Navigating The Digital Landscape, From Content To ROI

Foreign.

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

Tom Burton, Kevin Brown, we are joining you every Friday morning to discuss the topics around the world, mostly in the Americas here about manufacturing, wholesale distribution, the economy, sales and marketing, mergers and acquisitions, technology, AI and many, many different things. And what we do each week is Tom and I get together. We'll be doing it today is 86, yep, 86 times we've done this where we've gotten together with a community online and chatted about the topics going on as it relates to wholesale distribution manufacturing. We publish a newsletter every week. It's called around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution. We bring together lots of unique articles and interesting information and we get together on Fridays and we talk about that newsletter. So if you don't get that newsletter and you'd like to, you can just reach out to us. It's very simple. You can reach out to us by email@helloadsmartech.com or you can very simply go to the website for the podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and we will, you can sign up there and we'll get that out to you each week. If you happen to be listening later on on any of the popular podcast formats, Spotify, Odyssey, Apple Podcasts, whatever it might be, you won't be seeing that newsletter, but in your mind imagine you're seeing the screen that the rest of the audience is there looking at it. So we again do this each week. We're fortunate we are able to do this on YouTube live, LinkedIn live and Facebook Live. If you're love any of those formats, just hit the subscribe, the Follow or the share button and share this with your friends. Continue to follow us and we would love to have you with us. You got thoughts or comments, let us know as well. In fact, if you're joining us live today, chime in in the comments and let us know where you're from. Share your thoughts. Lastly, we couldn't do this each week if we didn't have the sponsorship from this company that Tom and I work for, which is Lead Smart Technologies. Lead Smart has developed a AI enabled customer intelligence and CRM platform that connects to external data resources within your business, like ERP and marketing automation and E commerce products and so forth. We bring all that data together in one format, one platform, and we run AI models and tools against that to help make decisions that benefit your customer, benefit your teams, and benefit your business to accelerate growth. So if you would like any information about that, let us know as well. So, Tom, did I miss anything and get our housekeeping?

I think that's good. And you mentioned you know, if you're online. Oh, good, Paul, good. Good to see you. We've been having. Paul said he's at 35,000ft.

Okay.

I hope you're in a plane or.

Good point.

But yeah, let us know. Good. Hey, Scott as well. Good. We've. We've had some issues with the comments coming through.

Yeah.

And. But hey, this is a new one. We're at the Mile High Club, I guess now, or the multiple Mile High Club here with Paul.

So want to put that Mile High Club thought together. And my friend Paul Kennedy in the same. Yeah, I think Paul's off to like, Eastern. Eastern Europe somewhere to start opening DSG branches because they just opened another location this week and are growing, growing, growing. I was on the phone with a couple of their people this week. What a great organization. So, Paul, we appreciate you being with us regularly.

So anyway, if you're definitely online, let us know you're here. We, like I said, we've been having some trouble the last few weeks with comments coming through, but so far, so good. So. Yeah, I'm sorry, Paul, that was a bad, bad analogy. Bad analogy. So let's, let's move on here. Let's get into the news.

Good. It's nice to have Scott with us as well. In fact, Scott's California guy onto an Arizona guy now. Minneapolis guy. So Scott Leith's with us as well. And I'm sure we've got lots, lots more than a little timid to jump in here. So, yeah, let's dive in. So each week in our newsletter, we split that up into topics. Like we start off with the economy and supply chain and we move in and talk about people and sales and marketing and technology and cybersecurity. But we'll start off with the economy and supply chain. So I have. Tom, I have informed Mrs. Brown that we might be having ground beef and ground turkey and beans for a bit coming into the next couple months. Because I might owe you a steak.

I think it's looking highly likely. Yes, highly. Like I think you want it was the Wine too. I think you said steak and wine. I wasn't mistaken. But yes, I'll bring the wine.

In that case I have better wine than Chuck's does anyways.

But yeah, it's, you know, I'm going to make another prediction though. I'm still definitely doubling down on my one cut this year. But I think we're going to see four cuts next year in 2025.

So unpack that a little bit. And the idea is the article that we first published today is about wholesale inflation heated up against again last month we were talking about the PPI or the Producer Pricing Index. So that's one of the key indexes the Fed looks at along with the Consumer Pricing Index. This is tied to the Producer Price Index is what does it cost to make stuff. Right. So anyways, tied back, I just wanted to tie that back in.

Right. And in the second article obviously is a CPI one, which is the Consumer Price Index. So bottom line, it costs more to make things and it costs more to buy things in the last month.

Right.

And you know, I, I think I sent you an article, you know, now there's talks of potentially no cuts this year. I don't buy that. I think they're, you know, you made a good point last week about there's just expectations that I think there is an expectation that something is going to happen this year and I don't think that those that expectation can be ignored. But I do think I'm still definitely on the, on the one. What I do think however is that there's a number of variables and again, not to be pessimistic, but if I just look ahead into 2025, there's a lot of things that I think are going to potentially come together that could cause a bit of a slowdown and as a result of the economic slowdown, obviously ideally, or we should see a reduction in inflation and prices as well. And I think we're going to see a faster pace of cuts next year. One of those impacts, I really, I know people might call me crazy but I actually think that with the AI maturity that's, I believe will happen predominantly in the second half of this year. We're going to see more layoffs and we're going to see more people out of work and you know, just things like that happening that I think you're going to, you know, will reduce the consumer spending and will just cause things to maybe ease a bit. So anyway, you've now had my 18 month predictions on what's happening.

That's good. I'm not ready to put any more, any more bets out there yet. I will tell you this and it's interesting, by the way, just nice note from, from Terry. I think she's in Chicagoland area and Darlene is not far away as well here today. So the, I, I guess you triggered something on for me last week and talking about maybe just one cut with a half a, you know, 500 basis points or a half a percentage cut versus quarter percentage cuts. And it hadn't thought of it at all that way before. We were talking about last week when we had Lynchase on with us on the show. But you know what, what really, really triggers for me is, I think about that is, and by the way, you know, I heard some pundit yesterday say their thoughts were, you know, we're like more likely to get an increase than a reduction in any rates. And I think that's absolutely ridiculous. And it wasn't anybody that's tied to the Fed or anything like that. But I think you're still seeing a lot of that discussion. If you, you know, msnbc, you know, or cnbc, I should say, not msnbc, but cnbc, Bloomberg. Some of the folks that they're talking to are, they're still talking about two less people talking about three. But what's interesting is, and I hadn't thought about this at all until you brought it up last week, was that because you were talking about maybe instead of two smaller ones, we get one bigger one. I could see us actually getting two or maybe three of the quarter point ones. So that there's the feel that the Fed is saying, hey, you know what, we're, we're not, we see what's coming. We're not doing big cuts, but feel good because we gave you two. It's, it's the same amount, but we gave you two. Right.

Again, we'll obviously see. I'm sticking with my one. I'm probably at this point sticking with my one and a quarter point. But I don't think a half a point is out of the realm of possibilities.

So clearly the world of technology thought you were wrong because it just took your picture away for about 10 seconds there.

So I just got tired of looking at me.

All right, very good. Yeah. So anyways, we see these, you know, then the reality of it is it just kind of goes back to this simmering up and down thing that we've been kind of talking about. Right. We'd rather see a rolling boil than a simmer with stuff that we're selling.

And People are spending. I mean, there's no doubt about it, right? There is. People are spending, they're spending money, they're continuing to put money on credit. I mean, it's actually quite remarkable. And when you're spending, right, prices tend to go up.

Well, I think for the most part, that is, if we looked at the statistic, you're going to see that a big part of that spending is probably folks in the millennial range or lower because they've never experienced in their life. You know, I mean, we remember, you know, lines to get gas right. In the 70s and weird things happening in the economy we think about, you know, and I'm certainly, as I say every week, I'm far from an economist. But the, as you look at kind of what's been going on here, you know, we're frustrated because of mortgage rates in the Sevens, but in the 80s we were 10, 12, 14% or more. Right. And you know, in our parents days, you know, 10% mortgage rate would have been, you know, a luxury.

Right.

Because so, but I think what we're seeing is a lot of that exuberance. Maybe exuberance is too strong of a word, but a lot of what you see going on out there from that high spending is from people who have never experienced a downturn before or of major. Or when we, what we saw 2008, 2009, in that time, they were too young to even really understand what was going on.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe so. Anyway, still sticking with my one. I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm getting ready. Looking forward to that state.

Well, there's, there's no turning back for either of us at this point.

So. That's right.

You're hoping for.

Maybe we need to do the show live from Chuck's while we're eating the steaks.

Pretty funny. So, hey, you know what? As we say that, I'm going to throw this out before we leave our, our economy and supply chain section. I'm just going to throw that out to. Whether you're listening live or not is, you know, we're just. Where are we at 14 weeks away from the hundredth episode and or the hundredth show. We've got to do something, right? We can't have you in a, you know, in a condo and me and my home office for that milestone. And it's, it's astounding. I've got to come up with the statistics on how few podcasts actually make it that far. And I don't know if we're just, you know, Crazy and keep going like others give up. But getting to 100 is a big, big deal that I'm proud of you and what we've done with that. So we're going to have some level of celebration that ties into that. So we got to map that out and figure out maybe we do it from the. From the beach and Laguna here and. And with umbrellas and boat drinks and in beach chairs or something. So we'll have to figure that out.

That should be a good audio visual experience.

Right?

Right.

No, the cameras would only be pointing at the ocean at that point. Yeah, good point. The. But the reason I bring that up is if you got ideas, throw them out to us. Let us know what we might. Might do for a hundredth episode. Might be fun. So before we jump ahead. All right, Paul Kennedy says take the show on the road. I think that was an invitation to do that from the Dakota Supply Group's corporate headquarters in the Twin Cities. So maybe we'll head.

I got a lot of family in Twin Cities, so that would be okay.

I just want to go grab dinner with Paul.

That'd be good, too.

He's got some great folks on his team. We might. I'm thinking there might be a. I've got a waterfront location in mind that could possibly work, but we'll figure it out.

There's a lot of lakes in Minnesota.

There is. That's a good point. Maybe we, you know, we've got a regular listener and a longtime lead smart customer that just bought a lodge in Montana, too. That's an interesting thought. Okay, now we get the juices going. All right, everybody, keep that happening.

All right.

Very good. So Mike Franz just said, come on up. Mike's in Minnesota, too. So that. That's. We'll have to keep figuring this. So. But listen, we've been talking a lot in the last. Getting back to the reason that we're here and why people spend time with us is we've talked a lot about supply chain stuff and port issues. Right. Last year, we were talking about west coast port problems and potential strikes. Then we had the Canadian issues. Earlier this year, we were talking about a potential east coast and Gulf coast or Gulf coast strike issues. But now we've got what we've been talking about with this kind of perfect storm triple threat with Panama Canal issues. We've got issues with the Suez Canal with the Houthi rebels and the bombings and stuff for them going on there. And now we've got this tragedy in Baltimore. So, you know, this is this resiliency thing. And I think it's, you know, we've talked about it regularly but I think it's just really reinforces, you know, we've got lots of folks here running large organizations that listen in and we had Mike Mortensen from ARG Supply in Alaska on with us a while back and we were talking about this, I don't know if you remember, but Mike was talking about, you know, never before have they had more conversations with their vendors about what their vendors supply chain looks like.

Right.

And understanding that because of the, this is a time where we've got to be, you know, plowing through and knowing really what's happening. They're talking, you know, it could be just even the end of May that they could have a portion of the, the channel open in Baltimore. But right now they're only getting some small, you know, more like tugboats and some, a few barges through. And this article, you know, talked about the, this was from supply Chain Exchange magazine and or dot com and they talk about the capacity of the number of 20, 20 foot containers they can get through or TEUs. You know, 48,000 go through that just in January or a month and there's hundreds of thousands, you know, of those going through some of the bigger ports. But it did have the same conversation, you know, that it's not having a major, that one thing is not having a major impact. When we start putting these things together, what starts to happen is we have supply chain issues. But the biggest thing that's going to come out of this probably when you added that third layer is cost. Right.

But, but this article was, I think looking at things from a little bit of a different stance is despite all of that.

Yep.

Right. Is you know, overall we're being very resilient. We're finding workarounds, we're doing things and. And I would bet. Right.

For sure.

I completely agree that probably most distributors are definitely working with their manufacturers and manufacturers are also very much digging into their different supply chains options. I think this has been, I think we're going to end up a lot bigger, better and stronger as a result of all of this and looking at options and looking at things. And I think that's what this article talks a little bit about. Despite all the crap, we're making it, you know, still making it go.

Yeah. So they talked about, to your point, they made the quote, what has been done with working resiliency has resulted in relatively stable supply chains in a short period of time. But what they also talked about and they don't mention the result in this article, they talk about what's happening though, Right. Ships are going the longer route and they're going faster.

Right.

That adds huge cost.

That does add cost. Yes, yes it does.

That's the big issue here is back.

To the PPE or the for traducer price index that we were just talking about.

Yep, exactly. Right. And so now we've got these added costs to get even finished goods and raw goods that are coming to North America and other parts of the world. Right. And you know, it's if you think about something going from Asia to Europe to not go through the Suez Canal is it's devastating right. From that time standpoint. So yeah, you're right that this talked about how we've been somewhat resilient so far. But that resiliency piece and I think what we're learning from all of this is we can't only be thinking about resiliency in our supply chain and resiliency is probably too simple of a word is that it's more of a have this be part of our, you know, I mean sometimes people have a title of somebody within the organization or a group of people that's called supply chain analysts and things like that. Well, that's usually tied to managing numbers versus how we're getting things right. And supply chain, you know, optimization and so forth is is often tied to crunching the numbers about delivery rates and things like that. But I think this is going to become more and more important, more and more powerful to those wholesale distributors and manufacturers who are taking advantage of understanding this are going to be the ones that are thriving more. Because I don't think these things are going to go away. I think where the risk is. Right. Can you imagine is if this and I'm assuming the union's probably not the east coast and Gulf coast port workers union probably is going to be smart enough to not go on their strike. That's I think two or three months away while this issue is going on, this tragedy in one of the ports that they impact. So hopefully that's the case. But imagine through all of this if the port workers went on strike as we talked about a month or so ago was their deal was being negotiated could be a challenge. So anyways, let's jump ahead. Let's go into our manufacturing and distribution segment. There was a good article here about manufacturing numbers as well. And this did kind of a. A year, a year, a month compared to previous year months. You know, there's parts of it are down but they Talked about how strong the first quarter of last year was, which would make it hard to kind of catch up with for this quarter this year as well. Right?

Yeah. So, I mean, it looked like it was a big jump in the first month and then there was a decline from last year. So a bit of a roller coaster ride. Could just be some numbers, things that are there, but looks like overall just things inching up.

Yeah, well, they talked about expanding to a level for the. In the first quarter that that's higher and better than since 1Q22. So, you know, I just think we're going to continue to see these kind of good new bad news things. Right. We talk about this each week kind of. But it's important that we're keeping on top and looking at these numbers and then understanding what they mean to, to our business as we go ahead. So. But it's good, I think that's important to keep an eye on manufacturing technology, the PPI for production costs and so forth is, is powerful to do on an ongoing basis. Good. All right. Want to jump in on this industrial metaverse, not just for large corporations. Want to jump on that first?

Well, I think, I mean, Override was really was quite impressed with the article. I think it really kind of, you know, you hear a lot about the Metaverse or augmented reality or virtual reality, right. You don't really hear a lot about the use cases that are behind it. And I thought they really did a nice job in here talking about some of the use cases. And I agree. I mean, I can't imagine any company, large or small here in the next five years that would start to invest in. I mean, it'd almost be negligence, right. To start going and investing and building things and putting things together without doing some form of metaverse. E like lack of a better word, Metaverse. Ish. Sort of testing or prototyping or all of those types of things. I mean, it's just, you know, it's. It's ridiculous, right, to think you try and do that on a trial and error sort of situation. And I think that's their point here is that this is going to become the standard or this, if this will be the norm, this is how manufacturing will be done regardless of the size of the, of the organization.

Well, and so it talks about. Right. One of the quotes I liked out of the article was it says many people associate the concept of the Metaverse with a colorful virtual world for entertainment and shopping. But it says its greatest potential lies in unlocking significant value for industry And I think that's the case, right? So I think where most of our minds go in some of this would be, you know, back to was it was that Tom Cruise movie where it's in the room and pushing everything around on the virtual screen. Minority Report, I think is what it was. Or now we see, you know, Apple's goggles, right, that they're out with and Facebook slash Meta has their goggles out. And you know, I think we've probably all seen the memes or the YouTube videos of people walking down the street with the goggles on and they're like playing drums or they're moving emails around or whatever it might be. There's so much more to this, right? And so what we're talking about now, you know, is that idea of, and I said it was great. It's you know, the image that goes with the article, you can see it on the screen here. You know, someone is wearing some virtual reality goggles and they've got what looks like a Sawzall, battery powered Sawzall in front of them where they're able to look at design prototypes and things like that, right? So when we can now look at things and say, okay, let's look at not just a thinking from a manufacturing standpoint, you know, we're not just thinking about, okay, well if we changed the saw blade to this, here's what we have statistically. But we can take that statistical data that we have, we can put that with the CAD drawings of what the new model would look like. We could take that saw blade and actually put it on four or five different vendors piece of virtual equipment and watch what it does. Now we're getting this real world thing. Not to say that I'm just going to use a Sawzall or a reciprocating saw like they have looks like here in this article. But now I can test, you know, Metabo Makita, Milwaukee, all of the different, you know, Stanley Black and Decker DeWalt. I could test my blades virtually with all of the data sets against all of those different pieces of equipment and I don't even need to go buy one, you know, so those are the types of things that we're going to see. What came through my mind in looking at this, you know, they talked about it optimizing production, getting continuous feedback loops on what's going on with your production. We've talked a number of times about what the Metaverse can do for us with training models and so forth that we can build for our teams and say, well, what does my business look like if I opened a branch here with this many counter people based upon this customer base and this end user base. Now we start virtually seeing not just the data flowing, but even what does that look and feel like? Do we have enough space to do these things? One of the things that, you know, came to my mind is if, you know, if you're thinking about, if you're a manufacturer, you know, and you figured out how to optimally using the Metaverse, right. To to build some tools where you're optimizing your warehouse for your pallets, your cases, however you're storing things, what great data you could share with your distributor partners that says, hey, you know what, the best way to store this for optimization in your cubes or loading or unloading or packaging or whatever it is is this. We've already done that work and they did all the model testing.

I think that's a great point. I think that if a manufacturer can provide that level of value add right to their distributors, that's going to give them a big, big advantage. So I mean the more value add that you can provide with that. I think that's a really great point.

Well, and I think right manufacturers and this is a whole new discussion. We could go path, we could go down. But at the end of the day, manufacturers are always looking for how to get more mind share. Sure. And you know, time and energy from their distribution partner. So what better way than to just, you know, instead of sending spec sheets and doing lunch and learns, what if we were really helping them optimize and maximize their business with tools outside of that are product related. Right. We've learned this from our testing. Let me show you how you can use that in your business. Or by the way, we've built our model so that you can actually log into a secure area and do some of your own testing.

But it's value add, right. I mean, who are you going to do business with? It's. Yeah, we talk about value add to the end user. Value add from the manufacturer is no different. Right.

And I think that becomes a trickle down effect. I think my point that I look at the strength of all of this is, and we're going to talk about this in a few minutes, right? About AI adoption and so forth. You don't have to be first. In fact, sometimes it's better to be a fast follower. But what you do need to be thinking about is whether you're a manufacturer or distributor is what am I doing to stay even with or ahead of my competitive set of factors and am I on the right roadmap so that I do these things and get these things right long term? Because we talked every week about the changing customer and the changing buying habits and keeping up with that. So if a manufacturer can partner with a distributor, everybody doing more to serve the end user, it's great. And if obviously if you're a manufacturer that provides more value with a better product, you're going to take the lead over your competitors as well. So I thought it was good. It was a good article about that. Yeah, it's actually, it's from a British publication, I think it was called themanufacturer.com and it spoke to and got a lot of information about from a division of Siemens and Siemens is a monster German company and. But they talked about how they're doing it in small business units, which I thought was cool too. All right, E Commerce and marketing jumping into our next segment section here. The first article talks about Grainger doubling down on digital commerce. Do you have any thoughts that came out of that?

I had questions just because I don't fully understand the whole. I'm not an expert on Grainger's digital strategy, but it sounds like from reading this and I'd like your take on it is they have kind of two different web presences. So they have one that's maybe grazer.com which is a bit more full serve, more aligned with their sales team and then they have another presence that's more hey, do it yourself and you're more on your own. And it looks like they were really expanding the more do it yourself in, you know, scenario with it, which I found interesting I guess for certain. I mean, I guess with their wide variety of. Of SKUs. Right. There's certainly a lot of SKUs that probably fit very well in that. And then there's other SKUs that fit more and products and product lines that fit more with the full serve approach.

You're right. And so we can talk about that a little bit. I don't know if we have. Sometimes we get some guests that are some wonderful former Grainger executives that are with us. But you know, Grainger used this term. They were the first people I ever heard to use this term. But it's tied to, as they call it, their endless assortment. Right. And the reality of it is Grainger has historically been as a company as most wholesale distribution is a hub and spoke model of branches with distribution centers feeding those branches. Well all of a sudden when E Commerce came around, they went to that endless Assortment, which they went to with grainger.com is how they got started, which is traditional, right? We could plug in, you know, fastenal.com here, mse.com here, any of the larger publicly traded organizations like that. They all kind of worked to jump in at varying levels of success and varying time frames. And the idea behind that is a big part of what this, this article talks about, right? Is when you have an organization. And I remember in my earlier days selling to Grainger and going to Lake Forest regularly as a vendor, being summoned, as I call it, for an overview of what they called their Grainger Value Advantage program. And that was the message that their sellers were taking to the end users, which talked about the strength of their hub and spoke model. And they can get you anything quickly, but that's out of the branch and that's going on a delivery truck or UPS or somebody coming into a branch. Well, this E. Comm piece said, now we can offer you so many more items that we don't have to have in the branch because if they're in our hub and spoke model, we can get it out of the hub quickly. I don't want to turn this into a discussion of the history of Grainger because I'm probably not qualified to talk about this other than my personal experience, but Grainger Bot and I think when we had Ron Paulson on with us in the Q4 of last year, we talked about this a little bit. Ron was very involved as a Grainger executive in the early days of all of this. Very early in that E Commerce was coming along, they bought a company called Lab Safety Supply in Janesville, Wisconsin. And Lab Safety Supply put out this monster catalog. And if you had a pulse and appeared you could ship things on time, Lab Safety would carry your products. And it wasn't about Lab safety, it was general safety. And it turned into industrial as well. Grainger bought that. And then all of a sudden they went from that model of Grainger having three or four vendors per SKU or per category. I should say lab safety having 20 or 30 per category. Granger up theirs and brought those down and together they probably had 8 or 10 what this article references about that. They've had a little bit of struggle again and it appears, and this is my take on this, but what I read between the lines was Zorro. Their online presence is lower cost because they don't have that same branch structure that they have to support from a margin standpoint. So pure econ play, they went back to that Lab Safety model where we'll just kind of carry almost everything because the vendor will ship it or we might have it in our warehouse. If it's a Granger SKU already, they done a phenomenal job. But it kind of looks like they got a little bit ahead of their skis with how far Zora went into that as well. That's kind of the crux of all of this. But the chart that we have, and we have it up on the screen here, and it's large in the article, you know, talks about them 2022, their total sales were at Granger were 15 and a quarter billion, 2023, 16 and a half billion. But what they talk about too is their high touch sales versus their endless assortment. So high touch, am I answering your question here? I guess. Is that the crust?

Yeah, I think that the answer is, is that the low touch is they're expanding. They're really trying to push that. And that makes sense, right? Is, hey, you can get it here. Right? Regardless, you can get it here. Or if you need more of a full serve or a higher touch thing, then you've got that as well. But I think this is saying they're doubling down more on the, for the moment anyway, on some of the low touch approach.

Well, and you. And you see that, the success that they're having with that in this chart as well, you know, an increased growth level that they're seeing with that, it's just, I think they're also finding a balancing act, how to go do that correctly right now. And they're seeing where those adjustments need to be. But it's a great, I mean, it's a great story and a great model to follow of how they.

But I think that chart is really relevant, right, because we talk a lot about providing that high level of service and providing that experience and all of that and getting that kind of balance and understanding. I think there's some good, some good data in there.

Yeah, no, it's good. So, again, this is a good time for us to jump in since we're talking about charts is again, Kevin Brown here, Tom Burton. We get together every week and have this discussion about the news of the week as it relates to wholesale distribution and manufacturing. Manufacturing. And our focus is to try and take that news, peel the onion back a little bit, as we like to say, and talk about how that impacts wholesale distribution as a whole. If you're listening on the recorded podcast, what you're missing is some of the charts, some of the articles, the newsletter itself that we talk about here each week. So if you would like that newsletter and you do not get that, please let us know. Simple. Two simple ways to do it is that you can reach out to us@helloadsmartech.com and we will get that out to you. Or you can join the podcast website, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. we'll get that information out to you. You can also hear previous episodes and so forth there.

So yeah, Mike's comment here real quick. And then I know we need to move on here quickly, but I think he brings up a good point. Right. He says with Grainger doubling down on digital commerce means it'll be harder for smaller players to be seen online. Local distribution needs more than SEO to compete. Right. Because, and he's right, there is, you know, the SEO model, I assume, fits very well with their endless assortment model and their low tech thing. And he says marketplaces will be taking away from relationship building opportunities. So smaller players and additional strategies for end user engagement. Yeah, there's definitely a poker game here that I think you have to think through depending upon who you are, who your market is, your size and all of that that takes into that account. And how do you find your best, you know, niche, if you will, in that, in that, in that game. So in that poker game. Right. How do you get yourself the best position? I think there's some, you know, a lot of things to be thinking about there.

Yep. So, Mike, thanks for that comment. Mike's been on the, on the podcast here with us a number of times. Couple of times. Mike's the founder of our co founder, I think of Insupply and Insupply works with local and independently owned wholesale distributors on helping them get their messages out. It's Insuppli. Mike does a great job with their team of supporting local and independent businesses as well. So it's good stuff.

I think we have a heckler too. I don't know, we might need to, we might need to ban her from further shows.

I, I have, clearly I have no influence on her. So you may need to have a talk. I think we just protected my wife. So as we, as we talked about that, I'm assuming she's relating that to the, the comment about getting the newsletter.

So yes, it was.

All right, you have a talk. Will you have a talk with my wife?

I'll take care of it. Yeah, I'll handle it.

For those of you that don't know, because we didn't say it today, Tom and I have been lifelong friends and so he can sometimes get A message across to my wife better than I can. So good. Of course, Mike thinks it wasn't a plug. It was an acknowledgment of great work that you guys are doing at Insupply. So. All right, next article as we jump ahead. Can digital content drive worthwhile ROI for distributors? This is my take on this article is kind of cool. This is written by Lindsay young. Lindsey's with 3 Aspens Media. She does just a ton in wholesale distribution. Fantastic human being, great writer. She's got a team that does some neat stuff. And I actually sent her a message this morning thanking her for that because I think what she did is kind of boiled down a lot of things we talk about regularly and made this kind of as a little bit of a roadmap. But most importantly, I think really calling out the importance of investment in digital content for wholesale distribution. That you did a good job.

Yeah.

And.

It would be interesting to unpack this. Maybe she'll probably be back on the show.

I think she's on with us either in the year June.

Yeah, Obviously you have all of your product content and your website content about your products and all of that. What she was talking about here is additional digital resources that really. And I think it ties into what we were just talking about. Right. That properly positions you and establishes the right relationship that you're looking to make with your customers. And, you know, that can come in a lot of different ways. One of the things that we're seeing a lot that people are looking for is kind of a lot of the things we talk about in this show, like, what is the state of the market? What is the state of the market that we're in? What is the state of. So as an end user, there's a lot of potential value. Or a distributor. Right. Rather, there's a lot of potential value you can provide to your end user, just about what's going on in the market, in the world and things like that, because you have a broader view of things. So I thought that it was an interesting way of looking at, okay, how do. What kind of content do I need above and beyond my product information and, you know, the things I have on my website about my products and so forth. I think there's a lot to talk about here. Way more than we have time for today, but interesting.

Let's. Let's hit some of the highlights here because I think what Lindsey's really doing is she's referencing online content, but it actually ties pretty well, too, to the whole E commerce journey, I believe as well because one of the challenges and the title of this article talks about ROI for developing content. And I think people also struggle with where's my ROI on my website? If they're just trying to look at how many transactions they had on the website and the website goes so much further than online transactions. Right. It can be people just building orders. I'd love to see some statistics if you look related to wholesale distribution of the abandoned cart. Numbers are probably dramatically through the roof compared to a consumer experience. Because you could go build your orders online and see once you logged in and you're building discounts and it's not uncommon. We know a big use of E commerce within wholesale distribution is I'm just going to build my order online here, but I'm still going to have somebody go pick it up. Right. I still want you to deliver it but. But it's so it's hard sometimes to track ROI on a website and it's the same thing with the, the marketing content we talk about. But I want to hit some of these statistics and she does a great job of the resources on this. She talks about 75% of B2B buyers prefer self service experiences with no rep involved. How many times have we talked about that here? Right. And that's Gartner's research. 71% of B2B buyers surveyed downloaded and consumed multiple assets to help with the decision making process. From demandgen.com right. 46% of B2B buyers surveyed report increasing the amount of content they consume over the past prior 12 months. And so this is the question and I think this is the value of the article and I love Lindsey, she's a great writer and she said so the better question might be based upon those stats is what is the cost if you don't meet customers increasing demand for digital resources. And that is everything from product specs, product videos, webinars, podcasts, if you have the desire to do those types of things, blog posts about how to do things better. And I love that. Right. It's the question is what is the cost if you don't meet their increasing demand for digital resources. So I thought that was good. A couple of the last things she hits here while she talks about the value and the ability to grow wallet share with existing customers. I would suggest it's a defensive mode as well to keep existing customers. Then it would be to grow wallet share with those improving customer experience you talked about. But the other thing that we don't talk about is the article as I talk about what we see regularly and then we discuss here is when you put great content together with great online resources for shopping, it allows that local or regional distributor to not only go to major new marketplaces because their sphere of influence grew outside of, you know, South Salt Lake, Utah out to now their scope of influence is into South Florida and into even other countries. But it also talks about the opportunity to reach new vertical markets. Right. There are vertical markets that if you're a regional seller, you might have 20 branches, but you're in a regional part of the country and you sell into these four verticals. When we get online with great content and great e commerce presence now we can start hitting new verticals outside of our geography. So good article. I appreciate it Lindsey, putting that one together.

And I want to hit Bob's comment here real quick.

Sure.

You know, you suggest they're preferring rep free experiences but at the same time buyer remote remorse is going up because of it. And I wrote about this actually quite a bit in my book. Even though that you know the stat like you read there, like especially younger buyers are saying, oh, I just want to do everything self serve. It's not necessarily in their best interest to do everything self serve.

Great point.

To Bob's point. Right. It's like a lot of times you end up doing something, you're like oh God, what did I do here? Did I buy the right thing? Right. The buyer's remorse. But you also see a lot of situations where buyers just end up in a confusion of content. Right. You end up in content confusion, you end up with a down a rabbit hole and then you don't make any decision or you end up down paralysis. Right. So and again we can, I don't want to get into a whole different discussion here, but I think really the answer is is not entirely to figure out how to make a self serve environment for somebody, but how to create content and how to set things up so that people, when it's appropriate, are willing to engage with your sales team even potentially earlier in the cycle. And a lot of that is adding the value that's there on the things that are that are happening. So I think there's a give and take here. It's not just how do you make this as more and more self serve, it's how do you then provide the right content and the right thought leadership that may cause somebody to go, huh, maybe I should have a conversation earlier in the buying process with this company and not just do everything on my own.

Yeah, I think that's great. And I Think what bringing this all full circle, I appreciate Bob's comments on that is I think what we really want to do is we want to enable the customer. We want to keep them going down a journey or as your book talks about our yellow brick road, right. We need to guide them where they need to go but we need to give them those breadcrumbs on the path, so to speak that fits what their desire is. But we want to keep them moving down our path. Right. So I mean in sales, right you're either in your buyer's process or your buyer is in your process. But we need to be able to give them more content, more tools, more ways to buy. And I think that's the beauty that wholesale distribution in particular has over traditional E commerce is hey, you can consume data on the website, you can consume data in the E commerce shopping experience. You can place an order from an E comm experience but go pick it up at a branch or have it delivered which is very, very different than, or just say hey you know what, I'm interested in this. I've got it in a shopping cart. I haven't clicked. Have my rep contact me, you know and that's, you know I'm gonna, I am gonna. We had somebody set a commercial break earlier and I will do that really quick cause that's one of the things we do with at Lead Smart along with even our partnership with Optimizely and their e commerce platform is taking that data from a third source, bringing E commerce data into the CRM platform to gain customer intelligence to watch that journey. Where are they consuming data? Oh they've been to a branch, we see branch notes, they've got a shopping cart that's not been emptied or not been fully abandoned yet. Where's that life cycle of that customer? So it's good stuff Tom. I know we got a lot to cover.

Yeah, I'm going to hit mics real quick though. He says there's a, easy for me to say a program project coming out called Gray Data targeted to get end users to see the content and driving to the experts, very interested to see how that comes out because I, I do think that again the, the, the right strategy isn't just how to make things more self service. The right strategy is to create a situation where people are willing to engage with your sales team when it's the appropriate thing and it's going to move things down that buyer journey faster. So anyway, a lot to talk about there. I'm sure we'll talk more about it as we go along, let's get into tech, cyber security and AI.

Yeah. So let me, before we jump into that, there's a theme in this today on this particular segment of the newsletter and our discussion. And it really, it's like I probably should have, as we put this together, ordered these a little bit better. You know, the, the last article. And we'll talk about that as well. Talks about AI is ubiquitous in the business world, at least not yet. And, and one of the things, and I'm going to kind of preface this and this is one guy's thoughts, but you get to hear them when you come here on Fridays, I think. And I'm out constantly at conferences and what I hear regularly in the webinars that I listen to is as we talk about AI as we're talking, we talk about this consistently here. Right. All of these things that we're going to be able to do and all of the things that we're seeing coming down the pike, so to speak, is all really positive. But what I consistently hear is fewer use cases of what people are actually accomplishing. One oftentimes is because the AI models and tools aren't quite there yet. As your team works with right now, as we know things we're going to do, but we're not. The technology's not quite there yet to back it up, but I just consistently hear this message, it says just get started, just get started. Just play with ChatGPT. And there's some truth to that, in my opinion. That's good to understand where we're at today. But as we talked about it today, two things that I want to preface the discussion with on the next few articles. One is you, you don't have to be an expert at AI today. Maybe there's three things. One, you don't have to be an expert at AI today, but you need to be aware. And then you need to be working on a roadmap for your company. And that roadmap isn't just we want to use AI and we want to do this, we want to do some marketing or whatever. It is a strategic plan for AI that includes cybersecurity issues and it includes what Tech Stack looks like and so forth. And we can probably do a whole show on just the Tech stack. Related that the third piece that I want to plug into that is a concept that we're going to start hearing more and more and more of. I call it the incumbent versus one offs.

Right.

Is there is every day I get multiple AI newsletters. You probably get Two or three times the ones I do, Tom. But it's all the new AI tools that are coming up and I think people need to have a roadmap and a plan versus just starting to buy one off software, especially in the space that we speak to. My concept is, you know, I call it the incumbent. And Microsoft's copilot is the perfect example of the incumbent is the copilot's in a trusted source. And I think people should be looking at. And we're going to talk about some successes and failures in these next couple articles about people that just kind of went out on a limb and trusted some things without a plan. So that's my soapbox for a moment before we dive in.

Okay, good. Yeah, no, I agree. I think what I've learned firsthand in working with customers is the crawl, walk, run process of preparing to use AI is got way more steps and is way more detailed and is way more. There's, there's a lot more crawl that has to happen before you go even to the walk into the run than I would have believed if you would have asked me even six or nine months ago.

Right.

So doing things in the right sequence, what I'm really learning is doing things in the right sequence, especially related to your data. But even how you use the data and how it's done is. Will has such a, such a huge downstream impact. But if you get that wrong in the beginning, then you're kind of, you know, fighting, swimming backwards going forward. So taking that, let's go back to this first article, right? The Air Canada chat chatbot ruling. And this was the situation where Air Canada somebody went in, I think, and asked about a bereavement rate. The chat bot gave back saying, oh yeah, you can do something. And it turns out it wasn't within the live agent said, oh no, you.

Can'T just buy your, buy your ticket and then let us know later about the bereavement stuff and we'll give you a discount.

Right, right, right. I mean, first of all, the biggest mistake is Air Canada just sort of honored what came on in the check chatbot. Right. So. Right. I mean, what would that have cost him? A couple hundred bucks or a few hundred dollars? It's like. And look at the amount of PR and other things that have been created from that. But that's a different issue. That's not what we're talking about here. What it really then, and this is where it is difficult. Right. Is to test the different. And I don't know that they, they made a bad decision or they had a bad company or they did, they had a bad roadmap. We don't know that, but they certainly you have to go through this testing process with the data, piece by piece and so forth and really then make sure that over time you're getting in the systems, learning more and more and more and taking these things into consideration. So again, we don't know what happened there exactly. I think it's been a bigger PR issue than it is actually a technical issue on the things that are there. But I think the point being is that without doing things in the right sequence and without doing this things, then you potentially create a situation where you can, you know, have some, maybe some serious damage on things. Yeah. And I do think, just one last thing, I think if you just go back to the third article because I think in the interest of time, we can hit these together. Right. The generative AI isn't ubiquitous in the business world, at least not yet. I agree. And the reason it isn't is because of what I just said is that businesses are still figuring out what is the foundation that has to go in place to then be able to take advantage of this and at the same time wait for the AI technology to get to that point where it's more industrial strength.

Great recap. Great. The latter part of this particular article says both chatbots and humans make mistakes. Right. And, and we're in a world right now where we're just, I mean think about how much what, what has happened in the. Where, where are we at? Would that be? Not even barely 18 months, right, since Chat GPT was launched and what has gone on in the world. Right. In that setting, it's just phenomenal. And, and so we're not even in the, I'd say we're almost in the embryonic stage of AI to even be thinking about the crawl, walk, run stage. So it's important. But I mean, I'm seeing some tools out there that we've had customers talk to us about that they've seen that I've gone and looked at and it's like I see what their website says they say they can do, but I, I know because of the stuff that you and your team have shared about what doesn't work yet in the AI world and people are saying that they can do it, it's not going to be a good experience.

It works great in a demo, right. I can demo anything I want to there. But when it comes down to having an industrial strength, production ready product in a business that especially if it's based around their data and tying in other things, there's just a process that has to go through on that. That is. And the interesting thing that I'm learning is that process and I'm really trying to work on documenting it, but I keep learning more things and it's like every time I sit down to try and document the process, I learned something new. But everything along the way in that process is really understanding how everything builds on each other. And I don't know how to explain it well until we actually lay it out. But you get something here and then you can build on it there and you can build on it there and there's, there's insights and information that people aren't. I hadn't thought about. I mean I'm finding things in data, insights and data that I would have never even thought about a few months ago. Right. That again, if structured the right way and are put in the right way then provides that foundation downstream. So again it's, I believe the roadmap isn't about what products am I buying the Pro. The roadmap is about what is the process that I'm going through to create a foundation. So as the products become available, whether they're from an incumbent or, or even a new player, I have a foundation to be able to use those, test those and validate those in my organization. So it's a little bit of a different, it's kind of a bottom up approach rather than a top down approach.

That's good. So before we go off of this, there is another article here about, and we won't go into the articles but it talks about basically a technology guy accidentally finding a hack in a major system within the Linux operating system. And I wrote myself a little bit notes in my show. Notes today was about, you know, I see I can see a Tom Cruise movie coming out of, you know, or a Mission Impossible thing with something like this. And the bottom line is someone got into and bear with me, if you're listening to this closely and like I, blah blah, blah, Linux, whatever, I don't, I don't deal with Linux, but stop with this for a minute and I'm going to give the layman's term of this because we talked about this a little bit with Lynn Chase last week. So somebody's doing basically a drip attack from the outside into a major piece of software. Now Joe Smith that runs XYZ distribution in Omaha and Kevin Brown here today, that probably doesn't mean that much to us but what happened was before this got caught basically accidentally, as the story talks about is it's not just okay, there was a hacks in Linux that impact that it had is almost every other piece of mission, say almost every other, many other pieces of software that you either are using now or could be looking at using are built using this Linux platform that now has these holes in it. Those holes, had they not been stopped, could have gotten to all of these other software products that wrap out. Right?

Yeah, I mean you're in the right direction. I don't know if it's 100% what you were saying, but what the, the point is here, right? Linux is an open source operating system. Obviously companies that are using that generally have some pretty, you know, well sophisticated IT people. If they're using Linux because it is open Source, you have to upgrade it. You, you need more technical knowledge than other sort of things that are there. I, I think that there's two points here, right? One is the fact that it happened, right? So somebody, you know, open source means that everybody there's, it's open to anybody to contribute to the development effort. Some bad actor came in there, put in something that was a back door into it, into this open source software. I think on the other side of it is again a more sophisticated IT per person who was doing some performance testing was able to identify that and catch it before it became a bigger issue. Again, there seems there's two parts of this article. One is, yeah, beware if you're using open source and there's a lot of open source conversation occurring with large language models and AI and so forth. So you need to be eyes wide open when you're using open Source and make sure that you have people that understand that and can deal with that. And then secondly, I think there are other tools that will be coming out more and more and I get this where AI can really help to make sure that you're looking at what you're getting and what you're installing and so forth and what are the potential impacts and the potential ramifications of changes and so forth as they're coming in. But yeah, I mean it's, you know, Open Source is becoming more and more of a common use case. You hear it a lot and I think this was a good wake up call on that.

Well, I think that the big takeaway for me with this is, you know, how it could impact other software and other organizations was it talked about it, it says this attempted attack, funny enough, they call it the supply chain attack carefully and Slowly pushed updates to little known tool within Linux that then moved it to the back through a back door into millions of other computers at once. That's the issue. The reason that I shared any of this together in these three key articles today was have a plan, know who you work with. And really it ties into what we were talking about in our supply chain section earlier today, which is, hey, if I've got a warehouse or you know, 55 warehouses across the country and I need to understand my vendors better because of supply chain issues, I need to take that same approach to my technology vendors to understand things like, hey, tell me about your cloud security. Tell me about the platform that you're built on and what that means to my business. What are the risks of me using your cloud based solution or cloud based AI solution versus someone else and understanding that and getting that clarity becomes extremely important. No different than you would check. Does your supplier of safety glasses truly have an ANSI certificate that makes them safe? You need to apply that diligence across to your technology vendor. So. Okay, agreed.

All right, let's move ahead here.

Yeah, those sections make my brain hurt because that's your day to day talk. But I have to think through that stuff. So you want to quickly hit this article about in our sales and M and a section about salespeople being coachable. Any thoughts?

Yeah, I thought it was a great article. It's one of actually one of the better articles. One of my favorite articles in a while actually talking about.

That's awesome.

Well, but I. We work with salespeople all the time. Yeah. And, and you know, you hear a lot of conversation about that, not wanting to change. I don't want to do things differently. I want to do things the way I've always done them. This is what we've already, you know, that's a large part of what we deal with that day in and day out. And what this said is that sales managers who coach consistently recognize a 28% in revenue from their coachable salespeople. The operative word being their coachable salespeople. And what they went into is, is, you know, what kind of makes a. What are the attributes of a coachable salesperson? What does that mean? What should you be looking for? I think now more than ever, especially as you're all the, for all the reasons we've talked about even today and whatever having when you hire salespeople and you have, you know, outside salespeople or even inside salespeople, having the hiring people that have a mindset that they want to be coachable, I think is a huge deal right now because there's just no way that the legacy approach is going to exist and be productive. Whether it's the year or two years or three years down the road. If you can't change that, you're going to be in trouble.

Great points. And you've got thousands of people that log into Lead Smart, Channel, Cloud and, and most of them are on. Well, almost all of them are customer facing and many of them on the sales side of things. So it's important to see that kind of thing that I like is, you know, coaching and training are different. Right. You know, training being more in a group setting, coaching being a one on one and there are people out there that do well in one and don't do well in the other and vice versa. So good takeaways on this. So again, this is part of our weekly newsletter around the horn and wholesale distribution and manufacturing that goes out. If you'd like to get that. If you don't just reach out to us, we'll get that to you right away.

Yeah, and I'll hit Bob's comment here. I agree, I think a lot of companies, a lot of companies, they talk about this, they almost never implement it. And I agree with you the difference between coaching and training. But again, you have to have somebody who's willing to make that change, willing to shift, look at things very differently along the way, which I think is going to be an imperative attribute, I think for anybody in the, in the sales, marketing or operations part of the business.

Yeah, good. Thanks for that comment today, Bob. I appreciate that. So good stuff there as we wind down today. People in leadership. A nice piece here that we added in. The reason we have a people in leadership section is because our friend Dirk Beveridge reminded us that we didn't and we don't talk about people in leadership enough. Dirk, if you don't know him, is the the man behind Unleash WD and the We Supply America tour that's getting ready to kick off again. He's been with us on the show and the we call ended up being called the Legends session that we had in January. We've got to get this one again scheduled for the middle of the year to review our program prognostications. But Dirk has got a session that's starting and it's called Force for Good and it talks about the 6 million employees in distribution and supply chain that are on the warehouse floor, the plant floor, all the way up to the C suite and talking about helping people thrive and making folks in the workforce feel prosperous and good about what they do. And, and I tell you what, you want to spend some time with somebody that just makes people feel good. It's Dirk.

He's a master at that.

He is. And he's a hugger as well. So that's good stuff. The last piece in that segment is about a potential shortage of manufacturing workers and it's threatening the US's global competitiveness. We've talked about some things like this quite a few times before on the broadcast here. And you know what? When we talk about the geopolitical threats in Asia, in the Middle east and so forth, the supply chain issues that we've talked about, pushing things to onshoring. This, this would impact us mostly with onshoring. Then we've got, you know, the Jobs act and the Inflation Reduction act and the CHIPS act and all of those things. Manufacturing plants are going to be being built. It's going to help construction, but we've got to put people behind those jobs. And we are not at a place where AI is going to solve that problem yet.

No, no. Unfortunately, that's not an AI, that's not an AI solution.

Nope. So, hey, that kind of hits it for the week. We've also got each week a section in here called the Industry Scuttlebutt. We've talked a little bit about some M and A stuff in there. Whitecap acquiring and doing another acquisition. One of the first comments we had for today was from our friend Paul Kennedy with a present. CEO of Dakota Supply Group. They just broke ground on another facility. They're widening their reach, so good for them. And a couple other pieces in there as well. So that's about it for this week. I'm a friend.

Yeah. Well, don't forget about the good reads that your Google Docs are probably safe from AI training. So, yeah, I was, you know, that certainly made me sleep better. My YouTube videos are not, but my Google Docs are. Anyway.

Well, but it's, it's, you know, it's interesting. I'm glad you caught that. I was going to move on.

You're.

It's funny. I'm moving us on and you're the one who wants to stop.

No rush, no rash. No, I'm just kidding.

That's funny. Trading hats there for a moment. I needed a laugh. Thank you. So that article, your Google Docs are probably safe from AI training. This is kind of a big deal though, right? Because that is a big concern for people in general right now. Is you know what from me is being used for training, right? If you just use the, you know, Chat GPT and just start typing stuff in there without knowing and understanding how you're using ChatGPT, you're training those models. Same thing. Whether it's Gemini slash Bard, whatever it might be, there is a caution here, right? If I send you a Google Sheet, which I do constantly, that's safe, right? So let me rephrase it. So they're saying is. So they're saying if I send you a link to it and I click in that Google Doc or Google sheet that anyone with the link can use it. They're saying that's safe. But you know, I, you we're both, and probably particularly me very active LinkedIn users and every day I see people put links to it. It typically comes from the M and a venture capital and investment world. But people are putting worksheets and links to Google Docs and surveys and things like that, right? And probably a good and I probably saw two or three Google links to Google surveys last week and those are being used and they, they clarify that if you're putting those out in a domain like that, you're at risk. So I think what it says is we all need to kind of be paying attention to what do we put out there and recognize that, you know, it ties to, you know, interestingly enough to whole nother realm of discussion. But you know, we, we have some customers that use lead smart channel cloud internally but they'll use for their marketing automation they use HubSpot and Google's talking about buying HubSpot and what happens to all your customer data if it's now in HubSpot and it's part of Google's domain? So that's the big push that people.

Are another topic for another day. Don't you know we're about out of time. In fact we're overtime man. What are you doing? All right, good comments today. Thank you. Thanks everybody for all the good comments and results and yeah. Now are we not here next week?

We are. You know, it's undecided. You're in Florida, I'll be in D.C. i think we're gonna do something but so stand by, watch where you get our info from. Let's do this Tom. And tell me if this is technically safe. We're either gonna do a best of recording will be available or we're gonna one of three things or we'll pre record something or we'll do a short show live.

Okay. Or we'll do Nothing.

I don't think. I don't think we'll do nothing.

Okay. All right, so one of those.

All right. Because the following week you're off in Vegas or something, right?

I am. I am.

College reunion.

And I don't. I don't think I'm going to be very valuable during my college reunion on that Friday. So you assume we'll figure something out tomorrow or for next week.

There's a joke in there about your current value, so that's true. No, you in Vegas, that's your, that's your play place with your buddies. And I don't want to bother you while you're there. But hey, a couple things. We've got some great guests coming up over the next couple months. CEO of national association of Wholesalers, Lindsay that wrote that great article earlier, Jonathan bank, find from Distribution Strategy Group. Some other great minds in AI like Jonathan. So stay with us again. Kevin Brown, Tom Burton, co founders of Lead Smart Technologies and obviously the founders of around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. We thank you for being with us. Our request of you is if you like what we do, tell your friends. And the easiest way to do that is if you're. Even if you don't listen to us on the podcast or on YouTube, jump over to those places, grab the podcast, leave a review, click the subscribe button, LinkedIn. Follow the lead Smart Technologies page, the Lead Smart Technologies page on Facebook or on YouTube and give us the thumbs up. Make some comments and. Or just forward the newsletter to your friends and help get that word out. Our audience is growing each week, both globally and here in North America, and we're thankful for you being with us, some of you faithful listeners, and some of the new ones that we get every week as well. So that's it, Tom.

Have a good weekend.

Yeah, everybody do the same. Be kind, do good things, and be safe.

Take care.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode and our guests. Each week we try our best to dig into the topics that are impacting your business. So please reach out to us and let us know how you think we can make the show better or topics you'd like for us to tackle or talk about more often. And even guests you'd like to see join us. We're looking forward to bringing you next week's session and hope that until then, you stay safe, stay focused, and do great things. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast and 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 atLead smart tech.com.