Top Economic Insights For Wholesale Distributors in 2024

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

The first Friday of 2024 it is.

Welcome back. You know, my wife, lovely wife Darlene asked me last, last Friday morning as I was like wandering around lost at 9:00am Pacific Time, you know, how did I feel about not having the, having the broadcast today and, or that day. And I said, you know, it's, it's twofold. One is it's great not to have the preparation and, and the I'd say pressure.

Right.

But we're the preparation that goes with it. But I kind of missed it a little bit too, I have to say.

Yeah, no, I, I agree it was, I, I missed the, I missed doing the show but I didn't miss all the prep work and the.

Yeah.

All that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Believe it or not, people might, not even, people might think we wake up in the morning, look at a couple articles and just start talking. But there's quite a bit of work and prep and an editor that works on all this and then quite a bit of stuff that goes with it. So. But anyways, great to be here. It looks like we got some great folks popping in the LinkedIn side of things this morning. Hoppy Brian Hopkins is a good friend and RP Ron Paulson. Good to see all of you folks. Good, good folks coming in. If you're with us on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live or Facebook Live this morning, please feel free to chime in with questions, thoughts, comments and, or just a hello and where you're visiting with us from. But Tom, I think what we'll do is we'll take it away and we got a lot of stuff to talk about today from go really, really, really quick. Right.

Keeping it like full speed like you know, like this, like this super fast.

We'll do that. Great. Well, let's first say who we are, huh? So I'm Kevin Brown, this is with Tom Burton, my co founder of Lead Smart Technologies, as well as a lifelong friend and business associate as well for many years. Tom and I are the co founders of Lead Smart. As I mentioned, Lead Smart Technologies is an AI enabled CRM and customer intelligence platform using AI tools and data from wholesale distributors and manufacturers to help them make better business decisions, accelerate growth, and deeply understand their customers in ways that they have not before. We are very fortunate that LeadSmart sponsors this event that we do every week. And what we do is on Friday mornings we publish a newsletter. And how we do that is we gather news and information from around the globe. A little bit of information about the economy each week, lots of information on technologies, a little bit of things about M and A leadership, lots of different topics, sales, marketing, and how those relate back to manufacturing, wholesale distribution. So that newsletter we send out every week is available to anybody. It goes out to thousands of people already. If you do not get that and you would like to have that sent to you, just reach out to us, very simple. Email address is helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that sent to you. The other way you can get access to that is we have a website for the podcast that we do each week here, which is called aroundthehornpod.com www.aroundthehornpod.com, which you can sign up for there as well as you can listen to all of our past episodes. What happens here is Friday mornings we go live, we review the information in the news of the week, and we look at that newsletter. So if you're listening on a recorded session of this, on the podcast, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, wherever it might be that you hear podcasts, you can, you're not going to be seeing that newsletter. So we'll remind you throughout the day that what we're looking at are the articles that the people that are with us live have a chance and an opportunity to see. So big guests coming up in the next few months. Great topics this morning. Tom, you want to lead off?

Let's do it.

All right, so a little quick one as we look at the newsletter here. Again, you're listening to the podcast, you're not seeing this, but interesting article. We talk each week typically a little bit getting started about a little bit about what's going on in the economy. This is particularly in the US And North America here. But some good stats about construction spending up in November. Those numbers came out last early this week, actually. So, you know, 11.3% year over year construction spending. You know, that typically bodes well in manufacturing and wholesale distribution. Right. Somebody's making the processing the lumber, making the nails, the siding, whatever it might be, and selling that through wholesale distribution, at least more. We have quite a few companies that are in the building materials business, so we follow that Pretty closely. So some good news to see that kind of a. I don't know. Tom, what are your thoughts? You know, I'm a little more bullish have been throughout 2023 than you on soft landing and economic factors getting better sooner. But this is another piece of good news.

Yeah, I think we touched on something like this before the break and you know, the question is here, is this really the uptick more because materials were available. Right. So was the supplies available and then it kind of allowed a lot of these construction spending to get started or was it really more of an economic demand for it? Not 100% clear, but it's certainly, certainly up.

Yeah.

I would certainly look to and I've read a few other articles related to this that a big part of this is caution. And so there's no, there's a mix here. Right. In construction spending. Look at commercial construction. They even talk about educational construction deeper into the report. So residential, commercial and educational. But on the residential side, the majority of the country has a short housing shortage. So there's been a need to do that. What some of the things that I've read about have been that builders, whether it's landowners and home builders as an example or multi family units builders have been looking at is less about the supply chain issues and more about the issues that go with interest rates. Right. Because they're going to need. You had taught, you've talked a number of times recently about prior loans, resetting and so forth, interest rates, confidence in things and are people going to have the ability to pay the rents if it's a multifamily housing unit, so forth. So I think a big piece of this we'll see and we'll probably see more of this shakeout soon. To understand this better is really tied to seeing that lack of a better term. Right. Soft landing coming out of all of this that now it's time to start gearing up.

Yeah. So it could be affordability, it could be materials, it could be all of.

The above interest rates, all of those things. Yeah. My thing is a combination of factors. Good. Well that's enough of that. Neither of us, neither one of us are economists or homebuilders, so. But interesting. The Institute for Supply Chain Management published a report this week about economic improvements continuing in 2024. A couple of quick statistics out of that. They talked about a focus and a forecast of revenue on the manufacturing side increasing up 4, 5.6%. I'm guessing we would have some manufacturers listening in with us today live or on the podcast later that would expect a whole lot higher growth in their companies, but growth in general. They talked about capital expenditures increasing almost 12%. Two things that they hit on though was capacity utilization that currently things are sitting at about 83% so lots of room for growth in manufacturing. Kind of the downside is if that number is there, they talk about it going to 86.5% next year. If that's the case, then we probably don't need all that much new machinery. We probably don't need new buildings which would bode well for economic growth as well, but so be it.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think there was actually a new ISM report that came out this morning as a matter of fact and it was two points below. I think it was 50.6 which they were expecting 52.5. So we get a lot of, I mean obviously still above 50% or anything above that is showing growth along the way. So it's not just growth. The question is the speed of the growth and are we going to continue to see, I don't know, a little bit of a roller coaster or is it straight up and vertical, not 100. Sure.

So, so that leads me to talk about. We have a little differing opinions on this, which is good. I, I personally have a. And this is again, you know, I did okay in economics classes but only took the required ones. I think there was only two of them. But the. I think there's a, I think there's a groundswell building. Now it's interesting, stock markets, you know, not had a great week in comparison to just pre holidays but in the second half of last year. But I think there is a little bit of a groundswell building. I read an article yesterday about one of the heads of the International Monetary Fund. This was in the Wall Street Journal. Making some comments about, you know, soft landing might be an understatement for what they see things for the US it's going to be even easier and better than a soft landing of things. So I think there could be a little bit of groundswell developing. You know, I'm going to hit the first plugs of next week. We're pretty excited. We've got some. Oh, I'm going to maybe stop short of legends but I think a couple of people called them legends when we talked about this before the holiday. But we've got Mike Marks from Indian River Consulting Group who's could not be probably more well known in wholesale distribution as, as a researcher, writer, speaker, consultant, board member for a number of large organization distribution companies. Dirk Beverage runs the We Supply America tour. Really thoughtful speaker, human. Dirk's just a great human being as, as Mike and Ian that are joining us are as well. But next week when we get Mike, Dirk Beverage, as we mentioned, Ian Heller with the distribution strategy group together I think we'll kind of dive in on more of this economic factors and their impacts on, on distribution. But and it'll be interesting to see right. Their thoughts. Are they bullish? Are they, you know, dovish? Where are they at with all of these things? And we'll get a, a good feel for that.

That's a shy group. I have a feeling we have a lot of dead air. So I, you know, people just not talking. So we're going to need a lot of people to, to jump in on that.

Well, there we go. Paul, Paul Kennedy, who's. There are people out there that and I'm a Paul Kennedy fan myself. There are people out there that would suggest that Paul's a legend as well. But Paul says all of those guys are legends. So Paul, I'm going to ask you. Paul is the president and CEO of the Dakota Supply Group or dsg Wholesale distributor of H Vac Plumbing pipe valves and fitting Electrical. You want to build a building in the upper Midwest and upper northern Northwestern part of the US Then you're gonna want to talk to the folks at, at Dakota Supply Group. But Paul, we're going to be looking for some good feedback from you next week and Paul's going to be joining us on the broadcast again before long as well. That was me putting out to the universe that Paul's going to say yes when we invite him next. So.

And Ron says we may need to expand the time next week. I think we need to make that like a three hour telephone or something.

Well I mentioned that I sent a note to all three of the guys the yesterday that we're will go, you know, you know who brought this up first is, is my father and dad's, you know, long since retired and is battling some serious health problems right now. And but he listens every week. Right. If, if I don't send him to the link to the YouTube recording within 20 minutes after we finish dad sending me a text message because he's in his chair and probably has ESPN on in the background but he's listening on his headphones to the podcast and his comment was why put a time limit on things? Just talk. He goes, people will drop off if they don't want to listen anymore. So.

Good suggestion.

Yeah. Well you know what RP and his comment here is right in line with, with my dad, Charlie Brown. So that's good stuff. All right. So you know, interesting news out of that, you know, supply chain management study. Encouraging news. Right. Let's, let's jump ahead. Next article that we talk about comes to us from the Wall Street Journal and it talks about new disruptions, geopolitics, Hangover 2024, supply chain and you know, Tom, we've talked a lot and I'm really interested in some of the people that have chimed in this morning and others that are listening with your thoughts. We've talked a lot in the past year. Right. What did we look at last year we looked at on supply chain related stuff. Right. We had major concerns about 11th hour deals put together for west coast port strike that was averted. Right. Then there was an eastern Canadian risk of a port strike. Then there was then the west coast of Canada's there was a port strike and it went on for a number of weeks. Really disrupted things cross border. That kind of stuff hit the auto industry pretty hard because you've got stuff, parts coming in from Asia into the Canadian western ports that are going to the eastern Canadian auto manufacturing plants that then bring cars into the U.S. so there's a lot of issues that popped up with that. Well now we're starting to see more and more things happening. And what we've got this issue now that's pretty, pretty scary is what's happening two parts. One we talked about this last year as well was the so weird. It's the fifth, you know, and we're saying last, last year, last year. It feels odd because it was just a couple of months ago we had this discussion. But you know, the lake that's at the far side of the Panama Canal because of a drought is low, Panama Canal is lower. Fewer ships are getting through on time. And now with the Middle Eastern crisis, we have this issue with the Suez Canal as well. So I don't know what are your thoughts and takeaways from this article?

You know, I don't have anything specific other than a lot of the things that we've talked about before. Right. It was contingency, contingency and contingency. And a lot of this stuff you couldn't have dreamed up. Right. You couldn't dream up sort of the things that could occur. Now I think the Suez Canal aspect of it has a lot more impact on Europe than it does here in the U.S. but you know, we're a global economy and a global peace and the stuff from China to Europe is really affected or Europe to China from the, from the Suez Canal. But I think it all comes back to again, having that contingency and having more of that onshore capability, I guess, for getting some of the things reshoring.

And onshore and nearshore.

Yeah. That are there. I think the only thing that you can predict is the fact that there is going to be unpredictable, you know, barriers and situations that are going to occur. So whether it's the Suez or the Panama or, you know, the Panama Canal, when I've heard some more on that, is it's not just the drought, it's the fact that they increased the size of the Panama Canal, which took more water from the lake to fill the canal.

Yeah.

So you end up with kind of a double, double whammy on those things. So I don't even know if, you know, it's not clear, right, if the, what, what type of, you know, rain or what type of water would be required to even get it back to a point of quote, unquote normal. So anyway, contingency, I think is the, is the key word there.

Well, some, some, the, some interesting points that came out of this article that I think are important. You know, said in 2023, Mexico surpassed China as the US's largest trading partner. That. Just stop and think about that for a second. 2023, Mexico surpassed China as the US's largest trading partner. That I think in itself a huge part of that speaks to that near shoring idea. Right. Is we're doing so much more there. But you know, globally trade flows are, you know, huge. It's the, you know, the world's factory is China in essence. But the Suez Canal thing. And maybe, maybe I'm overstating this, but I've been watching this pretty closely, you know, as we have this Middle east conflict going on and it's looking at other nations getting involved in that area and the risk of that conflict growing. Right. We've got these, these. I just lost the name of it. The. I'm just looking at my notes here, trying to get the name, but I think it was the Houthi Group. Yep. You know, that are in the Red Sea area, Suez Canal area. Right. That are coming after these ships. They, they, they made, you know, they've sent some, some, some drones and stuff, you know, teasing US warships and so forth, and you start seeing more of that pressure in the Panama Canal. And I did a little research additionally this morning and one of the things that I found it suggested that 50% or more of both oil and gas from there coming to Europe is going through the Suez Canal, in fact, far, far more than 50%. But from China and Asia, well over 50% of goods that are traveling to Europe are going through the Suez Canal. So you know, we talked about the pressure and the things going on with the Panama Canal as that starts to happen, that there's a ripple effect that it's going to hit this country as well through all of that, especially with oil and gas, you know, so something to I think be paying attention to. So yeah, and I think the thing.

You know, going back to the contingency, right, you can look at kind of internationally, where are these bottlenecks? Suez Canal, Panama Canal, those are places that create huge bottlenecks. Even if you have, you know, if you're in Mexico or you're in other places in North America, even if you have, you know, issues with, you know, ground transportation or whatever the case may be, you don't have the bottlenecks that you have potential bottlenecks that you have with shipping and, and so forth. So I think again, that contingency, and I agree with Ron, I was going to mention this actually, but I was going to save it till later.

You weren't going to mention it. RP is just feeding you stuff to make you look smart.

Well, yeah, that's fine. I need what I need every help, all the help I can get, RP.

Sends them my way.

But yeah, again, this is where AI can help to really support and look at sort of these different scenarios, look at contingencies, look at all of those things to help you determine options or alternatives, I guess along the way.

Well, I'm going to throw a wrench at that for a second and I don't disagree with RP's comment or what you're saying with that, but that's big picture stuff, right? That's when we're looking at planning things from a standpoint that says, hey, how am I going to manage supply chain months and months out, right? The risks that we've kind of been talking about with, in these disruptions that this article talks about. Right. Is no one was expecting, right? And I mean if we look back at events of, of 2023, I don't think anybody was it October 7th was the Hamas attack in Israel. I don't think anybody was expecting that to happen of the magnitude and how it happened, right. Middle east conflict's been going on forever. But when you look at an attack by a self proclaimed political group on a, you know, peaceful concert I don't think anybody was expecting something like that, you know, maybe some conflict. Yes, but these are the types of things and my takeaway from this particular article and the discussions we've been having about these supply chain issues are the more sudden things that you could have the best AI models out there and certainly it will help you, but when you've already got, you know, 150 containers on a ship that's heading to a port and the article also talks about the disruption in freight lines this year and trucking companies. There's not just yellow Freight, but a number of trucking companies, large trucking companies in the US went out of business in 2023. These are the sudden things that, yeah, I can help us with what to go do. But the planning piece of it I think is, is more long term in these settings.

Well, I think right now that's correct. I think that. And maybe this is the point Ron's making here is as you start to move forward though and you start to use AI, you can look at a lot of what if scenarios in that and plan for things that you wouldn't or at least have visibility potentially into things that you wouldn't normally think about and then plan for those, for those situations that are. Right.

So you referencing.

Right. The second. It's a different story.

But yeah, so you're referencing like digital twin type planning. Right.

It could be, I mean it could.

Be a lot of if I'm bringing X amount of goods by ship from Y location, what would I do if. What is the scenario if XYZ happens.

Yeah. Or even looking. I mean believe it or not, right there. You can probably even do this now on chat. GPT is say give me, you know, give me a basically an executive summary of all of the different potential issues I could run into with supply chain based around worldwide events and you know, geopolitical issues and things that are, you know, there's a lot of nuance. Right. That are, that are there and, and then help me come up with based on that sort of knowledge or projected knowledge then help me come up with some of the things like you said through a digital twin and so forth. Right. And Ron said scenario planning. Right. What are the scenarios?

Finish what he said.

I didn't see anything else what he said. I just saw scenario planning, digital twin. That's all I saw. He said it's all that showed up on my comments.

So very good. You know, just as a reminder to.

The folks we've missed Ron for the last couple weeks, I don't think we're on last couple weeks.

Yeah. You know what, what's as a reminder to folks, I, I, somebody talked, mentioned to me a while back in a conversation that they said, you know, you guys have some fun and poke at each other a little bit. You know, a little disclaimer. Tom and I are, are not young and we, we've been friends since kindergarten, so we run a company together, but we've been friends for, you know, I guess we're approaching, approaching 55 years coming up that we've been friends. So my joke is that I give Tom one compliment a month. So there's some, some zingers that go back and forth with us as well here and there. So we always like to see the compliments that we get. And RP complimented. Tom was gracious enough in his last comment to mention that I was right in one of my comments. So thanks, rp. So when you hear us poke at each other, it's in good fun. We're lifelong friends and we'll be fine later in the day.

Yeah, I'll get over it.

At least. At least I will.

Yeah.

Very good. All right, well, let's keep, we're going to keep an eye and I think with a group we've got next week that might be a good discussion is to talk about a little bit about some of the geopolitical issues that are hanging over, over moving goods. Right. Because we can't hit these growth rates that we've talked about and whether it's manufacturing or it's in distribution that we're looking for in the growth in the economy in North America next year if we don't have goods coming in. So. Yep. Good. All right, what's next, my friend?

Well, I think what we just talked about follows in beautifully to this next article about manufacturers need to follow through on their digital transformation goals. And basically the article is talking about manufacturers. And I assume that you could probably include distribution of this as well.

I'm glad you said that because you're right on. Yeah.

Right. Have digital transformation top of mind as 2024 begin. But how fast manufacturers will turn thought and intentions into real action remains to be seen. And we certainly see this, we see this a lot about, you know, there's a lot of ideas and a lot of things like that, but how does it actually translate into action and results? Yeah, and we're not. And that's what they're saying is it's the actions and results aren't happening quite as quickly as the ideas and the intentions.

Well, there's, there's, there's conversation and you know this kind of leads to some of the conversations and we won't go in this too deep but we've been having recently, the two of us is related to you know, AI and where, where manufacturing and wholesale distribution is related to, you know, preparing for AI. You know we had a nice conference last year about it that Distribution Strategy Group put on for, for, for wholesale distributions. Great event, right. Modern Distribution Management has one coming up and DSG is doing another one. We're reading about this stuff every day. There's a difference, right. And I think that's what this article and this is From Digital Commerce 360 to publish this article. And I think you know, part of the issue, Tom, that goes with this. Right. Is to your comment and the crux of this is you got to get off the dime. Right. And I have discussions. I you know, had one a couple weeks ago with a huge distributor with their, one of their digital officers that they've got there and, and just looking at CRM and customer intelligence which is not new technology as most people know it was on the roadmap for later in the year. Right. So organization has hundreds of customer facing people without. And I have these conversations every day. That's right. It's not to pinpoint one organization but I have this conversation with people pretty much every day that are, you know, 50 million, 250 million approaching half a billion dollar a year. Companies who know where they need to go in digital transformation or at least some steps that they have, but they're still working with in many instances 10, 15, 20 year old ERP systems and maybe a couple of other spot pieces of software, maybe a little bi and so forth. But the digital transformation is very different than just saying we bought software.

Yeah, I think, you know, look, I can totally understand where we're at right now as it relates to AI. There's a lot of too many unknowns, right? There's so a lot of unknown. It's hard to make good decisions and there's a lot of, and I get it, there would be a lot of fear of messing. You know we call it fear of messing up.

Right.

There's fear of missing out and there's fear of messing up. Right? I think there is. So, and that's understandable. And I, and I think this year will help really put some clarification. In fact we're going to talk about some of those things here in just a minute. I think though, right now, here's my recommendation and this is not self serving really at all, but just knowing where I know AI is going and what some of the things that are going to come about in the next six to 12 months is, do everything you can. As far as digital transformation is to get your data organized and in a place where it can be utilized and CRM, what we do is taking a lot of sales and business and customer related data and organizing that and making it so that it can be used and actionable when you're ready to move. With AI, your ERP is transactional accounting, transactional inventory, other sort of data to make that actionable and usable when it comes to AI, whatever the case may be. In my opinion, it should be 911 to get your data organized and together through some of the traditional digital transformation actions. Then you now have your fuel tanks essentially to then be ready. As the AI becomes more obvious on how you should be applying it, you've got your data ready. If you wait to figure out what your AI is going to be to then figure out your data, you're going to be way behind where it needs to actually come together. So that's my, my $0.02 recommendation for today.

Well, I'm glad you shared that. It kind of makes me think back to this. This fall I have a presentation that I do for trade associations, buying groups and so forth and it is, it's titled the four Pillars of Digital Transformation and you were with me when I gave it in Denver for one of the buying groups this fall and that was the after conversation with most and is all wholesale distributors in the room, right? That was the after conversation, the presentation and you know the four pillars, right, are getting clarity with your data with erp, with CRM, with marketing automation and E commerce tools so that we're getting that data together, we're looking at them holistically to make decisions in our business and serve our customers better because we have what truly is finally customer intelligence. But that ended up being the after discussion at lunch that day and then later that night after a reception in the bar with people I was talking to and I know you had the same conversation some when we were in together was about I've got all this data, right? It's not clean, it's not ready for prime time. And the way to get the best result out of any AI tool, whatever you're going to use is going to be to your point, right? Having data that is clean. And I don't want to say scrubbed per se, but most organizations need to do a little bit of work. And it's not that it's impossible or it's overly expensive or daunting. It's setting a plan for the data.

And again, it doesn't even have to be like, you know, squeaky clean. From a hygiene perspective, I like to use the word as I have a place, I have a repository to capture the data and to organize it. You know, that's any sort of ERP or CRM. I'll just take CRM as an example. Right. You can, you know people well, we're, you know, tracking activity or whatever. But if you think about how you're, you're using CRM to organize your data related to customer opportunities, customer, even issues, potentially customer engagement, customer conversations, customer actions, prospect or customer, when I use that word. Right. Most companies, if you don't have CRM, that data is not being captured and it's certainly not being organized. So therefore it's not going to be in a place where it can be utilized. As we get ready to go into AI. So even if all you just, and I, we tell people this all the time, even if you, for no other reason, you just want to be able to capture and organize that sales and customer information, make sure that you put that CRM aspect of things onto your roadmap as a sooner than later type of thing. Obviously there's a lot of other benefits potentially for that, but it's just as a place to organize and capture that data. The other thing is that I know we have to move on here, but.

Yeah, you're on a roll.

We see a lot of people talk about their concern about data hygiene. Right. My data is bad, I got a lot of bad data. And that's true, but that is less important. There's a lot of things that even can be done with AI as you move forward to kind of weed out some of that bad data or even help clean up some of that bad data. Hygiene issue, so to speak. So again, we want to focus more on the organization of it. How is it organized? How is it structured? That's why it's called structured data. How is it structured? How is it structured and organized so that we can be ready to use that and we can release some stuff on this. Because I've been doing some testing is if I look at what is the best data, I'm finding like what is the best data that AI thrives the best with? Like what organization of data is the best, what is the best way to organize data to then maximize the results that you start to get out of large Language models and AI stuff. We can talk more about that separately. But there is some best practices, I guess, on how to do that. But even if you don't have those best practices at hand, just having some framework for organization will go a long way. All right, I'm done. We can move on.

Well, I think, you know that the key thing, right, is visualizing that data that becomes actionable, right? And we can have all the BI tools and all the ERP stuff that we want that will tell salespeople, as an example, what they need or what they should be looking at if they go look. But they need it in a single place where everything is there for them. And I think that's what's important, is we get that data. And again, to your point, right, it doesn't have to be pristine or squeaky clean, but we do need to do some cleaning with our data. We need to get data from across our organization, bring it into a central location that we get that visibility and accountability to. And it's not just financial data, it's all of the things that go with that, our buyer behavior and what they're doing, what the needs are, what projects they're working, all that data that, and then the E commerce data, the what, what videos are they watching on our website, what emails are they opening? We bring all of that data together with financial data. That's where we truly get customer intelligence that accelerates growth. So anyways, let's move ahead. We're, we're way behind. Quickly, next article that we have, here comes it. This is a Daily Mail article from the uk, but we'll cover it pretty quickly. And the reason we're going to talk about Amazon reviews briefly is not because of what we might have bought the other day, a new pickleball paddle or whatever it might be, but more about the business side of this is more and more manufacturers are making their products available on Amazon, whether it's a tool or some PPE or whatever it might be. And Amazon's business is, I had an, I mentioned this before on our show is an Amazon executive at a dinner I was at a number of years ago in San Diego commented, he said, you know, I think his words were, if it's legal, reasonably moral and fits in a box, Amazon will sell it and ship it. And so, you know, if you think about it, right, if you're a PPE man, personal protective equipment manufacturer, or a hand tool manufacturer, things like that, that fit into reasonable sized boxes, having a presence on Amazon builds brand, not just for sales, but it builds brand. Well now what we have happening in that is there are distributors and there's two camps that I'm learning on this. There are distributors that have an E commerce present presence that are truly trying to sell one off items on E Commerce versus just taking orders through E Commerce. There's one camp that says Amazon is the devil and never have anything to do with Amazon. There are others that are looking at their vendors and their supply partners that have an Amazon presence and they're piggybacking off of that brand and they're also now starting up their own Amazon store. The reason that, because of that is why we will talk about this topic which is really that nearly half of Amazon reviews right now are unreliable and oftentimes fraudulent.

Yeah, you know I think there's two parts to that and they listed out, I think the different categories. I said what is clothes, shoes, jewelry and so forth. So I don't know how.

Go ahead.

Sorry. No, I don't know how that actually applies to all the sort of business related type things on there. But I think there's two things to be aware of is one, the reviews themselves may be bogus but also a lot of times people evaluate and make decisions based on the quantity of reviews, right? So you may end up seeing oh my God, they have 10,000 reviews. Well, a good majority of those reviews may be bogus or, or fraudulent along the way. So you, if you look at the qualitative and the quantitative part of it, it's probably not the. Again, I don't know how this affects on the business side but if it.

I'll speak to that. Just a second.

Yeah, some of the categories they were talking about here to me it more due diligence needs to happen beyond hey, I got 10,000 reviews and it looks like there's a lot of five stars or four stars there.

Well, what's really going on with this, right is they've got. And this is. I'll tie it back to what you were mentioning is about how this ties into wholesale distribution, right. Is as people are moving there, right. They're looking at lots of. If I'm going to open an Amazon store, right. And have a presence as you know, Joe's Industrial Supply on Amazon. I'm going to be wanting to work with my current vendors but I'm going to be wanting to solicit and sell other products that I could be looking at. So you know, the problem that they're describing here is that people are like and this is mostly are and oftentimes with third party sellers.

Right.

Which would be that if I set Joe's Supply up there, there are many folks out there trying to manipulate these ratings to boost their own sales. There are companies out there that are using, literally brokers to solicit fake customer reviews through social media, encrypted messages. There's bots that are doing these things now. And it's important because if I'm going to have a store out there, as I'm selecting what's going to be in my store, I need to be able to rely on something that I see reviews there. Not just, you know, what I may have in my own mind of what I want to sell, but I'm going to want to expand what I sell in my store. Because that's the beauty of Amazon, right? Is I can sell so much there.

Yep.

So I don't know.

I don't know the answer, but it's just, it's certainly something to be aware of. Nothing.

Well, just in closing on that, right. As Amazon says, it's not as bad as some of this research says. Of course they're trying to crack down on it. But as AI grows and bots, it's something to pay attention to. But I do think we are going to see a continued and ongoing growth of wholesale distributors having an Amazon presence. I know, right. There's probably people I can think could name a few of them right now that would probably be throwing rocks at me that they would never ever do that. And here's all the reasons why you shouldn't. There's a whole nother school of thought.

Of why you would.

So, so anyways, let's move ahead. Let's. It's, you know, we're 39 minutes into our broadcast this morning, almost 40 minutes in, and we've only roughly said the word a couple of times. So. Ready? Here we go. AI AI.

The household name of 2024. The household order of 2024.

So this article that we have here, it's a Reuters article about the New York Times suing OpenAI and Microsoft. Right. OpenAI's single largest investor now has a board seat. And they have a board seat or just board observing. Anyways, they're involved in the board seat.

Yeah.

And anyways, New York Times is suing them about infringing on copyright. There's tons and tons of. I just saw a thing earlier today that some famous writers, John Grisham, David Baldacci, some comedians even, are starting to jump on the bandwagon of starting to look into these lawsuits about copyright Infringements. So you're our science guru of the day here. What's your first take on this?

Yeah, I have a lot of. And I haven't done enough homework. I haven't done enough homework to fully understand all the nuances and ins and outs of this. You know, there's a lot of. Right. You can go to search engines today. Now, I know that. Let me back up. I know the lawsuit here was based around the fact that the New York Times said somehow they were able to get past their paywall and get data from the New York Times site that was only available for paid subscribers. Right. And make that data accessible and available on OpenAI. So that, I believe is the basis of this specific lawsuit for that, which technically I don't even know how that happens. And technically I don't know how OpenAI or whatever wouldn't have been cognizant or aware of this. So again, I don't know all the details of this. It seems a bit odd in the general sense. If you go to search. Right. A lot of data is out there. You mentioned authors and other people like that. It is out there that's available to the public on search.

They call it fair use. Right, Right.

Yeah. But I mean, most people want to put a lot of data out there. You know, again, if I'm an author or whatever the case may is, I want my, my visibility of what I do do I want my whole book out there or whatever. Not necessarily so, but there is a lot of information like that already out there in the public search domain, if you want to call that, or the search world. So the fact that that data is then being used to train the OpenAI model and then people want to sue because of that, that to me is a little bit of a, I don't know, potentially contradictory. I don't know again, if it's, Again, I haven't done enough research to be totally fluent on all of this. It just seems like there's a lot of potential conflict or maybe even contradiction between some of the things that are going on related to suing the AI companies versus what's already been available and out there on search for many years.

Yeah. So let me ask you a question related to that. We got some comments coming in, some questions that we'll get to here in just a minute. But wasn't there, I mean, this was like 10 plus years ago. Wasn't Google trying to basically scan and, and have available through its search model like the Library of Congress? I mean, just about. And that's just full of copyrighted material. You know, and so it's interesting to me to see this is, and maybe this part of this is tying back to all of the frenzy that we saw during the, the writers strike and the actor strikes. Right. About AI use in those settings is people are looking at, you know, it's, it's, there's an economic impact that they're looking at with all of this. And my assumption is that maybe it is that as the New York Times was trying to throw the first, you know, the first bomb over the fence to get kind of this conversation started a little bit further so they can start getting some, some court opinions and so forth on how they may or may not be able to protect things. But OpenAI and Microsoft is saying this and this could just transfer right across to Bard and Llama from Facebook and all of these other tools that we're going to be seeing popping up. But the response from them is basically this is all part of what's a legal doctrine governing unlicensed use of copyright material called fair use. And that's, I think what will end up being adjudicated in this setting is what is fair use.

Yeah. And if I'm, look, if I'm a New York Times or a media company, I'm, I'm nervous. Right. I mean you sent me, you sent me a chat GPT thread where you were going in and, and asking ChatGPT about some news related information. Well, what did ChatGPT do it when aggregated information from potentially multiple news sites and try to give us the most comprehensive and holistic answer to that news event. Right. That's very threatening to traditional news and media sources that are there. So I completely understand that. Why there could be fear and there could be a lot of disruption as part of this. I don't know how this will. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out legally and if they win this case or how it actually ends up coming together. But I don't know that it's something that's going to be sustainable as a long term. I don't think it's a black and white issue as to what data is legitimately should be available and used for these models and what should not. I don't know. There's a lot of shades of gray.

Something to keep our eye on with all of this. Right. I think is important. I pulled that article together just because I think we're going to continue to see this. I'm going to. William asked a question here. He says where specifically will I have the biggest impact on wholesale distribution, tactical ordering, website chatbots. I want to address that and we're going to talk about some trends in AI in just a couple of minutes that will also address that a little bit. But I think what we're going to be seeing here in this article, you know, before we go too far here, that the idea of that information that's out in the public domain, whether it's however this, these lawsuits play out, is a little, it's important because we want our, our model. Right. And you're going to have an opportunity to correct me here. But I'm going to, I'm going to give more layman's terms of our opportunity with AI within manufacturing wholesale distribution, right. We've talked a lot earlier today and in lots and lots of past broadcast about data, right. You talked today about the importance of it. It's astounding to me. And I'll mention this again because you know, my background is 30 plus years in wholesale distribution. Your background, although you're becoming an expert in wholesale distribution because you've been around it now for close to 10 years or seven, eight years at least. But your background is in technology, right? Computer science and so forth. But as we look at these things, I'll reference to a comment that you make consistently is you've rarely ever seen an industry or a market and just happens to be the market I've spent my career in. When we look at both manufacturing, wholesale distribution, but probably a little stronger even on the distribution side about the treasure trove of data, right. When you stop and think about a company that has a digital access to 10, 15, 20 years of invoice data, the things that AI can do with that within a business is dramatic and overwhelming. So back to William's question. We'll talk about it a little bit more. His question, tell me, bring that up for us. Sure, we can see that real quick because, and we're going to talk further about this and, and if you don't, William, if you don't get the answer you're looking for out of this, chime back in. But I think we're going to talk about this in our Tech Talk article that we post each week as well. And again, quick reminder, if you're listening on a podcast and not seeing the screen that we're looking at today, we have the newsletter that we post every week. It's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution, where we consolidate news articles and events from around the world and how they relate to wholesale distribution manufacturing, reach out to us at the email address would be helloadsmartech.com we'll get that email out to you. If we happen to be connected on social media, you can direct message me or lead smart technologies in any of the platforms. And then as well, we have a website for this podcast, which is called aroundthehornpod.com and you can sign up there. So I think this issue, though is that we're looking at is.

And by the way, we're totally good with them scraping our website and taking our material.

That's right. Very good. That's awesome. Thank you for that. My point being, is that article related to what OpenAI is doing and all of the other models out there are doing is looking at them basically scraping the web. The World Wide Web.

Right.

What we're looking at is. And as we start talking about AI and wholesale distribution and manufacturing are the things that William talked about here, right? Tactical ordering, optimizing websites, more specifically e commerce, using chatbots, really using those tools to analyze data, whether it's ERP data, CRM data. We have a tool built into our solution Leads more channel cloud, which is called our Genius Feed. And Genius Feed is an AI tool that is monitoring all of the data to bring up alerts and remind you not just having to go proactively look for who's behind on payments, what quotes are closing, things like that, but proactively bringing this data up. That's data that AI is using from within your organization in the right models that Tom's talking about. Tom, you can add to this or correct me if I miss anything here is we're talking about AI running against your internal data and then using that external data from the Internet to bring even more data in to help you make decisions. So these things are important to the global AI. This article we just discussed, but that is a component of what a wholesale distributor or manufacturer will be able to do with AI with their own data and external data. Tom, anything to add to that or did I do okay?

For a layman, I think that's fine. And I think going back to William's question, it was really well done. That was an excellent explanation. I can't say anything more. It's a mic drop moment. How's that? But going back to Williams, the answer is all the above and then some. And just again, I know we're really running out of time here, but as it relates to data, you can look at it kind of like a matrix, right? You have your data that belongs to you, belongs to your company. Call that first party Data and then you have data that doesn't belong to your company, which is, you can call it third party data. And then you have data kind of that's on one, maybe that's the y axis of the matrix. On the x axis you have then two categories, which is what's considered structured data, which is stuff that you can put in a spreadsheet, rows, columns, things like that that would be in a traditional application. And then you have your other data about all your documents and processes and best practices and safety requirements and everything like that. So any of those things are, you can look at those and go, there's kind of two combinations, right? You have first and third party and then you have structured and unstructured. That is your. And again this is very simplistic but that is your sort of data universe, if you want to talk about that. And that data universe is what is ultimately now how you use that and how you use that with different models and all of those things. But that is the fuel that, that drives that. And then you add it, you can add another layer into that with your partners and you know, there's kind of gray areas between that, but that's the basic basics.

Very good.

Good.

Thanks for that. Great question, William. Appreciate that you sharing that with us. Let's jump ahead. Each week in the newsletter we have a section called Tech Talk. This Week's article is 5 generative AI trends to look for in 2024. And I'm going to rapid fire these to you Tom, and get some of your feedback on. First one was AI Technology at work and bring your own AI. You want to unpack that a little bit?

Yeah, well, I mean that's happening right now, right. People are bringing their Chat GPT login to, to work and they're using Chat GPT for, for business and things like that. So that's what they're talking about is you know, AI is going to come into the business whether you do it from a corporate perspective or not, because people are bringing it into the, to the equation there. And I think there was a second issue about that as well. What do you do about that? But that is going to be more and more of a trend and is. And by the way, the Chat GPT Store is opening I think next week.

I just got that announcement this morning.

Yeah, that's going to be a marketplace on Chat GPT where you can go and look for things like pre created basically agents or GPTs that have different purposes that are now going to be accessible because they're in A marketplace. It'll be interesting. I'm interested to see what shows up in that marketplace and which of those are more business oriented or not. But that's yet another example of, you know, bringing your own. Bring your own AI.

Right, good. So next topic was, and I think this will relate backward back to that first point about kind of monitoring. Bring your own AI. And there's, I think there's, the topic is that they mentioned the second one of their, their trends to look for was enterprise will invest more in AI governance. There's probably multiple sides to that. What governance is probably external data, internal data, what people are doing. You want to comment on that a little bit?

Well, I mean, yes, the answer is yes, it'll be around, not just data, but it'll be around use. So how are we using the data? And then I think even Kelly mentioned a minute ago something about hallucinations. Right. How do you QA a little bit about what's coming out of the, out of the AI and is it in fact accurate and how is this being used? You know, are you using hallucinating data with hallucinations in it or inaccurate data in your. Or inaccurate outcomes or in your organization as well? So I think there's going to be a multidimensional governments kind of, and there'll be an organization I think in most, in most businesses called AI operations, which will look at, in the same way you have dev operations right now in most companies, development operations. You're going to have an AI, AI operations team that's going to look at a lot of these different aspects of how we're using AI in business.

That's great. All right, so next, one little bit, we're getting a little bit in the weeds here, but this will be probably helpful to folks. Next thing they talked about as a trend to watch for was autonomous agents. Fire away.

Yeah. So, and this comes back even to William's question. Right. And this is an area that most people are used to using AI the way you use ChatGPT. Right. You put in a prompt and something comes back and you use that and you have a conversation or how you use. Right. Autonomous agents are now think about taking a lot of different AI capabilities, essentially linking them together and allowing them to run automatically or have one AI ask one AI tool, then call another AI tool that then automatically does something else.

So I want, I want to, my, my wedding anniversary is August 26th. I want to go to Hawaii. What happens next in that autonomous agent?

Right. So I want to go to Hawaii and I want to give it some basic thing and says, create my trip. And through a whole series of autonomous agents working together. At the end of the day, you have your trip.

One is looking at flights, one is looking at hotels, one is looking at my schedule to see if I'm even available.

1.

One can check my wife's calendar. All of these things. Start talking to each other to do duties and tasks for me.

Yeah. And they're dependent on each other. Right. So you may go, okay, well, before I check flights, I have to check the calendar. Now I go back and maybe you gave it a framework that says, well, I don't want to spend $5,000 for airfare. So it may want to go back and go, well, if you go on this date, it's all of those types of things that are contingencies. All of those things will end up sort of working together. But yeah, we, there's a lot to talk about there. So we'll, we'll.

And I just wanted to get it out to the audience and then this recorded and preserved in history that I know my anniversary date. So well, I said it out there out loud. So. All right, next one after autonomous agents. Multimodal and open models. These are, these are kind of some big words if you're newer to AI, right?

Yeah. So multimodal. What that means is lots of different formats. It could be visual, it could be audio, it could be pictures, it could be all kinds of things. Not just text. Right. Or you're not just dealing with text or data. But I think the bigger, you know, when they say multimodal. Right. Your, your companies in the way that I believe AI, and especially when you get into the autonomous agents, you could be using different models for different purposes. I think we talked about this on the show a couple weeks ago as Apple is talking about releasing a model that will run on your phone, a personal model that will run on your phone. Then you have your own business model, your corporate models and so forth. So there's a lot of different potential. In fact, there could be thousands of models potentially available and accessible. Some are more expensive to use than others. So the key is, how do you kind of create a composite of those models and use the right model for the right job? That's going to be a big architectural conversation over the next. I don't know if that's a. I mean, it'll certainly be a discussion in 2024, but I think it'll become a bigger issue in the next couple of years.

Well, I think this. And then the next, the Last topic that will that is brought up here is more AI startups and better sophisticated offerings. I think what part of this is going to play out as right. And I really think this is important for our audience of manufacturers and wholesale distributors that might be looking at this going oh my gosh, you know, I don't want to bury my head in the sand but this is overwhelming is that the DIFM model is going to come along.

Right.

Is who can do this for me in a way that's going to bring relevance to my business. Because you know we had some comments about chief ethics officers and all these types of things. You're unlikely to see that in a 75 million dollar a year distributor with four branches and a part time IT person. Right. And so how do we get around that?

I think this is the most important one actually on the list is all the things that we as as a vendor or as a company bringing AI to businesses. Up until now most of you look at most of the AI that's come out from companies. It's like a tool. Hey, look at my tool. Look at this cool tool. In order to really be competitive. And I think we've been slower in the lead smart side even releasing some of the things mainly because I haven't wanted to release stuff that doesn't take into account some of these other foundational issues that we just talked about.

Right.

I think vendors are going to have to be. You're going to have to release your AI tools and capabilities. Keeping in mind how does that fit in with the company's AI governance? How does that fit in with their integrity? How are they using the models? What are the costs of the model? Our job as the vendor or the service provider is to think through those things so that the offers and the tools that we provide kind of have those built into the DNA of what we're providing versus just saying here's another tool, here's another tool, here's another tool.

Right.

And that shift in the, in the vendor world of AI over the next year to two, well next one to three years for sure.

So we, we see this and I thank you for that clarification. We see this consistently right within, within our company Lead Smart where we, we meet with both distributors and manufacturers. But I think my belief is it's more prevalent at the distribution level is we have tons of different pieces of software.

Right.

But we have no tech stack and no plan for why we have this. Or you know, typically they're, they're all, not all, but many of them are Touching an ERP system to bring things out. But you know, we were on the phone earlier this week with a distributor that we thought we knew. You know, your team is onboarding them. You joined me on the call of getting a new customer on board and I learned about like three or four new pieces of software that they have that impact their roadmap. Right. That in all of our other calls they've never disclosed. So we have all of the. Whether it's a mapping software or it's a delivery software or it's a messaging software, whatever it might be that they bought all these tools with AI. I'm going to throw this out there. Some may agree or disagree with me. I'm going to suggest the idea of having a well thought out, well planned, well structured and organizing tech stack. These are the software pieces that I use in my business and how they relate to AI for my roadmap moving forward is probably more important than ever right now because of the impact that AI can have.

No, I agree. Again, we talked about data organization, your technology organization, if you want to call it that, how you're. I've said this over and over. AI is going to really force businesses, everybody's included, right. Is to really get ourselves much more structured and organized. We have no choice if we're going to try and take advantage of the benefits that come from AI. So whether that's technology, whether that's data, whether that's process, whatever the case may be, it's going to force us to get more organized and more structured and great. Anyway, that's going to be a byproduct of all that.

So we're going to continue these discussions as we go on. Each week we have a feature. I'm going to kind of jump ahead and we'll wind down. Each week we have a feature called Industry Scuttlebutt. We pop up three M&A pieces, whatever it might be. This past week, Stellar Industrial, historically headquartered in Pacific Northwest, announced another acquisition, acquiring IMC Supply. I think they were in Memphis, if I remember correctly. SRS Distribution Record 22 new branches through both. These were greenfield opportunities that they were opening. Not just acquisitions. But the third piece that we have here is modern distribution Management. And we get just as a kind of a side note today, right? We've had Reuters, I think CNBC, Tech Target, Modern Distribution Management, Distribution Strategy Group, Wall Street Journal and I think something from ap. Lots of different sources we bring together, but MDM does a great job. They put it together this regular M and A roundup and that's published here. It's also published on the MDM website. We're going to have Mike Hockett from MDM on with us, I think in late February and later in this quarter. Tom Gale, I think, is going to be joining us as well as a guest. But quickly, December they had they published 34 different M&A news items, but there were 40 transactions. Several of them included multiple companies at once. That was a big jump from the previous November and the same as October. So we're seeing this. There's this frothiness has continued throughout 2023 in M& A, in distribution, and certainly we've seen quite a bit in manufacturing as well. I think that's only going to scale up this year as likely money becomes easier to get our hands on and financing options for M and A becomes even more accessible. So good stuff there. Thanks for all of the organizations that we get data from each week for this. We added a feature last month actually was called In Review. So again, if we publish this newsletter, we're looking at it now. If you're listening on the podcast and can't see this and would like our newsletter, just reach out to us. But we'll get you a copy of that. But In Review is where we post articles about things we've talked about many times potentially in the past. This is a great article. It talks about 10 of the biggest ransomware attacks of 2023. Some related to distribution and manufacturing, others not at all. Just I think we're going to continue to, especially with AI tools expanding. Right. That's going to be some of the bad side or the negative side of AI is the bad guys are going to use some of these things. So that's, that's great. There. There's also a special feature article that we added that goes into more about AI lawsuits. We talked about one earlier today. This article about it's titled AI Lawsuits Explained. It's from TechTarget.com who's getting sued. It's pretty intuitive. Article talks further Last thing I want to hit on today is each week we publish an article about it's called Goodreads and it might be about leadership, it might be about technology, it might be about health. It's more of a let's get our head around something that can help us. Personally, I just thought this it talks about Costco employees at a, I think it was in Virginia voted to unionize. The company's response is just astounding to this. And if you just, you can just Google Costco unionizing But basically Costco CEO sent a letter out that said, hey, we support you and your decision to do that is on us. Right? We didn't do a good enough job to. Because the rest, you know, Costco by my house. Everybody there has a smile on. I think the people truly love working there. And this was, you know, people use that emotional intelligence mantra all the time where this was just smart, right? It was like, okay, what can we learn from this? We had this location that unionized. I don't know if it was multiple or individual that unionized. We're probably doing some things that didn't make that the greatest workplace to be at, so what can we do? So they basically went back and apologized. That was pretty cool.

That was a well written article or well written letter. And definitely, I think, a good sign of leadership and goodwill and handled it well.

Good. All right, my friend. This was a good one. We went long, but I think people have stopped.

I guess we're just preparing for next week, huh?

Oh, man, next week's gonna be fun. So back to those of you that joined us late next week, we have Mike Marks, Dirk Beveridge and Ian Heller. One of the first things I want to ask them together is have they ever been together on the same format or panel? They might have been, but I think it's going to be some fireworks and some fun and a bunch of giggles. Maybe we should have done this later in the day because it's so. It's definitely five o' clock somewhere and had an adult beverage with this one. But if you only tune in sporadically to listen to our show each week, man, come next week. Don't skip next week or at least listen to the podcast or the recording. You can always get our recordings on LinkedIn Live, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live. If you want to see how handsome Tom and I both are, you can get those there at the Lead Smart Technologies page. On, again, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, on our pages there, the broadcast. So next week should be fun. Really looking forward to it. I have no idea the direction some of this might go. It could be I could come out of this looking like the Allstate Insurance Mayhem man with some cuts and bruises, but it should be fine. So, Ian Heller, distribution strategy group distribution. Just, you know, an icon. Dirk Beveridge, one of the kindest human beings you'd ever meet. Phenomenal speaker, writer, does the We Supply America tour where he works and travels and does videos with family owned enterprises across the country and wholesale distribution. And Mike Marks from Indian River Consulting Group it's going to be fun. So hey, Tom, thank you, my friend. Thank you for everybody. Hey, look at that. Will's comment. Bring that up. Tom, one last one. Maybe go full screen and bring Will's. Will's comment up tuning.

I wanted, I wanted to thank James and Ron and Will for everybody staying on with us. We appreciate it. Yeah, James, James has a new. James has a new show too. And we should. Yeah, James is now in the show business as well. So yeah, definitely check it out.

James is with the Perimeter Office Products in Atlanta. Great company partner of ours, good human being. And James, if you're still there, pop in the notes that the title of your podcast that you just launched yesterday because it's related to Envelope, it was a super cool title. We'll post it, we'll add it in and we'll talk about it again if James isn't still there to plug that in. So anyways, great for folks being with us. Will mention tune in early next week for the pre show dancing. That could be fun. And maybe I can get Mike and.

I'll probably be a little late next week. I'll probably be a little late.

I'm pushing the envelope on the same podcast formats that we're on. Check them out on LinkedIn. Mahesh, thanks for your comment. We're going to get. Mahesh was one of our top rated guests from last year. I don't think I shared that with you, Mahesh. As we're winding down. So we'll get Mahesh back on hopefully soon. And so that was insightful. What a great day. I had a lot of fun in our first time for this year. And so I'm going to say thank you to you, my friend. Thank you for all the comments today. We're grateful for the growth of the show and it continues to get a wider audience each week and we're appreciative of that. If you have thoughts and topics and ideas, let us know that we should be covering. We'll continue to do that and we wish you a wonderful afternoon evening, depending on where you are, fantastic weekend. Please be safe, be kind and good. Do things, do do good things.

Thanks and we'll see you next week.

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 LeadSmart Technologies@Lead smart tech.com.