right.

Shift towards that revenue centric metric that says we are one in the same. And Brendan, you mentioned it earlier because the historic fight has been as long as I've been in my business career, which is long, long time is marketing says sales sucks because we give them great leads and they don't close them. Right. Sales says marketing sucks. The leads are no good because people took, you know, to Bob's point here is his comment here in the, in the notes about, you know, the more swag a person takes, the more qualified the lead. Well, jokingly of course, but you know, sales doesn't consider the guy that took a, you know, a baseball cap as really a lead. Right. Or how many times have I seen the same lead? Tom's team is developed within Lead Smart. We track and manage leads within our smart lead center, within Lead Smart Channel cloud. We track not just is it a lead but where did they come from and how many times have we seen them and what's been done with them. We track all that within a smart CRM. But I do believe in again, soapboxing here for a moment is if you're still on Friday, March 7th at 10:00am Pacific Time in 2025, looking at sales and marketing and not having a go to market or a revenue team, it's time to rethink.

So question for you, Kevin, who leads the go to market team? I mean that's, that's the challenge is you have two. Yeah, they believe so strongly.

You know, that's the beauty of having a CRO and it doesn't need to be a C level title but if you have, and we're seeing more and more of this with distributors in particular, much more than manufacturers that you're seeing a chief revenue officer and sales and marketing reports to that and I think.

And you don't need.

You can call it a. A VP of revenue or a VP of, Of. Of growth, whatever that title is. But I believe in answer to your question, that's. That's where we need to be to have a VP of sales and a VP of marketing. Unless they're reporting to a chief revenue officer, you're continuing the divide and now is the time to be thinking about bringing those.

We just, we just rolled out something this week to one of our customers where they have a marketing promotion team. So they're doing like, you know, specials and promotions around product lines. But the sales team had no visibility prior to what was being promoted. So we've tied it together now so that when marketing does a promotion around a certain product line or a price line, the sales team is actually alerted of customers or prospects that have purchased or expressed interest in those and are given cues and roadmap to actually follow up in concert with what's going on. With. That's using marketing and sales together, right?

And that's one of the most innovate. This, this is a just a large distributor and not far from you, actually, Brendan, in the H vac and plumbing and electrical space. Probably one of the most innovative things I've seen done at a distributor in a long time. Really, really bringing those two pieces together. And the beauty of it is they're taking ERP data that's in the CRM and they're using this, our smart CRM, to identify who those people are, scheduling tasks for the salespeople. And sales and marketing are literally in this case. And you can tell my passion about this topic is in this instance, sales and marketing are lockstep. It's incredible within their organization. So there is the opportunity to do that.

So that's the dream, you know, that's the dream. You know, you unlock multiplier value if you have that one plus one equals five, you know, happens well, and let's.

Go back full circle and then we can move on. Kevin, especially in this age of turbulence, right? And uncertainty related to prices and costs. What's one way that something you can do about stuff right now is be more efficient in your marketing, go figure out how to drive more organic growth. Right? These are all things that you can control versus focusing all the things that maybe we can't control or we don't have all the answers for.

Well, that's. Tom, that. That's a great, really great point. It makes me, you know, think, be careful to not plug our product too much. But that's like the revenue expander tool. Right. We have that illuminates and uses AI to go say, are we selling all of our product categories to our customer? Because now there might be a point in time where we can say, hey look, you know what, here's my Canadian made products and my Mexican made product and my Chinese made products. But I've got these other products from Southeast Asia and here's all the customers that don't even buy those products.

The technology, I think there's a lot of things that we can do that we can control and then there's a lot of things. Right. That we maybe can't control so much.

But bravo. Good. Anyway, so moving through this segment, E commerce and marketing, another great article. This is from the search engine journal leveraging AI for buyer centric B2B engagement ties right into this. Right. There's so much more we can do now with from attribution standpoints and so forth. AI is helping us with that. We just used a great example of that as well. I want to kind of push through this because Tom or Brandon, we have multiple other articles here about data driven multi channel prospecting. Any key points from either of you on either of those before we jump to technology? And we're going to watch a super cool video in a couple of minutes. So anything on either of those you want to hit before we move?

I mean I love super cool videos.

So.

Let'S do it.

Yeah, let's. Tom, are you cool with that?

Let's jump into, go do some super cool videos.

Super cool videos. So we'll kind of start with Opera the first. This is we're moving on into our technology, cyber security and AI segment and we'll kind of probably close out today's show in this segment. But from PR Newswire, there's just just really cool thing of a new browser that's AI based agentic browsing. So to kind of preface that right. So we think about agentic or AI agents and we also have an article at the the end here and a last piece that we have in our, in our newsletter each week is our we call it a good read or a good listen which is either a an interesting web, a podcast or an article and that has the founder of Salesforce.com, mark Benioff talking about the future of hiring and managing people, which is we're going to be using agents more and more and an agent basically as a tool might be an agent in your using an LLM that is helping us do our job better, saving US time and doing those digitally instead of using by using AI, then having to do manual processes. So now we've taken AI agents and we've merged them in this setting with Opera, which is this new announcement of this week, and we've brought that together to our traditional web browsing. So, Tom, you want to just play a couple of snippets out of that? Do you have that one ready before we play it?

Right. You OpenAI released Operator, what, a couple weeks ago? Three weeks ago. But it doesn't run directly in your browser. It runs in kind of a proprietary OpenAI browser, so to speak. This is, I believe I haven't done this or downloaded, but I believe this is actually running directly in the Opera browser. Yep. So think about that. Now, there's the reason OpenAI didn't do that is because there's some security potential issues. I don't know what Opera is doing about that. But anyway, we can take a look here.

And I shared this more about what's coming versus know today, the world we're moving to. This is pretty cool. So what, what we're seeing here is a browser where somebody's kind of hard for me to see this. I'll pop it up a little bit. There we go. Their browser, right from a quick question and a prompt, which was what they wanting to buy some socks. It's taking them through a entire process and now they're moving of where to buy it, where to look, and it's doing it for them and it's kind of thinking ahead. Now they're moving to wanting to buy a Premier League Soccer ticket. And it's express. Tell me, hit pause for just one second what it's doing here. For those of you that are listening on the podcast, I would encourage you to just go search the Opera browser. AI would bring this right up for you to watch it if you're listening on the browser. But what they typed in is instead of us historically saying, hey, I want to go to a ball game. I need to go to, you know, an online ticket, Ticketmaster, whatever it is. This is giving the example that says, I want two tickets to Newcastle's next Premier League game in April. That particular stadium I want hospitality. Tickets are okay. If regular tickets are not available and it's saying exactly where they want to sit, you could say what they want to eat. So this is where we're going from a browser standpoint.

So, Tommy, for the AI, as you'll see here, is driving the browser interaction versus me sitting there typing and doing it myself. Perfect.

So those of you that are watching will be able to see this further. What it's doing, he told it gave an instruction of what the. What the pricing should be. And it's moving through all of this basically knowing what the person's expectations are. And then from there it was like next we need to go get you a flight. So it says can you find me a flight tickets from and so forth. So Tom, we could probably stop with that because, you know, a large part of our audience can't see this. But the point is we've talked about on this show a number of times about agents and what they're going to be able to accomplish for us. And you know, I used the example a few weeks ago when we were talking is just about the idea of being able to say I think we are talking with on a LinkedIn post from my. In fact, Brendan knows him as well. Nick Pericle put a great post on about, you know, travel and the things we're going to be able to do. And I look at this as a place with a browser like this, it's going to know my preferences, it's going to know all of the different agents that I have for travel, for entertainment, for different things. And in one browser we're going to be able to even talk to it and it's going to be able to go take all of these steps for us versus me going flights, cars, tickets and I take all of those steps.

And it will learn obviously you and learn what you care about and learn how you do things and go through here. Right. Again, it's trying to automate a lot of things that are maybe doesn't appear like it takes a lot of time, but could take a lot of time and a lot of those things that are there. Yeah.

Nope. So very my very cool stuff. So I think this is going to be neat. I'm surprised that we didn't see this first from Google for Chrome, but this could be actually running in Chrome fairly quickly.

Yep.

So good. So now talking about the future, Brendan, any thoughts about that browsing idea?

I try to flip it to how it will impact. I mean I see how it could impact me personally, you know, nice little personal assistant for me. But thinking about end users, what if they said I'm looking for this part and it needs to have this and it needs to be available within two days. How does that algorithm gonna spit back something that that isn't just gonna lead to, you know, I don't know, something like if the. The negativity means is Gonna say it's gonna go to Amazon or Granger or something like that. And not to take anything away from those guys, but, you know, there are other attributes and I wonder how the model learns, you know, and what you can put into that model that. That really gets to the heart of the value of the independent distributor or the local distributor, the specialty distributor. Because end users might use this to buy things. I mean, if they're using it to buy plane tickets or socks or whatever, why wouldn't they do it to buy machine tools?

Well, I think that's a great, a great point. And I think the key thing is if we take a step back to your comment and we talk about agents is agents have to be built, right. And so agents will then know our preferences. So when we were building that to your point, right, Our purchasing my cutting tools or my electrical reels or whatever it might wire reels or whatever it might be, is that with that we would have built the agent that says, only look at these resources, only look at this. And then we could also have an agent that's also scanning other prices. So what this would be doing is knowing us learning about our preferences.

Right.

The agent could literally have the contract that you have with XYZ distributor in the agent at that level. So I think this is going to be in. Your point's very good. I think the key comes to this is knowing that this is all going to be tied to how we build agents. And the beauty of building agents is agents will coach you through how to build them best. So I have right now, within ChatGPT, they call it GPTs or agents. I have six or seven different agents for our marketing team for sales. Coaching literally can be dropping, you know, recordings of meetings in and transcripts of meetings in to get guided on coaching, internal training, personal research that I do. So as we build those, we're going to have organizational agents, we'll have personal agents that will tie to this. But I think this is where we're moving. And the key to your point, right. Is who's going to be buying the ads on the other side of that to support it. Right?

Yeah, I think that, look, we've seen this all the way along, right. Our consumer behavior influences our business behavior.

Sure.

So if this starts to. And this is not mainstream. So I would not like to in any way, shape or form, this is what's coming.

This is not today.

This is like an early, another early stage, early adopter thing. But will it become mainstream? Yeah, it will become mainstream at some point in time here they'll work through some of the kinks and as it becomes mainstream. I think on the plus side, Brendan, I think you're right. I think there's if you go at something a little bit more broadly you could have run into what you just said is all of a sudden it ends up on Amazon and Granger. But if you specify more specifically in a B2B setting what you want it to do, and especially being able to go into gated e commerce sites or logins or whatever, which it will be able to do, you'll actually be able to tune, if you will, the buying process actually even more efficiently over time if you tune it properly. The key I think is going to be the e commerce sites and the websites that are part of this are going to have to be designed to be more friendly to accommodate and be compatible with these types. So there's going to be quite a bit of technological change. But yes, I mean this will eventually get to this point. This the Quinn, I'm not sure I'm not willing to bet on the, on the win at this point, but it is interesting to see kind of where this is where it's going well and.

I think that just to close out on that before we go talk about the robots that are going to be weeding my yard soon is you know, Stefan with DSG just made a comment earlier this also the new he's the chief digital officer at DSG and good friend and he said this is the direction that Alexa, the model that's in beta right now, the blue light on, on that digital assistant next to me on the other desk in my office is lighting up as I say that. But that's the direction they announced. I think it was either late last week or early this week. I think the digital assistant piece is going to go really great. What we were showing earlier is what we're looking at, you know, from a browser based component. I think what's going to be interesting to go along with Stefan's comment though is where will that crossover and we talk about this a lot here on our show is that gray area we're at right now, and you mentioned it a moment ago, Tom, and the crossover of, of our personal life and our business life with digital assistance and so forth. I think they're just those gray lines are just going to become it is just one place. Sure.

We always have to be looking ahead right to how that's going to influence the experience that we want on the business side.

So Brendan, before we jump ahead here, what Are your thoughts about robots?

I mean, look, on a personal level I'm not shy about talking about my kids. I've got three little kids. I could use all the help I can get if the technology is there and they can change a diaper while I make dinner or do all of that and I can do stuff then great. As it relates to businesses, I think that we just, my fear is that maybe companies aren't ready. Good companies, really great companies that have been the backbone of, of U.S. manufacturing and have supported our end users so much and problem solved and have all this technical expertise and can build relationships. They might not be ready to become agentic ready. And so they might have just invested in that shiny new E Comm website and now they're like, now you need to scrap that and start making sure that your API can handle that. And they're like what's an API? You know. So I think I'm nervous about robots, agentic AI and all this. I do agree with Tom that it's coming. I just think that some will be lost and I think ultimately our end users won't get the same level of support from this channel that they will get as of today. They might get things faster, might get things a little cheaper, but they won't get that technical expertise. And at least in my channel that technical expertise is absolutely critical. I mean we're talking about, you know, a very complex machining or specific use cases or even custom made tools that, that people, that end users need and those are really based on a relationship between two individuals. So I, I worry that the shiny object here might be something that either causes some people to just fall dreadfully behind or it makes people jump into deep water when they don't have their swimming zones.

Yeah, I, I, that's a very reasonable, I mean I'll just compare it with you know, with our company in our day to day is, you know, we probably 70% of our customers and or prospects at Lead Smart have never had a, never had a dumb CRM in their business, let alone a smart CRM.

Right.

So I think your point's right on track. I think the world is going to move at the world's pace. You know, we have a lot of people that talk about, you know, what AI and other tools and that distributors are going to be out of business. I look at all of these technology changes as I don't look at, you know, XYZ Distributor with Y number of locations is going to be gone. What I do look at is the guy down the street that was in a Quonset hut that is, you know, maybe a little gnat bothering you here and there that if he jumps ahead of you with some of these tools that are available specifically, just, I mean, I think I made this comment a few weeks back. I said, you know, the guy in the Quonset hut that you drive by that's got a little sign could tomorrow have a Starlink connection, though. So his Internet's never down when yours might be because of Cox or whoever it might be. And he pops up a Shopify store that's using AI tools and could start running circles around some of our more antiquated. Your members, AD members, hardy members, ISA or ASA members, whoever it might be. There are these opportunities. So I. Well, I don't think some of the folks are going to go out of business. I think the business as they know it today may be different and it might not. They might not be the market leader that they had been for so long. Yeah, that's the risk there. But we're getting to this place where. And we've always thought, you know, I. A lot older than you are, Brendan. So, you know, you may or may not remember the Jetsons, but they had Rosie that cleaned their house. Right. So I said a while back, my wife, who made a comment earlier on the show here is Darlene is a. As a marketing, design and print company, I told her a while back, 18 to 24 months, we're going to have at least available to us for under $20,000, somebody that can or somebody, a humanoid robot that can clean the house better than we can. So this is an article from TechCrunch, a video.

Are you suggesting that by the end of, say, 2026, you will have a robot in your house? Clean.

I'm not. I'm saying there would I preface that a moment ago. I, in fact, I stopped and caught myself and said, available.

Send it. Send it over to my house. I'll take it.

Brandon, will you have one by the end of 2026?

It depends on price point.

If they work.

If they work. I mean, look again. People are trying to do more with less and the pressures on profitability and time is a constraint are very, very real. And so where you can create an extra, not warm body, but body to help accomplish the mundane or the things that don't require or the things maybe you're outsourcing to another person, you know, cleaning lady or something like that. Like, yeah, sure, people will go for it. You'll start doing the math and saying, I could Buy this and then it'll be worth it in 12 months or in 16 months.

I think that's a great point about. And this is personal and in business the ROI will be looked at. But I think before we watch this video and talk about this a little bit further right. Every day things are getting better. And this happens to be a fig. A video that we're going to show in a minute from figure with their Helix. But there's multiple Chinese companies that have robots that are really, really amazing from the dexterity that they have the things that they can do. We've got. Was it Boston Scientific, I think it's called here in the US That's I just watched a video yesterday some crazy things that they're doing. But what I want to do in prefacing all of this is the idea that says, you know, we think about cleaning our house, let's just use our homes as a model. But translate that over to within the business idea is the goal of technology should be to free us up to do better, more powerful things and improve our lives. So I'll use Brendan, back to discussion is if you could reduce some things that you and your wife need to do around the house to give you more quality time with your kids because you don't have to go trim a hedge or whatever it might be that's bettering our life, right. If we can look at into a factory situation where we have a dangerous job, right. That whether it's fume hazards or heat or whatever it is, and we can have a humanoid robot doing that versus a human doing that and we can use that same human to oversee and manage those activities. That's where we start really seeing the return on those investments is it's better and improves people's lives. So I think that's the thing that we want to be considering with both of these.

So I know we're well over time here, but one thing that just popped into my head and I think that there's there's some, some robot bias too. I think if it was the. If the difference between let's, let's use the hedge trimming was not a robot but a magic wand, everybody would go for it. But I think that there's the notion of a actual physical robot coming out and doing the thing that a human could do. I think that that makes you think of other things. It makes you think of the person that might have had that job or the satisfaction of getting a job done yourself. Whereas you wait that magic wand, everybody takes that. Right?

Great.

Great point, Tom. Let's play this quickly. This is for those listening and not watching. This is a video of two humanoid robots in a kitchen. And the sound will kind of tell us what's going on. But imagine this in a manufacturing plan or distributor warehouse.

I'd like to try something new. Even though this is the very first time that you've ever seen these items, I want you to use your new.

Helix.

And try to reason through where you think they belong and then work together to put them away. Does that sound good, Tom?

Can you hit pause real quick? So it's a little hard to hear, so I'm going to kind of recap this. So this was a gentleman that walked into a kitchen across the counter from him with the. With a refrigerator next to him, next to one of these humanoid robots. There's two of them there. He sets down a bag of groceries, and he asks both of the robots. And I think the critical factor is this, is he asks them to work together, right? So there's agents in AI within both of them that are able to. Those agents are able to communicate, and he wants them to sort what's in the bag of groceries. So we have a little bin that can be used. We have a fruit bowl, and we have a refrigerator. And on the counter we have cookies. We have an apple and some other produce, and I think a thing of ketchup. So I wanted to kind of preface where this is going. Tom, why don't you hit it again?

I've turned off the sound because the sound is not really.

Maybe you want to describe it a little bit. What's going on here?

Yeah, I mean, so they're basically looking at the items that are on the table, and then they're trying to identify are they going to go in the refrigerator, are they going to go into a drawer, you know where they're going. Obviously, they're not moving at warp speed through this process. But again, they're using the intelligence and the sort of multimodal, whether it's touch or visual or whatever, to go through the process. You'll notice there they just handed one. Just handed something to another one because it needed to go in the refrigerator, and the other one is putting it in the face there. So I think you get the idea, right? Is. Is basically they're learning. They're, you know, taking the steps that they need to do. Again, without a whole heck of a lot of training, Right. They didn't have to be trained on how to do this. The. They're using their AI quote on Knowledge to, to be able to run that through. So this is good.

So basically, you know, to Brendan's point, we're kind of getting short on time, so we're, we're going to cut to the chase on this. Imagine, though, what we're seeing here is. And Tom, you made a great point right, about. Well, they're not moving real fast. Does it matter? Because you're, you're, you're sitting in the sun by the pool, right, while this is.

No, I think it does matter, actually. And I think I do. And I think, look, we don't. This. Your, Your point about bias, Brendan, is, I think, spot on. I think people are very. If, as you said, if you just wave a magic wand and everything was put away, that's one thing. But having these things that are, you know, at least appearing part human and how they operate, the speed of which they operate, the how they handle things, all of that is going to be a very, very big part of this is way more so than the actual actions that they, that they, that they.

Over.

That they actually do.

I think there's fascination and people nerd out on it. They're like, I can't believe it can be done. I can't believe I could be done. The other side of this is that someone's like, I could do that faster. It's the same reason why I'm sitting in my living room, you know, reading or something like that, and I watch my Roomba come by and I'm like, it's not doing that good of a job vacuuming. I could do a better job. It's getting stuck in the corner and, and it's missing that little piece. You know, I think we analyze our robots and try to compare them to what we could do. And until they can do everything better than us, I think we won't accept them fully.

So we're going to close on that. From this topic. Here is a very valid point about. We have a. It's a 2x the cost of a Roomba that my wife found a while back that mops and does all kinds of other stuff. But what we're missing with all of this, and if we were to make that comparison, is there's no sensors, there's no vision, and there's no AI, Right? There's. I shouldn't say there's no sensors. There's sensors in a Roomba. But we're talking about here is AI, where these devices are talking to each other. I'm going to call them devices versus humanoid robots because. And I frankly, I, I would rather have not have them look like a person is. It makes. Gives me a little bit of the EBGB's and some of them don't. But it's a, it's, it's something that can go. And this is I think important as we go back to talk about manufacturing and distribution, right? When these things have a carbon monoxide sensor in them and they have a fire sensor in them and they have moisture sensors in them and they have the ability to have vision to see what's going on and they use all of these AI tools. I think these, these pieces are going to revolution or revolutionize us our lives. What I shared with with Darlene about this recently was and she said, well, it could never do a better job than I could if it has a sensor in its eyes that can sense dust that we don't even know is there or it can find mold in our house that we would have never known about. Big, big difference in what we can do. So we share these things on the show. Not to say it's, you have to do it tomorrow. We talk about it because of what's coming and where the opportunities could lie with it. So the last piece we wanted to talk about in this segment is there's a great article from Cyber Security Dive that we covered in this this week is cyber attacks targeting IT vendors. It's intensifying and there's a point that I wanted to make about this and Tom, you may want to add to this is we see this every day in our business at Lead Smart is that. And there's. There's a company that we bump into in some deals here and there that has a, that serves the manufacturing distribution market with a, a CRM and a BI tool. They just came out of having, you know, almost a month of their users not being able to log into their system. Surprised none of the news covered this but they're. Some of their customers came to us is that they underwent a cyber attack. They had horrible communication distributors and manufacturers using their system didn't know where their data was and if it was secure or not and they couldn't access any of the tools that they had paid for. The reason I shared this today is I and I really want to share this with our audience is there's more to be thinking about with cybersecurity than just your data security internally, it's who are your vendors and what are your vendors doing with your data and what are they doing to protect your data and their business to ensure that They've got a lot of uptime, so that's all I kind of wanted to hit with that. So let's kind of wind down Brendan before we close out for today.

I think Brendan has to leave.

So once. Can you give us 30 seconds to close out and give us the reminders of the show?

Sure. So first, thanks for having me, guys. And just, you're. You need to. You have too many awesome articles to discuss and there's too many interesting things for us to discuss. We could have talked for another couple of hours, but thank you very much for having me. The show in April again, this is with everything that's going on. It's March 31, April 2 in Nashville. With everything that's going on, all this stuff we're talking about, you need to stay close to the people in your industry. You need to be talking to them as often as you possibly can. So you, if you haven't seen them in six months since the last show that you saw them at, go and see them again. It's worth it. So we still have a few booths available for you, manufacturers out there and distributors. You know, we have got plenty of spots, so IMRs and service providers if you'd like to get in front of our audience. Service providers, this is a great opportunity. We still have some good sponsorships available. Please reach out directly to me and I'll help triage it to the right person on my team. But very excited about this.

So closing with that, the one thing we missed earlier, probably the most important part of this. Isapartners.org Correct?

Isapartners.org that's correct.

And then if you're not connected with or Following Brendan on LinkedIn, Brendan Breen, B R E E N should certainly want to do that. Great team behind him. Can't wait to see you. Also, if you're a regular listener, we're getting ready to do another session that'll just be one on one and not about the news that will be coming up. And so we'll alert everybody to that with Brendan. We're going to do a deeper dive into ISA and the show. So we'll talk about that and. But I'll see you in less than a month and we'll look forward to that. And thanks for being with us, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. We wish you a wonderful weekend. Be kind, be safe and do good things.

Bye.

Bye.

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. 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 LEED Smart Technology Tech Combination.