Text-to-Order, GenAI Roles, and AI Scams: Inside the Future of B2B Distribution

Foreign.

Welcome to around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution with Kevin Brown and Tom Burton. Sponsored each week by Lead Smart Technologies. Tom, Kevin and their guests review the news of the week and dive deep into the topics impacting manufacturers, wholesale distribution, independent sales agents and the global wholesale supply chain. Whether it's m and a SaaS and cloud computing, B2B, E commerce or supply chain issues, we peel back the onion with our guests into the topics that impact your business the most.

Good to see you excited on. On Friday the 13th. Good, good deal.

Oh, that's right. Didn't even think about that.

That's right. That's right. Taking chances like that, spinning around, you.

Know, I should just go bubble wrap myself and go in a closet.

There we go.

Tend to get hurt sometimes. Well, that's a kind of scary. I'm glad I'm not superstitious. I'm glad my wife's not superstitious. Darlene's on a, on an airplane on the way to go see the grandbaby in Colorado. So for her. Yeah, I wish you would have even brought that whole thing up. But no, it's okay. I'm not a superstitious person typically.

So no get through the show without any injuries.

Worried less about injuries and more about Internet. But I think all. Otherwise all is good. Oh, how are you doing today?

Doing okay?

Yeah. Just okay.

Just okay. But I'll do better now that we're there at the show.

Okay. I want you to be doing fantastic.

Fantastic.

I was expecting since we got to spend a couple of days together in person, you know, that you would just be stupendous and fantastic and overwhelmed and happy and none of that.

I'm catching up.

So, you know, just go ahead and lie to me. It's okay.

Okay.

Just tell me, tell me. It's great.

It was, it was wonderful. Yeah, wonderful. Best, best week.

We did accomplish a lot over a couple of days. So that's good. So. Well, let's, let's say somebody.

Good morning to Brian. And maybe that's what you were going to do. Yeah, it's Happy Father's Day weekend.

That's right.

U.S. open this weekend. Lots of stuff happening.

Interesting. So I've got a ton of work to get done and bought that new software for Lead Smart that. What do you call that trainual tool. Basically all of our systems and processes and all of the manuals and I've got some work to do on that. So with Darlene out of town, the U.S. open a wine locker in the other room. I might get some stuff Done.

Sounds like a great weekend.

Yeah. Very good. Very good. That's awesome. So good. Good stuff. So. So let's kind of get to it. Good morning, Paul. Good to see Paul here with us. And aloha from Bob. Although I think Bob's in Dallas, so. But as a Hawaii guy at heart, so love that. I think Mrs. Brown and I are heading back to the Aloha State in November if all things play out correctly. I guess that will depend on the budget. Her budgets for going to see the granddaughter.

That's right.

That may impact my Hawaii trip. So we'll see how this first trip goes with a baby. But good stuff. So let's. Let's get ready to dive in. We'll do a little bit of quick housekeeping. I'm Kevin Brown. This is Tom Burton. We get together every Friday and we chat about the news of the week as it impacts the global economy. We talk about all kinds of things from the supply chain. The economy, obviously. Tons and tons to talk about. Typically in the last month or so. Related. A couple months related to tariffs. We talk about sales and marketing and technology and robotics and AI and all of the things that are big and going on in. Well, that's funny. Keith says, who let Kevin have sugar again? That's a good one. No sugar yet today, but who knows what the day holds? Keith, no Sprite. You know, Tom, the Keith there. The last time I saw him. Why take a wild guess where I saw Keith at last?

A show.

Anaheim and Temple in Long Beach, California.

Oh, yeah. That was my next guest. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We went. We had lunch at Joe Jost. Right. The. The Icon Long beach beer bar that both of our fathers introduced us to when we were kids to. Probably learned how to play pool there too.

Right? That sounds really good. Maybe we should do a show from there.

We should do a show from there. We could probably get that set up with.

That happen. Yeah.

Some of the people we know. So if you. If you're out there in other parts of the world, just. Joe j o e J-O-T.com and you'll see what we're talking about there. But. Famous place that Tom and I grew up with. It's over a hundred years old now and Tom knows the family that owns it. So. Good. Good little pub. It was good to see Keith there a while back. So we. I shouldn't say I ran into him there. We met for lunch there.

Yeah. I was gonna say.

Yeah, preface that we both weren't hanging out in a bar by ourselves and Keith And I had lunch.

You don't have a lot of sugar, but they have some big beers, so.

They have some good beer and some good sandwiches. So anyways, I was going to try and do the introduction to the show here, but again, we get together each week. But one of the things that's important to share is first off of saying thanks for all that have been joined us today and that listen regularly. But if you're listening on the podcast format, which will be prepared later today, we're live this morning at 9:06 Pacific Time. And if you're listening to the recorded podcast that our editor and producer John will post later in the day, which would be on Apple or Spotify or Odyssey or wherever you get your podcast, you won't be seeing the newsletter that we'll have up on the screen. And that newsletter contains the top topics of the week from the news as we've kind of identified them. We call those together and get together here on the show to talk about the importance of those and how they impact wholesale distribution and manufacturing. So if you would like that newsletter, we'd love for you to have that. You can get it three simple ways. The simplest one is to, if you're active on LinkedIn is just search either Lead Smart Technologies, the company that Tom and I work for, or around the Horn and wholesale distribution. You'll see the newsletter there and you can subscribe. If you'd like us to send it to you directly like about 10,000 plus other people do, we'll get that out to you by sending us an email@helloadsmartech.com helloadsmartech.com we'll get that out to you. Or we have a website for the podcast which is www.aroundthehornpod.com and we will get that out to you either way. So we'd love to have you subscribe to the newsletter and then you'll see what we're talking about today. So before we dive in, Tom and I couldn't do this each week or we couldn't have the guests that we have with us if we didn't have the sponsorship of the company that we work for, which is Leadsmart Technologies and Leadsmart. At Lead Smart, we've developed a product called Channel Cloud. And Channel Cloud is an AI enabled customer intelligence, sales enablement and what we call Smart CRM solution. What we're able to do with that is provide wholesale distributors and manufacturers with deep, deep access to both customer team and business insights on a simple single platform that helps them accelerate growth throughout their Organization. We do that by bringing what we call siloed data from around the organization. ERP data, marketing automation, e commerce data, other types of structured and unstructured data that we'll be bringing together to help make better decisions about the business. We can see opportunities, we can see risks through that by doing smart alerts for your sales team inside, outside customer service and most of your customer facing people. So if your company is digitally transforming, look at looking to understand your customers better and your teams better and accelerate growth within your organization by using technology to do that. We would love to speak with you and share with you more about how we help many, many companies around the world gain that growth. So that's about it. Tom, you got any thoughts before we dive into the news?

You know you were talking about alerts. I have a favorite one from this week that we did with a new customer. Oh cool. Where the Genius feed like you're talking about is we looked for any account.

Why don't you say what Genius feed is real quick before you.

It's the AI sort of radar without getting it kind of looks at all the data and stuff. But what was cool about it is, is we looked at all of their product categories over the course of this year versus you know like so say take May of 2025 or wholesale distributor.

Right?

Yeah. And if anything was down any product category was down over 50% or over a certain dollar amount, it flagged a Genius feed alert and basically all their sales team now had visibility on what was happening year over year by product category really simply and they were ecstatic about that. It was like they, they was like nirvana in terms of their ability to see stuff that they wouldn't either they have to go mine it themselves or whatever. So that was my, my favorite Genius feed of the week.

That's awesome. Maybe we should have that as a segment of the show.

That's right.

Favorite Genius feed of the week.

That's right.

Yeah. So what you're describing is an AI enabled tool that looks across ERP and other data from within organization, identifies very specific types of triggers and then says smartphone alerts and could be email alerts and so forth out to the also doing smart.

It's also doing right on the mobile app pop up so they know what's, what's there for the outside team.

So they and you can even through that schedule tasks to go along with that of what needs to happen next. So good stuff.

All right.

All right. So a little bit we go through segments each week of, of the newsletter. We start each week with the economy and supply chain. So, you know, we're, we've got a number of articles to talk about here today, but it's, it's kind of interesting. It's watching the, watching the world turn by the, the current US Administration's whims of the moment almost, it seems like, because we went from early in the year, the World bank being pretty bullish on things, to cutting some growth pieces amid rising trade tension. So any thoughts for you? This was a Reuters article about the World Bank's cuts.

Look, I, I think that they're, they're, they're sandbagging a bit and cutting. I think 2.3% is way too low. I think it's not. And I haven't read the whole thing, so I shouldn't, I haven't read their whole forecast or the whole thing. But I think if you're only looking at tariffs and, you know, heightened uncertainty, as they called it, I think that's a little bit low. I think they're missing other things that are taking place. I think they're missing potential productivity. You know, they're taking this all the way out through 2027. Correct. And so I, if it was just, hey, for the next, you know, three months or six months, okay, maybe I could get behind it. But taking out for a couple years and not taking into account some of the productivity gains and other things, it's, anyway, I, I think it was a little bit sandbagged. Yeah.

Interesting. Well, I guess we'll see how this plays out, right? It, from that standpoint, they were looking at this. You know, they, it said in its twice yearly Global Economic Prospects Report, the global lender lowered its forecast for nearly 70% of all economies, including the U.S. china and Europe, as well as six emerging markets. They did that, it said from the levels it projected six months ago before US President Donald Trump took office. So it's, we're going to see what plays out of this. But, you know, we've got some other articles to talk about from a tariff standpoint and then even the views of CEOs that we'll talk about in a moment on things that it's, if we, my feeling is you're already seeing that there's some balancing of opinions on things. The question is if we could get some solid clarification on tariffs. We should probably see some settling down of things even if the tariffs stayed how they are now, which we can talk about here in a moment a little bit.

I don't know if it was in this Article? I don't think so. It might have been one downstream but they were somebody mentioned in the article about, you know, we're kind of in fog. Right. We're in this fog and it's kind of hard to see what's going to happen. Sometimes the fog lifts a little bit and you get a little glimpse of something. Then it gets thicker again. I thought that was a good analogy. I think that if, you know, obviously we'll find out this next article what comes out of the whole China conversation and then we have obviously what July 9th is the 90 day thing from the, from the other tariff piece and there's already conversation of that either being extended or, or otherwise so. Well that's I think the fog, if we could lift the fog or maybe not remove it but at least get a little more visibility, I think that would be a, a big thing.

Yeah. Well you've got both Lutnick and still trying to get all these names correct. Sorry Besant have said that, you know we've got a framework in place with China. It's not, you know, for it's not signed done every, everything in place but based upon that. And I think it was Bessant who said that. Yeah, it's earlier this week Secretary Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant told Congress that it's highly likely that the tariff pause would be extended for countries that are negotiation with the administration in good faith. So that plays out. That's pretty positive. So we'll have to see with that piece playing out. So the next next article as we're describing that is from ABC News. It said China appears to downplay US Trade deal Trump said was done. So I think this is, I, I read this as one is, you know, this isn't a sign sealed and delivered thing yet regarding putting something together for rare earth minerals which is really the core of that which is, you know, critical to I was watching an article yesterday or watching a report yesterday on CNBC while having lunch and you know they were really talking about the rare earth minerals piece and the importance to the technology, space. Right. Ferrero minerals for the, you know, batteries and EVs. But really the big component was national security and I had never kind of put that national security piece together which is pretty crazy if you're relying on a nemesis so to speak for the rare earth minerals that you need for your own military. That's a kind of problem.

It's, I mean it's a real situation and we created it right. We, we change and invested or you know, moved all of Our, most of our purchase up the rare earth from China and places that are potential adversaries. So yeah, that wasn't exactly kind of a tactical blunder on our end.

There's probably a growing list of those. So, but you know, it's what, what's interesting about this particular article is, you know, there's just, and, and I swore yesterday I wasn't going to talk about the craziness going on in la. And you know, LA is about halfway between the two of us and where you are up in the Central coast and where I am in South Orange county here. But you know, when I was up visiting with you earlier in the week, I took Pacific coast highway through Malibu just to get away from any of the headaches of going on in la. But I, I just, you know, you watch the, I don't know, I was going to say bombastic or just exaggerations that comes from the US President. He's got an agenda. You've got the Ministry of Commerce in China plus, you know, Xi Jinping there. That has his agenda and how he needs his people to be thinking. So of course Trump's gonna, if Trump says, hey, we've got to win on this, the other side of it is going to be a little bit downplaying that or at least if, if not the opposite end would be saying we that they won. And it ties into the, to me as the silliness is I think some of these political folks, and maybe this is just redundant of just general knowledge, but it just seems like I was listening last night, you know, so we have this craziness here in Southern California of the, you know, National Guard being federalized and coming in and working to support the ICE agents and so forth. I'm sure everybody knows all about that and it's all over the news. But the California governor went to the courts and got to get an emergency stay and, and when I listened to the governor last night, I was talking to my wife about this, I said he just sounded like a more polished and well dressed and more fit Trump. The vitriol that was leaving him is, I don't know if he, if you heard any of that. In fact, I know you didn't, Tom, but it was the anger and the frustration and the name calling that you saw to this is everybody's got an agenda, right? So whether it's the, the Chinese on the tariffs or, or another country on the tariffs or the selling and some craziness happening in California that of what's going on and I'm not saying that what's going on here is right or wrong. I'm just saying how it's being managed and handled and the rhetoric that goes with it is not productive from, from either side on this. And you had the California governor come out and just railing on, on the administration in just a, I just thought a horrible fashion. It just, but he's just more well spoken. But what he was saying was it just was Trump like and, and then literally two hours after that, the appeals court upheld it all and they've got till the 19th, I think to get a closer look at it. So it's crazy. So, and there's going to be big economic impact. There's, there's, you know, tying back to our audience here the area around the, where all of this problems are happening. Not only is it delivery trucks getting slowed down because the problems on the freeways and so forth. I can think of probably, you give me 10 minutes, I could probably think of 15 or 20 significant wholesale distributors from the safety arena, the industrial arena, plumbing, H Vac, food service. Food service is huge right in and around that area of distributors of food products. So big impact just with that, you know, I mean it's like forget about the port slowdowns that we had last month. This is, there's going to be some big impacts. My son is, has a manufacturing clothing brand and manufacturing company and they have people not coming to work. Right. He's quite concerned right now of just his workforce because they've got Paris Fashion Week coming up.

Not, not coming to work because they're afraid of ice or because they're afraid of.

Yeah, it's, it's impact because they're afraid of ice. And, and in this setting. And it's not impacting him too much right now as it is. His vendors are having a bigger issue. So anyways, I digressed a little bit.

But I remember seeing that in the articles here.

It wasn't. But you know, we don't have to stick with that. It's just my point out of all of this is like, look, everybody's got an agenda. The Chinese in this setting have an agenda. But I hope that we can get these pieces in place. Certainly don't want to see a continued 55 tariff on, on China. But that's a whole lot better than 145.

Yeah.

So it's good. All right, let's jump ahead to a CNBC article about the CEO. You think you jumped way past it, Tom. Economy. CNBC article said that 30 is C of CEOs. See either a mild or severe recession taking place over the next six months, but that's well below the 60% that had the same view in April. Right. So see which way the wind was blowing next week for these reports.

Yeah. And I think this was the article that talked about the fog. Right. So I think as they were interviewing the CEOs, they were less concerned about, you know, the falling off a cliff type of recession, but they felt like they were in the fog of uncertainty. And you're kind of navigating the fog of uncertainty. And so either one, a couple of things is going to happen. Right. So we just talked about, I think in the next 30ish days or so, either the fog is going to start to lift, which I do think will be a real nice tailwind for a lot of organizations, or the fog will be, it'll, the fog will turn into a more of a storm, which is what we had before, and that's what caused everybody to obviously have the, the bearish view on things. So. Yeah. But I think we're going to end up with still quite a bit of fog over the next 30 days or so.

Yeah, well, hopefully we have some little bit of stability starting. It would be great if it, if it continued. You know, I think as we talked about earlier, the administration is, I saw one of the articles we had here today. It talked about the likelihood basically coming from the administration here very shortly with, if you took probably the eu, Canada, Mexico and China out of it, it would be, come, come with your solutions fast or this is it, because they're not going to put a lot more time into it. But those are mostly the nations that are at a 10% tariff and so forth. But the big ones, I think we, we get these things squared away, specifically the China one, and I think we'll be in a much better place.

All right, should we move ahead?

Yeah. Let's just hit this real quick since we've been talking about it over and over again.

I was wrong. I was wrong.

Wait.

I thought the court would, I thought the court would, would, would block the tariff policy, but no, they upheld it.

So just a quick note to our producer and editor, John. When we hit this spot, I think we were, it would have been in about 22 minutes into the show. If we could make a snippet out of that and record that for the long haul, that would be great.

Well, it just happens so infrequently that, yeah, it's probably worth doing. Right.

Tom said he was wrong. That's okay. You know what?

It was wrong. I lost that bet.

Yeah. So what we're talking about here is last week Tom told us that he was very confident that the appeals court would say that there's, they can't continue to collect tariffs and that they would squash the whole tariff idea. And federal appeals court agreed to let the government keep collecting the, it says, it says here President Trump sweeping import taxes. And so there's challenges still. Right. And it's, there's got more arguments that they're going to hear, but for right now, they're moving ahead and we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens next.

Right.

My, my hope is that with that in place, you know, is that it brings more people to the table because as we talked about, I think on the show last week you were mentioning it, which I think was, you know, I, I, I'll say, I think you were smart to bring that up is like, hey, if I'm, you know, the EU and you know, there's a, a court that may say he can't do this, I'm going to pit pause for a moment. Right. Or maybe change my position in, in my urgency of negotiating. And now, you know, this is in place and it's time to, it's time to keep, keep the, the wheels moving and negotiating.

I mean, they said they were going to try and accelerate it, but yeah. What exactly that means. Right. And you know, this could go on for a while. So I, I don't think, yeah, we're.

45 days away before they even hear any more arguments.

Right. So I don't think it's going to bring a whole hell of a lot of clarity into what's going on. So nobody up held it. It would have brought some clarity potentially or at least some adjustment, but this doesn't seem to help.

Yeah, I think I would maybe take a little bit the opposite side of that thought. I think it's going to, there's way too many issues going on right now. Unless the administration continues to push the dates out of the impact of these, if we went, you know, even 55%, I think people would like to see lower. So I think it, I think based upon this, a lot of people are going to come back to the table. It may not get the Chinese thing done. But I think if we get something finalized as opposed to the, the, the kind of handshake deal with the UK and we get something finalized fully in place with the eu, those could be pretty significant. So could be, we'll see what goes. Anyways, last, last article in Our economy and supply chain is from G Captain. I think I've shared this a number of times before. If you have interest in what's going on with, with freight and so forth and, and supply chain issues. G Captain is a great newsletter to get. We try and typically each week we comment on something from that and it's just the letter g and then captain.com and it talks about global disruptions. Drives a container ship fleet to near full capacity. So we went in as tariffs hit there was, you know, 30, 40% reduction at least in the ports of LA and Long Beach. Amount, number of ships coming in was obviously dramatically lower. I took a look at the same time on a tool that it's called AIs that tracks movement of ships and the amount of ships in the ports that were just sitting there in China looked very similar to. I used the same tool at the beginning of the pandemic when ships weren't moving. Well now if you look at the traffic, it's just astounding of the traffic that's charging towards the US and coming to the port. So that's, you know, some good news there. And it said. I can't remember what the article said exactly. It was a fraction of the percentage of available ships. Give me a second and I'll get to that number. It. I think it was something like Only less than 2 or 3% of the available ships or we're not being used or in route somewhere right now.

Which they were bringing some ships out of stockpile too.

Yeah, yeah.

Trying to get some older stuff going as well.

Yep. So that's good. So anyways, that's good to see boats on the ocean and bringing stuff in. The pricing of those items might not be perfect, but it's better than it looked like at the beginning of April for a moment. Right?

For sure.

Good. All right, let's roll into our manufacturing and distribution segment there. We won't spend it really time talking about this but good article from HBS dealer talking about and I should say it's not necessarily good news because price are edging higher but a good article there about lumber prices and overall lumber reports that we won't spend too much time there. The another article from Modern Distribution Management about where distributors rank on the 25, 2025 Fortune 500. You know, talked a lot about the folks that we talk about regularly here that are publicly traded companies on that list to go along with that we're going to have. I just, I think, I think Mike Hockett from MDM was going to Be with us today. Next week we'll be talking about their list that's just going live of their top distribution companies that MDM does every year. They did a webcast yesterday, Mike with Tom Gale and David Gordon and John Gunderson. I think John was going to join us for the show today as well and oh, can't remember Mr. Webb's first name but lumber and building material expert. And then they, they all chatted about the top in the distribution market. So I sent Mike a note about getting Mike back on the show to talk about that in the next few weeks. So we're going to have Mike Hockett with us again from mdm, but they're publishing deeper articles. But this one particularly was about, you know, where some of the top and most of them are publicly traded companies in the billions and billions of dollars. But a good article there about how they, they rank amongst.

I was surprised at how many there were. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of them. Do you know where Granger ranks In the Fortune 500?

Yeah, they're 243.

Perfect. Well done. How did you get that? Just you have them all memorized.

It's hard being me. Tom.

What about Chef's Warehouse?

Oh, let's see. Command f c h e f804.

804. Man, you are on the, on the ball today. Just there's a lot of them. I think there's probably what, 40 distribution companies that are on the.

Oh, easily.

Yeah, you know so and they go.

This article goes out beyond 500 but, but just some names that we talked about off and on here. We at the, on the show here. Cardinal Health is, you know, 226 billion. But some names we probably talk about a little bit more here might be US Food Holdings, Ferguson Enterprise. On the plumbing side of things we talk regularly about Aero electronics. Ferguson's number 146 arrow is 154. Quite a bit of discussion recently about QXO building products. They're 420 number 421 Graybar Electric 365 Wesco 199 genuine parts which is the company behind Lawson Products and some other names out there is 187FASTENAL492CORE in Maine who I think we might have a announcement from Core and Main in the newsletter as well today. Number 497. So quite a number of folks out there.

So that's good all the way to the Fortune 1000. That's right. So we took it all the way out to the. Yeah, if you go to the 1000, there's a lot more.

Yep, yep. So anyways, good, good news, positive stuff there. So let's jump ahead here a little bit, my friend.

I do want to hit Bob's comment here before I, I think I completely agree. You know, it is interesting, right, he's saying going back to the container ships article is an article that. Or is it interesting how things tend to iron themselves out and is there a lesson to be learned? Don't react to every bit of news you hear. If we'd be getting ulcers needlessly. Yeah, it's an. I think you're. It'll be interesting to. I said this back on the Brendan Breen article. I thought that this whole thing was going to iron out a bit faster than it is, but I think we'd even talked about where things would end up being by the end of the year. I think a lot of things will be ironed out and they're certainly not as tumultuous as they were, you know, when the whole thing started two or three months ago. But I do agree is it's very difficult to react to every bit of news that, that you hear. So I just wanted to spotlight that.

Well, I mean, I think it, that's a great, great view in general. I think the other side of that as well, though, is, you know, something that you've said and many others have said about this particular administration that impacts so much of this is the idea behind. Wait, take a deep breath. Don't get panicked. You know, now we've got quite a few folks here on the, you know, have joined us today that are wholesale distributors and running large organizations and they can't always wait. Right. Just for, for convenience. But at the same time, don't, I don't know, the sky is falling maybe is not always the right, you know, the right view of this. I think sometimes if we can see what settles out. I, I don't know. You know, I don't think anybody comes here for Tom and Kevin's economic advice, but you know, they do okay at least times. Do you pay, do you pay somebody to do that?

Yeah, exactly.

Okay. Because, you know, if they were, if they were waiting on your prognostication of interest rates last year wouldn't have gone well for them. And so, but anyways, my, I, maybe this is my hope rather than my belief. My hope is that we're going to come out of this over the next few months with there will be some significant tariffs on some important countries, most specifically China, they're going to be a fraction of what the, you know, the big, you know, crazy news reports were in April and the, the big chart that we saw held up and I just thought it was so interesting, you know, having been being at the Industrial Supply association meeting in Nashville when those came out that afternoon, because there was some, you know, on the, specifically on the industrial side of things, there was, you know, some major, major players and thought certainly, you know, a building full of thought leaders in the industrial distribution segment that was, were all in the same place. Steve Levy and I from INFOR had dinner that night and got to, to chat at length about, about the tariffs that were announced. And was that April 2nd? I think it was. But I think what's going to come out of this is we're going to have had a bunch of disruption and we're going to have increased prices that are going to come out of this, but they're not going to be anywhere a fraction of what we, what we saw. I think, you know, before we, we, we jump ahead with this, you know, as, as well, Tom, the bummer about this, right, is even if, even if we came out of this with, with no dramatic increases on tariffs, what rarely is talked about is the impact that this has had operational, operational in these companies, right? They've got SWAT teams or strike teams or you know, red light teams or whatever it might be, you know, throughout so many wholesale distribution companies that are literally spending hours every day on this topic away from the important things of running their businesses and serving their customers better. Our dear friend Paul Kennedy talked about this a little bit when he was with us a few weeks back. I've talked to countless number of distributors, you know, since this time that are just having to put so much energy into the manufacturers are doing the best that they can as well. So it's been a drain. Let's hope for the best. I think there might be some, some light at the end of the tunnel coming out of some of the news in the last week or so.

We will see.

That's my prognostication, although I'm not. I worded it in such a way that I don't have to come back.

And I don't see there wasn't a lot of specifics there that I can.

Write so I could run for office.

That's right. Almost a word salad. Yeah.

No, it wasn't that bad. All right, man, that's offensive.

Sorry.

Sorry. That's offensive. Anyways, you want to roll into our e Commerce and marketing segment.

You want to hit this last one or move on?

Yeah, that's fine. I forgot about that. That's from Electrical Wholesaling magazine. What's new in the top 100? Any specific things out of that for you?

Mr. Kennedy was DSG was listed in there about opening up new branches and stuff like that.

But this is a great, great article and it specifically about electrical distribution. So it ties in, it talks about new branches and facility renovations and. Absolutely. With Dakota Supply Group there or DSG now and Dolls Electric and dn, DNS and Cockburn Supply and lots and lots of folks that have been aggressively moving forward with new branches, new people, renovations, new systems in place. I did notice in this article that there was a number of discussions from companies about their expanded investment in technology which I thought was great.

You know the thinking about that organic growth.

Do you think about that much?

A little bit. A little bit.

There is an opportunity that we have identified in really looking at the and we talked about this a ton in our in the session a few weeks ago when Paul was with us about the opportunity to grow organically versus solely balance sheet driven by acquisition or or branch openings and or new markets and new product categories. So great opportunity to do that. Happen to know a company that called Lead Smart Technologies that helps companies do that. So good, good stuff there Tom. We are about halfway through our show which is I'm going to remember what I always forget is that reminder about the newsletter. So this is about the time that if people were listening solely on the podcast and not watching these two handsome Hollywood bound faces that they would be maybe wondering what we're referring to. So we publish a newsletter every week. It's called around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing. And if you would like to get that newsletter that we have up on the screen now that we're reviewing today, just send us an email@helloadsmartech.com or search around the horn and wholesale distribution on LinkedIn or our website aroundthehornpod.com and we'll get that out to you right away. So Tom, what are your thoughts? E Commerce and marketing industrial B2B buyers shift to digital 65% now order online. Any thoughts or takeaways from you on that?

Well, what was interesting, I don't know if you have the exact stats in front of you, but I believe that 65% broke down between, you know, digital website ordering but also text messaging. Right. Or mobile mess? Mobile. I think it was online mobile and text messaging. Yeah. And I was surprised it was at 39% of these orders that were coming in through text messages, which is, you know, I know our friends over at Moblico are working on stuff. On this. Yeah, on this. I didn't realize that it was that.

24.4%.

Okay. And. And then another, you know, large percentage on mobile.

Yep.

And you know, what we've been. And what they've been telling us over at Mobilika, Right. Is a lot of these text messages are literally a screenshot of a piece of paper or somebody wrote something on a piece of drywall or. I mean, certainly not very official ways of placing orders.

Well, and the, the beauty of that. Right. As we start looking at this from an E commerce standpoint and online ordering in general, whether it's, you know, on. On a distributor's website, it's on an E commerce marketplace, or it's through an SMS type tool like Mobiliko and some others that are out there, then what we're needing to do is we need to get visibility in that. Because the big thing that's not talked about this a lot is the buyer journey. Right. Because historically, the fact is we've always looked at ERP data and ERP data is a snapshot of a transaction that's behind us. So rear view mirror look. And when we start combining this is, you know, put my sales guy hat on for a second. We start combining ERP data with marketing automation data and most specifically e commerce data. Now we get the full picture of the customer journey. Because customers journeys takes very different routes than they used to. Right. We can see the abandoned cart thing. We can see what people were looking at online. We can see what they're consuming from our marketing materials. And when we bring that together, that is a very different view of a customer and a customer journey than it is with just what orders did they place. And it's the future of where we're at to really have that intelligence and that insight to our customers.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, as farther. The farther you can move up the customer journey. Right. From prior to the point of transaction and you know, even quotes are oftentimes in the erp, not always in the erp, oftentimes in the erp. But even using. I mean, that's prior to the transaction. Right. So that's an estimate or a quote along the way. But yeah, yeah. Is. Look, I don't. It says 65% now order online. I think it would be interesting to be able to unpack that a little bit more and really understand exactly what that means. Is there Certain vertical, certain industries, certain situations.

Let me help you with this. Can I?

Yeah, please.

Yeah. Says that 65% are making at least one online purchase so far in 2025. But then it goes on to talk further about some of the more detailed specifics with this. It says that compares with just before.

You go, it says they're making at least one in, in 2025. They have. That doesn't mean they're always making purchases online.

No, but they've got some good statistics coming here. So get your popcorn ready.

Go.

It says that compares to just 45% in 2018. According to. This was from the Channel Marketing Group, which is our good friends David Gordon and John Gunderson. And that was the. It's kind of a recap. We should actually publish their article fully. It was sponsored by BigCommerce as well. It was a survey of 345 industrial supplies supply buyers and contractors and a detailed snapshot of purchasing done. So key findings were 62.3% of buyers purchase electrical H VAC or industrial supplies online, which now represents about 30% of their total purchases. So that's, that's I think a pretty big factor here, right? 30% of total purchases. I can't wait to see what that is, you know, a year from now or nine months from now to see what the 30% go to 45 or say at 38 or something like that. It says 65.8% of respondents say buying online is easy and 60% say it saves them time. 58% of purchases now occur outside traditional distributor relationships. Digital is the preferred channel for most buyers, the report says, but when e commerce tools fall short, they fall back on phone calls, texts or in person visits. So those are some of the key factors. With that, ordering methods are evolving. They describe here buyers place orders from a range of locations. 62.3% on websites, 39% from apps, and 24.4% by text. This reinforces the need for 24. 7 access and device agnostic platforms. So nice stuff here.

Yeah, no, I just, like I said, I was really shocked at the amount of text orders. I mean that's a lot of text orders. That's saying basically a quarter of the orders were done through text.

Yeah, right.

Which make it hard to try. I mean, I just. Anyway, I was very surprised about that.

Gotcha. Okay, well, why don't we roll through here again? Let's. This is. We won't spend time on this, but this is also from our good friends at Digital Commerce360 Mark Brohan and the team over there, Rexell large electrical distributors working on a digital portal for contractors. So ties right into all of that as well. Right, good. So this is our E commerce and marketing segment. So we have a article that follows up to that about from marketing profs, which is every marketing team will need new roles in 2025. Did you any takeaways from you on that?

You don't remember what those roles are. So I thought this was interesting. These are actual. I don't know if I'll go so far as job positions but roles that they're talking about related to marketing.

It's not a new position, it's an adjusted one. Right.

Yeah. Well or yeah or role or maybe it's a responsibility for lack. But AI content strategist. Right. So basically determining the relationship between AI content and human created content and figuring out what to use which and when to not use others Prompt engineers. Okay, we know what that is. Data curators. So these are people who organize and prepare internal knowledge bases for AI integration. You know we spend a lot of time on that. I hadn't really thought about it from it as a marketing function but the more I when I thought about that I looked at this article. It's like, you know, marketing might be at least having them involved in the data organization process and the data curation process of what data is being fed into the AI. What both unstructured and structured data. Right. That's being fed in there. I think that would be very, very helpful to have that marketing viewpoint on it.

Yeah.

Rather than just kind of looking at well, let's just, you know, throw all the data in and see what happens. So the curation of the data is an important part. Ethical AI officers and to your point a minute ago, customer journey architects. Right. Those are not terms that existed on a resume or were talked about in a job description even six months ago.

Yep.

And very different when you're. You're looking at the, the marketing. And I'm actually excited, you know, having a background in marketing and having a marketing agency myself. I'm really excited to see if we get more. We get more. Continue to get more involvement from the marketing team and the sales team and that kind of as you always say the revenue group that's pointing to coming together to work on these things so that I think there's a lot of opportunity for that. One plus one equals three.

So I think that's good. I think. You know what, it's interesting you talk about your background marketing background which is mostly digital marketing. Right. And this is what this article is talking about. But I think what we're talking about so much historically is in manufacturing, wholesale distribution is we, I won't say all but many companies have the same marketing team that they've had, you know, or the same marketing in the same way that they've done for many years now. You know, email marketing has been around forever now and social platforms are just kind of table stakes now, so to speak. But we have a lot of folks that are still doing, having a huge focus and I'll just put it this way, right. There are plenty of wholesale distributors who have large percentage of their marketing budget is going to open houses and live events and so forth versus the depth of what's being talked about here. And certainly I'm, I don't think either one of us are suggesting somebody needs to go read this article and go, you know, hire 27 new people or whatever it might be. When we see the, we see such a diverse in our work every day of working with wholesale distributors and manufacturers, you know, we, we run across, you know, Joe that was, you know, really good at inside sales but kind of thought marketing was cool and now he handles the catalog and the events and then we have other companies who have, you know, chief digital officers in their organization that supporting or supporting a marketing team that is doing amazing digital stuff. You got everything in between. But I think this is a great article to talk about whether it's, whether it's. And again this article is From Marketing Profs P-O-F S.com MarketingProfs.com and it's titled the The Gen AI Talent Shift. Every marketing team will need new roles in 2025. I, I think as we look at those lists of those emerging gen AI driven roles and you read them off Tom, right. AI content strategist, prompt engineers. You know, it's one thing to have an AI tool, it's another situation to know what to ask it. It's not that you need to have all of these right away, but you need to be having these on your roadmap within your organization. And, and as we look at expanding roles, do I have the right people in place to do these things and what do I need to do either from a upskilling or hiring. And that's one of the big things it talks about in this article is the upskilling is no longer optional. Right. And that the leadership mindset at a high level within the organization. Well, it says right. Another segment here is surf this shift or sink. Right. This is where things are going. And we need to have a mindset and a leadership role to support these things.

Yep. And I do agree that what Bob says is that they're going to start, people will start putting those keywords, if you will, on their resumes even though they don't really know how to do it. Because even a lot of the job. Right. The scanning of resumes and stuff is being done through AI in some cases.

Sure.

A lot of companies so kind of making sure. But yeah, there's, there's. It's not an area that's full of expertise, but it's something as you said, upskilling is something areas that companies are going to or even individuals are going to have to do if they're going to want to stay in that. In that area.

Well, and it's just, you know, Bob's earlier comment was ugg AI. Right. But the reality of this is it's, you know, it's here, it's here to stay. What, whether, whether it becomes what we anticipate, don't know yet, but it's here. And from this standpoint of looking at this is we need to be putting a. No, no different than whether you're looking at a customer intelligence and CRM solution or a new ERP system. You need to have a roadmap and a plan and the goals and what you want to achieve. And I think we need to be looking at the same thing from a. Both the marketing standpoint and gen AI in general. Right. If we putting an AI roadmap together, marketing should be a significant component of that. And if it is, we need to make sure we have the right positions in place. So Tom, let's jump into our technology and Cybersecurity and AI segment. Industry 4.0 isn't so sexy anymore. From Industry Week magazine. Industry 4.0 has kind of been looked at for many years now as the idea of, of Internet of things connectivity, cloud solutions and bringing broad technology mostly in on the manufacturing side. Any thoughts on this particular article?

Well, I think it's, you know, the trough of disillusionment. Right. The whole, you know, hype, Gartner hype thing. And yeah, I mean the industry 4.0 was being hyped and even AI in that area was being hyped before. Even AI, the generative AI that were of, you know, dealing with now became, became popular. So Industry 4.0 has been a big topic for several years. But I think as I said in here. Right. It's, it's kind of just becoming the New normal rather than something new and exciting. And so then it sounds like, you know, they're now trying to. Some of the media people and thought leaders are trying to create Industry 5.0. But that's kind of. But you know, some of these things. Right. The trough of disillusionment happens when you realize that implementing these things and making them happen isn't as easy as it may appear on paper.

Yeah, yeah. It's taking a step back kind of back to the previous article with Bob's comment there. I love it is people call themselves experts in a field that's only six months old. How does that work?

Right.

You know, Bob, my definition of that is all I have to be to be an expert is to know two or three sentences more about a topic than you do. Right. So then I call myself an expert. But back to this industry 4.0 thing. I think there's some good stats in here about what people are thinking about it. Where was that in particular? It said that barely less than half or 49% plan to use AI or ML for cybersecurity, which. We're going to talk a little bit about cyber security in a moment, which was kind of surprising to me, but they talked about 81% say they're accelerating their digital transformation, considering current challenges, deploying and integrating new technology. I think a big part of this as well is the workforce. Right. Getting workers into factories is harder than it's ever been. So if we can automate some solutions or you know, make, you know, 2 or 3x our. Our people and their. Their capabilities of what they're able to do by using the right technology, that's going to be a big part of things as well. So gonna have to see how this plays out. But a lot of focus that's needed to adjust there. So said about 40% of respondents plan to introduce AI to fill sales skills gaps and address later labor shortages as we talked about. So some good statistics in there. I guess it just, you know, ties back to everything else we've been talking about in this, you know, last two sections is we need to have a plan. We need to understand the workforce, what our needs from the workforce is changing and the workforce is changing. Right. So absolutely had. Can't tell you how many discussions I've had recently with mostly distributors who as they're interviewing salespeople, their salespeople are asking them using terms like tech, stack. Right. What technology do you have to help me do my job? Because that's the world that they live in. Right. I mean where we've talked a number of times about, you know, how we've shifted. Both of us have shifted away. We do it different ways, but we've shifted away from using Google to ask questions. You know, the term Google it. We've got a generation that's coming up that that will make sense to them because they'll have picked up their AI tool or their multiple AI tools or the AI tool that they built for themselves to go get the information that they want. We've got, you know, a younger generation that's coming through right now that how we've done things for, you know, the last however many years is going to be foreign to them and they're going to have expectations about what tools are available. So either of these next two articles interest you there?

I mean, this is all just a continuation of. Unfortunately, an area we've touched on a fair amount over the months is the use of AI for, you know, cyber security breaches. And I know, you know, they talk about the deep fake and the phishing and all that stuff. The emails and the sophistication of the emails I get that are referencing you and asking me to make payments. And I mean, I'm now getting them probably, which when you start to get a large quantity of them right, it starts to actually even more so, be an issue. But I'm now not only getting text messages, I'll get other sort of phone calls from time to time that are, you know, certainly all fishing and deep fakes. And in a larger organization, if you didn't know better, I think a lot of this stuff would get through.

Are you sure it's not the feds looking for me?

I've gotten that too. Yeah, yeah. And ice. And ice.

No ice. Very, very good.

They don't want. They don't want German heritage here either. I guess so.

Could be. Could be. Did I say I'm getting a German passport, too?

Yeah, man, now you're going to be at risk.

Yeah, I will be. I'll have dual passports.

That's right.

So this article is from Cybersecurity Die. They publish some really good stuff. And this talks about from malware to deep fakes, generative AI is transforming attacks. And, you know, now more than ever, we're just, this is time to really be taking this stuff seriously from a cybersecurity standpoint. Because folks, as this article talks about, are using AI to do that. They're building better tools to come and be more aggressive and coming after your data. And, you know, we really need to be prepared for that. So there's some good research that goes with that said right now they're still fairly rare with the deep fakes. And you know, it takes me back to when we did our 100, I think it was our 100th anniversary show. It was either that or might have been the 2024 beginning of the year show that we did with. We had Mike Marks and Dirk Beverage and Ian Heller with us and they were on our 100th anniversary show as well. But they, Ian brought up an example of something that has happened where a voice came across the phone with an order that sounded, the voice sounded just like Tom Burton placing a normal order and they asked it to be delivered to a location. And it was, you know, Tom from ABC Electrical that needed stuff delivered to a project, but it was almost all copper based wire. And if I remember the story, Ian, telling the story correctly is that someone had the forethought to look at the location and the location was basically in, I don't remember it was an empty lot, but it was not a construction site or, or somewhere where that would be needed. And they did some checking and at the end of the day it was just a deep fake trying to get an order through. And that type of stuff is just going to happen more and more and more and more. And so we need to get those pieces in place to guard against that. So lots of technology out there on the cybersecurity front that can be of help to that.

It's interesting what we were just talking about too, about the percentage of orders that are coming through text and online and so forth. It's possibly another area you've got to be cognizant of on sort of these fraudulent sort of scenarios like you were describing because it might even be easier to send a fraudulent text message than it would even do a phone call. But as Ian said, that's coming unfortunately. So, yep, I think, you know, having, you know, whatever keywords or passwords or things like that verbally that you do. Hey, before you place an order, you, we need to, you know, kind of give me the key that unlocks some of these things. I think all of those are going to become part of the process.

Is that a blockchain reference?

Could be, could be. I think it would be an interesting application over time of the use of the blockchain potentially.

Yep, that's good. Well, let's, let's roll into our sales and M and a segment. Just a couple articles there today, one from MDM about optimizing your salesforce Model for the future and then another one from industry today about challenge and opportunities in today's M and A environment. Either one of those stand out to you in the time we have left today?

I thought the MDM article was, was good, really kind of, you know, talking about the relationship between inside sales and outside sales and hybrid models. And you know, I, I don't, in fact, I think there was some conversation about outside sales, you know, going away. I don't think outside sales is going to go away. I think it's the hybrid model. But I do think what they were talking about and we're seeing this, right. I do think that there is more strategic responsibility that is being added to inside salespeople and how they relate to the, with the outside team. So they're not just order takers or assistants or whatever. But there is more strategy going into how the inside and the outside teams are working together, sharing data, sharing information, even following up on larger opportunities, things like that. I, I think there's a lot of opportunities to again talk about leveraging organic growth just through the optimization of that, of the, of that relationship.

Well, I think we've got a comment here. It says LinkedIn users. I'm not sure who that is, but it's. They talk about interesting info and this is, I think they're tying back to the marketing article, but they talk about aggregating information across an organization between erp, cms, Marketing automation, CRM, E Commerce and so forth. It says helping make connections and utilize all the information across an organization. I think that's powerful. Right. And this is, you know, tied. The comment there was tied to what we're seeing from the marketing article that we talked about. But you know, it's interesting, it's how few people, organizations that we talk to on a regular basis are really even thinking about, you know, most people think about just, you know, in our case, if somebody's just thinking about the CRM component of what we do in their mind, it's, well, that's our field, outside sales guys. And then as we start having broader conversations, the lights go on. It's like, well, wait a minute. If inside sales is talking to or customer service is talking to our customer about an open quote, we got to get that information to the sales guy. And sending an email or a text message to them is not the way to get that done. So now we're seeing, right? This, as I've been talking about forever, is about aligning sales and marketing so that we've got what you call it, whatever you Want I use the reference term revenue organization and that we're getting customer journey data from marketing. We've got inside sales, outside sales, customer service fully aligned using the same data tools, sharing data about what's happening with.

The customer, even the branch and showroom people.

Exactly right. Yeah, we've got one of our, one of our great customers in the H VAC and electrical space that just is bringing on extra licenses right now to bring their whole showroom team in and they're already doing things with the branch folks. You know, we always talk about it as some of, some of the best, best insight and intel into what's happening at a customer comes from the driver that stops to pick things up at the branch. And that's telling the guy at the counter in the branch, right. He's the guy that is saying hey you know what, we just won a new contract, we're going to get really busy. As opposed to the sales guy might be calling on a buyer or somebody in leadership and they don't, they're not planning to talk to them for a few more weeks. You know, and when we're starting sharing that data and then we get that data aggregated and we start using AI against it, power, power starts happening, the magic starts happening. So. All right, want to roll through here and let's good article in our People in Leadership segment about micro shifts. The key to hiring Gen Z this article talks about. All that can come to my mind on this time is snowflakes.

Snowflakes.

Snowflakes. Is the, the way that Gen Z's want to be treated in the workplace.

Was that the term they used?

No, no, this, that was me.

Okay.

Using that, that term is like they need to be handled so gently. But this article talks about, you know, balance beats the corner office for Gen Z's and we see that a lot of, you know, the, in fact we were even looking at stocking to some executives in, in Utah recently and there's a whole corridor of, of technology companies like ours in, in between Salt Lake and Provo, Utah called Silicon Slopes. And I was talking to some executives there about, you know, some of the talent that's there. And one of the comments that were made was like Kevin, yes, there's, there's great talent here and, and we were talking about doing some hiring or maybe even potentially having an office there at some point. Their comment was, and this isn't Gen Z related, it's just a workforce mindset was they're oftentimes willing to work for a little bit less than Your their counterparts in California or other parts of the country. But they want to be able to take the morning off on a, on a, on a powder day and get some skiing. Right. Have that flexibility or get off, you know, Thursday afternoons, leave at 3 to get to their mountain biking group or whatever. But I think what we're seeing a lot here is that Bob's comment is that's why everyone should serve in the military. It melts snowflakes. That's funny, Bob. Thank you, thanks for that. But this is, you know, tying to Gen Z's of wanting flexibility and is far more important than even money or prestige that goes with it. But the other side of that this article says that Gen Z will, I think Gen z is that 80, 89 to like 99 or 2000, I think falls into that roughly is that it says that 27% of the global workforce by the end of the year will be comprised of Gen Z. So we can't afford to ignore them. But they're looking for flexibility in a world in this article talks about a micro shift program where people work shorter hours but over a long. How would I put this? Shorter shifts but more of them. Both flexibility with them and the ability to trade those shifts with other people with similar skills. I can only imagine they're, you know, logging into a mobile app and saying when I want to work today was.

This focused more on like blue collar type workers or did it say. Or the type. Didn't say. Okay, okay, so didn't say here but.

No, I think, I mean this is from industrial distribution.

Right.

So that kind of ties into the, the reference point for what that, what that means. So anyways, good stuff there, Tom. Just in our going down, rolling down to our scuttlebutt section that we do each week we had our. You're scrolling through now they're first our channel leaders on the move. We usually don't talk much about that but some good stuff going out on some acquisitions that are discussed there from Brady plus and then Span and Rose on the Lumber side and then kind of a cool partnership that QXO who has said over and over again that they're going to drive technology and they're partnering with a product called Roofer RO F R which is a CRM for tradespeople. And so I think we're going to see more and more of that and had some discussions with some people myself lately about the idea of taking the technology that might be from a product like Roofer or Service Titan or something like that and balancing that with the data that a distributor is keeping and then what a manufacturer needs and are there ways to take data, something that, you know, you and I have talked about even building into our technology is the ability to aggregate some data from across all three segments of the supply chain, so to speak, from the manufacturer, the distributor to the end user to help improve getting orders out faster. And you know, what are, what are the issues that distributors are seeing that are happening at the contractor level or at the customer level that can be shared? I think it just ties into the big focus we've talked about so much on today is aggregating data to get better outcomes. So this is a starting point for that with their partnership.

So it sounds like they're going to feed data from QXO into the roofer CRM to give them more visibility on pricing and ordering and things along that line. I guess in return they probably will get something back.

Guaranteed. Yeah, guaranteed with that. So good stuff with that. Let's kind of roll into. We have a second look and we.

Actually got to the end.

We did.

I don't know that we've done this in like a month or two.

I guess I'm motivated that I've got a doctor's appointment in 40 minutes.

Usually we're like, you know, still in the economy section by now.

Well, there hasn't been a lot to talk about with tariffs this week and things seemed a little settled. And we're certainly not a show that's going to spend a lot of time talking about missiles being fired on other countries or labor strikes so. Or immigration stuff. So we spent way too much on that with the time we did. But we have a second look segment which is where we in the newsletter which is where we put articles that we might have referenced before with some new updates. I added that to this, this, this week is there's a. Trying to think. I don't have that highlighted here to say which the organization is but I can grab that briefly. But the, the it's a tariff tracker and basically they're updating live pretty much the tariffs as they, as anything changes with them. So if you're looking to stay kind of stay on top of what is going on at what with changes within tariffs. That is a great place to go look for that. And let me just see if I can find that link.

I think Bob says it's a quarter or two since we've, you know, moved along here. I think he's missed all of our AI conversation. We haven't had nearly enough AI Conversation the last last quarter. So what? Bob, we will pick that up, I promise. In fact, maybe we should just start the show with AI and then see if we get to economy.

I think we'd lose, Bob.

Maybe others too. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is trade compliance resource hub.com and it's a tariff tracker. So they're doing constant updates. The last update was yesterday, but a nice chart that they have and you can scroll through that anytime. So we wanted to add that. So go from there. Good. Oh, you just went. There you go. Now we're showing it.

Yeah. Okay. So it's all right there. All right. Interesting.

I just like you to recognize for a moment the work that I go through to curate these articles on your behalf.

Very appreciated that.

That sounded like not even remotely or vaguely sincere.

It is very appreciated all the work that you do to curate these articles every week.

Yeah. Some of them you even like, huh?

Pretty good.

Yeah, that's right. Good. So another article, Greg, we call it a great read or listen, an article there about. It's from Sales and marketing dot com. Rough seeds ahead. Preparing for a recession. I don't know if you got a look at that one or not, Tom.

I actually did not. So.

Okay. That's right. I'll hit a couple things on it. They just. It's another article that kind of ties well into other. The things we've had about, you know, tightening up your ship. Right. Watch your pennies, they say. Fortifying existing customer relationships. Yes, Tom. I think they're even referencing organic growth. Diversify revenue streams, invest cost effective marketing, seek strategic partnerships. It's all stuff that in theory, just make consistent good business sense.

I don't know if that would be. That seems like good common sense no matter what, but.

Well, it does, but they're tying it to preparing. If you're. If you're not doing those things, now's the time. Right. So good stuff. All right, my friend. That kind of gets us. We've got our upcoming event segment in there as well. We've got distribution strategy groups hosting the 2025 Applied AI for Distributors event, the 24th through the 26th. That's going to be a great event. I'll be there. I'm looking forward to that. And that's the good news of that. That's an easy in and out. That's at the o' Hare Marriott, just a couple minutes from the airport and you can get out of town fast. Although Chicago is one of my favorite cities, this time I need to get out of there quickly and then we start into the trade show or the, excuse me, the buying group events get kicked off in July and August with AD and other organizations that are doing their big events. So if you've got an event that is relevant to manufacturers and wholesale distributors that you think we should post, please send us that. You can send it to us at hello, leadsmartech.com and we'll get that into the newsletter. So, Tom, we're winding down on the day. Any closing thoughts?

No. Good job. You made it. You made it through the Friday the 13th, no issue. That's good.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, no earthquakes or anything yet.

Internet was good.

Internet was good. Yeah. Now, hope all goes well at the doctor, which I would expect it to. I've been eating my Wheaties and so forth, so all should be good there. So anyways, we're looking forward to next week's show. We appreciate everybody that joins us each week. The one favor that we have that we would ask you is if you enjoy what we do here each week and the content is of value to you, the best thing you could possibly do to give us, do us a favor would be jump onto whatever the format is you're using. If you're on LinkedIn, go to the Lead Smart Technologies page and follow us there. You'll see the updates for the show. A great place that you can really provide a lot of value for us is jump on to either Spotify or to Apple podcasts and not just follow the show, but leave a review. And the more reviews that are there, that push helps them push that out to the audience. And if you happen to be listening in on YouTube, which the YouTube subscribers are growing each week as well, whether you're listening in YouTube or watching on YouTube, hitting that subscribe button is of great value to get hit those algorithms, as John, our producer says, and get this out to more people. So again, we're appreciative of our sponsor, the company Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies. If you're looking to digitally transform and accelerate growth in your organization, and we have some great examples of how other companies are doing that in the wholesale distribution and manufacturing space. We make, as we've said, our Lead Smart channel cloud product, which is an AI enabled, what we call smart CRM and customer intelligence and sales enablement platform does great things for organizations and we would love to share that with you. So, Tom, any exciting weekend plans?

Nothing too exciting now.

Well, mine's going to be happily quiet.

Okay.

When Mrs. Brown is in town, we have a big agenda of barbecues and parties and things like that when she's out of town, nobody invites me anywhere.

Okay, well, good. You can catch up on a few things.

Clarifies who people love in our household, which makes good sense. Any of those folks out there who have met my lovely wife. So all good. All right, everybody, we wish you a fine weekend. U.S. open. Good stuff going on there, Father's Day, all the stuff that goes with that. So be kind, be safe, do good things. We'll see you next week.

Sounds good.

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