What A Difference A Week Makes: The Fed's Big Decision

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&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. I thought with that cool new microphone, you might be singing a few tunes as well.

No, no, I should have. If there was words to that tune, I would have. My camera seems to be a little fuzzy right now. Maybe it's just my eyes.

No, you're a little fuzzy right now.

See if it adjusts for me. I'm sure, sure it will momentarily. How are you doing?

Okay, how are you?

Very, very good. The things are changing out there these days, aren't they?

I think so. That's okay. Another week, another set of changes. Yeah.

But we'll dive right into that in a moment. I'm looking, Tom, I'm as we're on our simulcasting tool that we use, I look a little bit fuzzy, but I looking at a LinkedIn feed and it's not too bad. So I'm not quite sure what's going on there, but we'll adjust to that. But anyways, you're getting ready to hit the road next week, aren't you?

I am, I am. Let me out of the house. Yeah.

Out to see a key customer and work with them on some technology issues, which is exciting. That'll be great. And I'm headed off to the Industrial Supply Associations event in Orlando, Florida. Looking forward to that ISA event. They're always good. Good speakers, good networking and so forth that go with that as well. So. But why don't before we dive in, why don't we do a little bit of the housekeeping that we normally do? If that works out. Okay, what do you say?

Yep, let's do it. Quick, quick, quick, quick. We got a lot to cover today.

We got a lot to cover. You have a couple of exciting things and I know there's a couple topics you want to move beyond quickly as well. But. So I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with my lifelong friend and co founder of Lead Smart Technologies, Tom Burton. We get together every Friday morning here. Unless, like next week we won't be here because someone will be on a. One of us will be on an airplane. But we get together each week, we talk about the news of wholesale distribution and manufacturing. We look at everything going on in the world, whether it's port strikes, supply chain issue, M and A activity, finance, the economy, sales and marketing, E commerce, human resource things. We look across at all of those and we try and discuss what is happening with that is how it relates to wholesale distribution. And so we do that each week here. We send out a newsletter every Friday morning. It goes out to about 10,000 plus people and that newsletter is called again around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing. If you would like to receive that and you don't get it, it's easy to get. Just reach out to us. You can reach us at hello atLead smart tech.com and we'll get that out to you right away. Additionally, you can get information about that at the website that we have for the podcast which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. past episodes will be there. We're going live this morning on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live and Facebook Live like we do every week and later in the day this broadcast and livecast will be available on Spotify, Odyssey, Apple Podcasts, all the top podcast platforms, wherever you get those and we would love it if you would join us there. If you were listening on the podcast you do not get an opportunity to see what we're showing on no, I did that on purpose Tom. Yeah, I'm trying to get my camera to adjust here but thanks for the throwing me off base there. But anyways, if you're listening on the podcast you don't get to see our beautiful faces nor do you get to see newsletter that we have there. So if you'd like to get a copy of that please let us know. So and finally in doing so, if you like what you are listening to each week, best way to do it is share that information with friends. If you're listening on LinkedIn on YouTube or Facebook or YouTube or Facebook, hit the subscribe or the Follow button on the Lead Smart Technologies page. You'll get alerts for this each week. If you're listening to the podcast on Apple or Spotify or somewhere else, just hit the subscribe button and leave a review and that'll get out to others. Last thing before we move ahead is we couldn't do this each week if we didn't have the support of the company that Tom and I both work for, Lead Smart Technologies. Lead Smart has developed a AI enabled customer intelligence and CRM solution that is a truly a foundational tool for wholesale distributors and manufacturers to gather information from around their organization through erp, marketing automation, E commerce, data lakes, other tools and bring that together to get AI enabled insights into what is happening at their customer and within their organization to help accelerate growth. If you're a wholesale distributor or manufacturer and you're ready to digitally transform, we would love to talk to you about that. So that's about it, Tom. Ready to dive in. We've got Will with us. We've got Bob here with his.

I want to say, I want to say good morning to Will. Hey Will. I'm going to a big infor customer next week so if I need any help I'm going to give you a call. And again welcome Bob. Aloha. And yeah, if you're out there listening, please check in, let us know you're here, where you're from. Always great to know who's out there.

Very good. Want to dive into the news with us there, Tom?

We can do that.

Fix my camera.

Oh yeah. As soon as I brought up the news, your camera was fixed.

No, no, I did it on my own so I don't ever question my abilities with technology. It, it had somehow changed on its own. It changed the setting of the.

The.

Quality of the image. So I am, I'm a higher quality image now, just to put that on the record. Yep.

So I'm just going to skip all of these and move on to the news.

Yeah, you just want to roll right back past this economy and supply chain by the way. Hey, good to see Rodney Williams with us from North Texas. Crystal's joining us too from Saskatoon.

Wow, Kevin, you just, you just, you just died. You just died. No sound. Gonna have to go back to the other, other microphone. This, this happened earlier where he has a cool new microphone but it likes to cut out I think after like five minutes. No, why don't you go out and go back in? All right, he's coming back and going back in. Lars, greetings from sunny Minnesota. You know, I'm, I'm going to Wisconsin next week and I was hoping to get a little taste of fall and they tell me though it's going to be in the 70s and in quite warm. So I guess in Minnesota it's been very warm as well. I was talking to another customer in Minneapolis this week and I think they said 80s so but there might be some, some leaves that are changing colors. So looking forward to that which we do not get here in, in California. All right, just another minute here and hopefully Kevin's technical difficulties will be handled. Well now he just disappeared completely and I'm hoping that his computer is not rebooting. Will's asking what part of Wisconsin. It's about an hour, I think from Green Bay, about an hour north of Green Bay, somewhere in that area. I don't, don't know exactly the city, but yeah, Bob, I need the Jeopardy. Theme here and otherwise I'm just going to do the news by myself. I'm going to give Kevin another minute and then, hey, you're going to get my take on the news. But yeah, Duncan saying it's changing color in Toronto. That's good, that's good. Yeah, I've heard about that Mars Cheese Castle now from a couple of different people. I don't know if that's going to be exactly in the area that I'm going to be into, but I've heard about that Mars Cheese Castle, Will, from a few different people and I'm sure there's some cheese curds all over the place. Okay, well, I see Kevin coming back, but it says his device is not connected. Thank you everybody for all the, the comments to keep us going here for while Kevin sorts through his technical difficult. Yeah, I heard it's a little bit of a drive. But it's funny because it's like I've, the few people I've told I've gone to Wisconsin, like three of them have said go to the Mars Cheese Castle. So it must be pretty epic. You know, I'd really like to start on the news and start talking about rate cuts and things like that, but I just don't feel I can do that. Where. Yeah, Bob says he's from New England and they start coming up from Leaf peepers start coming up from New York. Yeah, my wife is from New Hampshire. So we try and go out every year to New Hampshire to, to see the leaves and all of that. And yeah, it's probably a bigger, bigger tourist season. It's probably a bigger tourist season there in the fall than it is in the summer. Or at least similar in size, just different, different people. Yeah. Well, I may be dancing here in a minute. I'll be dancing through the news. I don't know why Kevin is having so many problems here. All of a sudden he got a new microphone. I don't know why. That would kill his computer. All right, I'm giving him 30 seconds. Yeah, my, my Bob saying he moved from Dallas to Manchester. All my in laws live in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Exeter, New Hampshire, which is right on the border of Maine. Really a cool area. It's about an hour north of Boston and it's Just unbelievable up there with the leaves and the, and the, and the color. Especially if you get there at the right time, at the right peak. There is some just amazing, amazing stuff. Warren's. Yes, I've been to Warren's, Warren's Lobster House, which is in Kittery, Maine, which is right across the, the river from New Hampshire. And not only do they have good lobster, but they have an amazing salad bar, if I remember correctly. So, yes, we tend to go there most of the time when we're where we're in town there. All right. Hey, I'm going to get rolling here. I have no idea what's going on with Kevin and his computer, but let's get into the news here. So, hey, as we all know, the Fed slashed interest rates by a half a point. And if you've been listening to our show and our bet, Kevin is gloating because not only did they say they, you know, cut rates by a half a percent, but they said they're going to be cutting rates another half a percent before the. Oh, here he comes. He must have heard me. Are you there?

I'm here.

Okay. Well, thanks to Bob and Will and everybody else, they kept us going. You know, we chatted about all kinds of important things here.

Yeah. So, new laptop arrives. Arrives Monday. My new MacBook. Apologies to you and to everyone. I'm wondering, though, if actually that was all done on your end to keep me from gloating too much.

That's what I was hoping. That's what I was thinking. I was just about ready to go through and give my take. But hey, let's, let's, let's speed up here, you know.

Well, let's, let's just. How much did you cover about that? Because I do.

Just started. We just started. Just started.

Okay. My apologies. This has happened once before. New MacBook arrives Monday. I'm quite excited about. I think it, it just seems, Tom, it seems like that that new mic I bought, like, I spent a lot of money on it a couple months.

About a month ago, it just basically overtakes your Mac and it can't handle it. So.

Well, let's. You think that's the case?

I think that that could be part of it. Good.

Well, new machine arrives Monday. Pretty excited about that. I will be fast.

Yep.

The.

Yeah. So Laura says ensure your state Kevin has to buy you is a really good one.

Why would I be buying you a steak, Lars? Well, because I'll buy Lars a steak.

Yeah, happily so. Look, I, I admit, I admit my probability of buying You a steak is probably, is quite high. However, I am not giving up 100 hope. Okay. And I think actually the half a point cut works in my favor slightly because they cut more than expected. You know, a big cut to start off and you know, they've basically said that they're going to do another 50 basis points this year but, but they're going to be very data driven. So if we see a little, if we see an uptick in jobs or we see an uptick in the inflation rate over the next two months, it's not a slam dunk. They could easily, easily not make that move. And otherwise I'll, I've been looking forward to taking you to Outback and you know, you're welcome to even have the Bloomin Onion if you like with your dinner. I'm totally good with that. So. Yeah. And, and Will says he's going to call the chairman. I appreciate that. To push, push the next cut out to January. I just tell him there's no rush, Will. There's no rush. Right. You know, the new year is, is better. So.

Oh, what's in your coffee cup? What are you drinking this morning?

I figured I just had to take over the show myself. So that's.

But there's that gin in your coffee cup or tequila. Let's before we go on from there, just because of the delusion that you're talking and Will was saying some silly stuff like that Yesterday on a LinkedIn post I had although he did put a beautiful stake there, picture of one on there. And but listen, there is the dot plot that I think we've missed here and the dot plot is suggesting as they describe that and I'll just read this. It says in addition to this reduction, the committee indicated through its dot plot the equivalent of 50 more basis point points of cuts by the end of the year close to market pricing. The matrix of individual officials expectations pointed to another full percentage point in cuts by the end of 2025 and, and a half point in 2026. And all the dot plot shows the benchmark rate coming down about 2 percentage points beyond Wednesday's move. My friend. There would have to be some pretty big news out there.

But, but look at what happened in a week, right? One week ago we sat on the show and there was an article I think we went through that we were talking about that the chance of them making a half a point cut was like 17%. It was very, very low. And if I remember correctly the article was hey, if they do a half a point cut the stock market's going to go crazy, go down, because they're going to freak out. Right. It's going to show a sign of. And in the course of one, I think by Monday, I don't know what the heck happened, but the chances were up to like 50% for a, for a half point cut. And by the time Tuesday or Wednesday rolled around, it was like 70 or 80%. What. What changed in four days?

Leaks.

Yeah, obviously.

But anyway, information getting out.

Yeah, but anyway, I, I think that they do. He was very clear about them being data driven. And if the data stays the same, then I think you and I are going to be going to outback for a steak and a Bloomin Onion. If it doesn't stay the same, then, you know, we'll be having a much better stake somewhere else.

So where we go is dependent upon who wins. Is that the deal?

That's right. That's right.

Okay, perfect. No, you know, we went to a really cool steakhouse together in Newport beach last December. That's, that's on the agenda. The. There's a great place that the famous hockey player Timusolani owns in Laguna beach that. It's called Salani's. It's around a Pacific coast highway. That's. That's kind of where I'm leaning. So you can, you can try and play the outback game, but that ain't working. But you know what? I, I. Listen, nothing's sure till it's sure, but I, I think even though Will is agreeing with you and my thought. I thought Lars was my friend first, but the Lars might be along the way as well. But you know, I don't. I'm not buying anybody a steak regardless. Right. My, my worst case scenario is we go to. We buy our own stakes. So what did you call it? House money.

Yeah, but if I said there's only one or less. Right. So it's actually not 100 house money yet.

Well, how do you figure?

Right. So there's one. So if there's only one, I win. Okay. That's the more than one you win. Right. That's how it works. So you're not quite on house money yet. I overspoke.

The. Bob's got a good comment here, though. Getting back to the more important thing of the discussion of the day. So money will be cheaper, but things will be more expensive and that's, you know, potential for that. Right. We've got to get some balancing act going. There's some weird stuff happening out there, though. I mean, the whole, you know, we don't try to be political here at all. But it's just I was watching a senator that, you know, really wants to drive corporate profits and stop mergers and and so forth and squash a lot of capitalism out there right now and just to try and drive prices down that way and where there's some risky, risky discussion out going on out there related to that. And obviously prices are, are still crazy. The good news is here in California, gas prices have come down a lot. So I'm very appreciative of that. But you know what, when el Pollo Loco or, you know, I mean, it seems like fast food is 80 or 70% of the cost of going down and sitting and having a meal somewhere now.

Yep.

You know, so.

All right, well, you can go to the outback for the price of going to Pollo Loco.

Practically you could. But if you're paying off a debt.

Yeah.

Then it's not going to play out that way. So. All right, let's move ahead.

We got a lot to cover here and we're behind so.

Good. So next article, as we're talking about in the newsletter here, survey shows top execs back to viewing supply chain management as a cost center. This was from Digital 360. Similar article we posted as well from supply and demand chain executive. They're both referencing a study that was just released and some research that was out there from Ernst and Young. And you know, it's interesting and we talk about this and you know, we're in our economy and supply chain segment of the show and we've talked about this a number of times from the standpoint of going through the pandemic. Supply chain issues were out of control. The executives had to take a totally different, a totally different view of things. And we saw a lot of focus going in on managing supply chain, looking at technology within supply chain and really having that become such a key part of the company because of the challenges that were with just getting product. And now this starts. This article is really talking about how executives as a whole are kind of falling in the back in the wrong direction of, hey, all of our supply chain work. And basically it talked about supply chain management. People were almost becoming peers of the executives in the organizations and things are flip flopping back now. And I couldn't think of a worse time for that to be going on based upon two things. One is the supply chain. While the ships aren't stacked up out there and things are moving a little bit better, we have a very volatile supply chain out there between the risk. We're going to talk in a few minutes about the potential port strikes in the Gulf coast and the East Coast. And then when we still have the issues in the Suez Canal, we have geopolitical tensions. Now is not the time to be reverting back to previous thinking.

It said in there in the articles that there was. There's been a switch from supply chain being a growth driver or supply chain strategy being a growth driver and now going back to a cost center. And it seems like. Seems like it's a pretty short memory in a lot of. In complacency that would set in that quickly. I don't know. Yeah, it's. And it was, it was an overwhelming number of people on their survey that was moving in that direction.

And so the survey. This is Ernst and Young again. The surveys did this surveys 347 US supply chain executives from various industries whose companies have at least 500 million in annual revenue. It says despite heightened awareness of the importance of supply chain, 78% of supply chain leaders say their organization is back to focusing on supply chain cost management with 28% citing cost reduction as one of the top three priorities. A shift from pandemic era strategies. They go on to say the series of supply chain shocks that started with a pandemic elevated the role of supply chain leaders in the C suite. But executive teams are increasingly reverting to outdated views of supply chain as a cost center rather than a growth engine. And that's a big challenge. I think one of the things to be thinking about with this is going back to some of the discussions we've had. We talked with our guests last week with James Gilman about this. We've talked to quite a few other guests in the past year about how much more closely they're managing their supply chain and asking harder questions of their vendor partners. If you're a distributor and so forth, I think that's where we need to be.

Right.

Where we need to be is thinking about this just not as the dollars and cents of it, but what does it mean to my customer? We go back to being customer centric with these things. And that's where I think the risk of this is getting away from being customer centric and just doing what's best appears to be best for the customer with old school.

So yeah, and I want to, you know, I think what Bob's saying here we are on the hairy edge of having squeezed so many dollars out of supply chain costs as becoming hyper fragile doesn't take much to create shockwaves you know, I don't know if they're looking at this as a cost center. Is there a lot more to squeeze out of it? It seems like there's a lot more opportunity to optimize than there is to squeeze dollars out of the other end.

No, exactly. I mean, we're been having discussions about even AI tools for supply chain management.

Right.

And some deep conversations in those things. And I think this, where the risk with this kind of thinking right now is it's, there's one school of thought that says we're going to work hard on crunching the dollars in the supply chain. The other side of it is those are the things you control. But if you're doing that and you're not paying attention to the things that you can't control, and you can't control a Hootie rebel shooting a drone at a ship that has your raw materials on it. You can't control the geopolitical issues in the South China Sea and China and Taiwan and the pressures with the US Government and Taiwan. You can't control those things, but you should be preparing for those things. So I think just the point of these two articles in this E and Y survey was don't go back to pre pandemic thinking. Take that pre pandemic thinking or the during the pandemic thinking and make it your post pandemic view of how you manage supply chain in your business is understanding all of the factors and on a consistent and ongoing basis. Good. I'm done pontificating on that point.

All right. So speaking of supply chain, it looks like Biden is not going to step in in any way if there's a strike here on the East Coast.

So I mean, stop and think about that, the implications of that. Tom, there's, what we're talking about with this is main to Houston down the east coast and across the central part of the country. No ports open. Right. Potential. And by the way, in about two weeks and there I wonder if ships.

Are hustling to get in there fast.

Well, they're already moving to the West Coast. Right. We talked about that a few weeks ago. There's very. Right. There's already been a shift coming that direction and they're, they're, this is a big deal. But you know, we could pass by this. But you know, there's the, what was it called? There's the Taft Hartley Act.

Right.

That allows the government to step in regarding labor issues. Biden said that they've never, you know, it says weave. So his administration Never invoked it before. He sent out an emissary, the acting labor secretary last summer.

Right.

When there was the risk on the Lake Long Beach Port issue with this. And, and yeah, they got something done. I think it's, that was still somewhat of a fragile deal. But the, the good news of all of this, you know, is it hasn't happened yet. They're talking, I'm guessing they're going to extend talks probably a little bit. The union said something that we posted a week or two ago, though, that, you know, they're not fooling around and that they're ready to go. I, I listened the other day. We had a guest on earlier this year that's I really enjoyed having with us Eric Hoplin, the CEO of the national association of Wholesalers. And Eric was on Fox Business Network earlier this week. The, it's called Mornings with Maria Bartiroma. And it's a pretty big and popular show. And you know what Eric was talking about. I listened to a couple of clips I, I commented on. He posted it part of the clip on LinkedIn. I shared it. If you follow me on LinkedIn or we're connected, you can see it there or go out and check Eric's comments. The issue that's going on here is powerful, right. And the issue that's being talked about, Tom, here in this setting is the idea of automation. And that's the big issue. And what they're trying to do is completely block any automation coming into cranes, gates, container movements, any of those things. Right. And, and this is a, you know, protectionist type things.

Right.

We got to protect the jobs, protect the jobs, protect the jobs. Understandable. But the Eric made this great point. He was talking about the, the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. And what he was saying there is it's one of the most automated and mechanized ports in the world. And when they did all of that, there was no significant job loss issues that went along with it. And so he used, I just, I think this was great. Eric used the point of he just said, look, we're not the most sophisticated supply chain in the world that we probably think we are specifically when it comes to our ports. And he said this, we're at a moment, I loved it. He said we're at a moment of Blockbuster or Netflix. What do we want to be in our ports and our supply chain in the US because right now we're in that blockbuster world. Right. And the rest of the world, specifically a lot of the European ports are embracing technology that's there that are making Them more sufficient. There's research that's saying we're not losing jobs because of it. Right. And I've spent a lot of time when you know, when you and I were just out of high school, I worked for a company and I was in the port of Long beach or LA every day. And you know that was while that was eons ago with steam ships coming in it feels like versus tanker ships. But you go through the harbors. I just going to call a spade a spade. Somebody can get mad at me. But there's a lot of waste with a lot of. A lot of. You know it's kind of we joke about the Caltrans crews right here in California. Right. And it's one guy with a shovel and seven guys watching. There's a lot of that in the harbor. And I think the research is saying we got to automate these things and that's an issue of staying competitive in this country.

Yeah. Well, hey look whether I don't know what's going to happen in the strike or how this is going to result but it's going to happen. Right. So whether it happens now or later, you're you know just make it more. More friction, more difficult. But it's the automation is going to happen. So it's anyway it seems like there's a. There's probably it. I don't know enough about the situation but that seems like a tough one to hold hold tried to hold the Ford on.

Well they got enough people that are ready to stop working but eventually it's all going to happen. Right. So let's jump into our manufacturing distribution segment.

Yeah. This first article, interestingly enough I didn't realize this but there are ETFs out there, right. Electronic traded funds are basically little, you know, not mutual funds but sets of stocks that are all related to near shoring or reshoring or bringing things back to the US And I think they're also. What the article said is they're also being essentially accelerated through the fact that there's a lot of money set aside for projects and for reshoring and things that happening here in the US So a lot of money I think they said record amounts of money pouring into these funds that are all related to companies that are in the reshoring near. Near shoring industry.

2.25 billion has flowed in just this year. Right. They're expecting that NetBrink total assets they set in these funds to net nine and a half billion. So they said companies this the quote was from one of the one of them, the one of the ETFs as companies keep referring to reshoring as a long term driver of their growth. And our goal is to find beneficiaries or enablers of that trend before that theme is mainstream. I mean here's the, here's the kicker on this, right? And I think this is, this is not somewhere I would put my money right now. I love the idea, but I think the kicker on this is what they're trying to look at with this is some short term returns because we still have labor cost issues in this country, we still have raw material, we still have transportation issues, we could have closed ports. Now some of those drive towards the idea of this being a bigger value. But I think that we've got to see some of this plat. I think these ETFs got started a lot of it because of the government money that's coming back to reshoring and the overall growth here. But listen, no matter how you slice it, BlackRock is in on this as well and one of their funds through this, which is an infrastructure development fund, year to date returns are 26.6%. Tough to argue.

No, I look again, I don't know all the details of what they're investing in and so forth but it seems like it's a trendy type play at the moment right now. Trend based play. I think there could be some short term opportunity. This is an investment advice but it's probably not something I would be looking at to hold for 10 years. But if it's something that you know to put money in for a year or two.

That was some stops in it. Right?

Yeah.

Good. Anyways, interesting, interesting article. So as we kind of jump ahead from that. Good article from industry today, US manufacturing is facing a once in a generation change. I kind of like that, you know, kind of important to, to look at from that standpoint. They talk about supply chains are being reconfigured, wages are rising, consumer demand is softening, cost pressures are continuing, the times are uneasy for US manufacturers and incremental improvements will not be enough to ensure long term success. So I thought that was a value and a benefit to kind of get a look at because those are the realities of what we're seeing right now. Right. No matter how you slice it. Go ahead. I'm sorry.

No, I thought the article was actually quite, quite good. I mean I thought it was quite thorough and talking about just a lot of different areas as it relates to manufacturing and I think that could carry over to distribution. As well, that is, you know, that kind of need to be shored up, I guess, for lack of better word, no pun intended. And, and so anyway, I just thought, you know, there was a lot going on in that article and a lot of things. Obviously technology was a big part of what they were saying and automation, interestingly enough, was a big part of that as well.

Yeah, the. I, you know, and I think this just kind of all these pieces kind of tie back together with what we were seeing earlier about supply chain executives in manufacturing. And you tie these pieces together with what's going on in manufacturing. So they talked about change management and organizational health front and center. They had some, another piece in there about skills development, a core part of transformation.

Right.

No matter how you slice it, you're not going to be able to stay competitive in this world unless you are bringing in newer technologies. That means you've got to upscale your workers and then talking about, communicate with shareholders and if you're involved in capital markets. But I don't know, I sent it to you kind of last minute. There was a chart in here. Did you by chance grab that?

I did.

And the chart is really talking about an effective transformation of US Manufacturing. Again, if you're, if you're listening on the podcast, you're not going to be seeing this, so I'm going to read a little bit of it. But an effective transformation of US manufacturing sector could boost GDP by $275 billion to 460 billion while adding up to 1.5 million jobs. So this though ties back to some of the thinking that we were talking about earlier with executives looking at manufacturing and supply chain with reverting to old school thinking, you're not going to achieve any of these things with that. But if you're thinking forward and you're upscaling your workers, you managing your supply chain well, you know, you're embracing technology. Listen, I mean, between 275 billion and $460 billion to the US GDP. It's a lot of money. Plus a million and a half jobs. Talk about strengthening the economy.

So that's, and what this is saying is right, rather than trying to save jobs, you know what we were just talking about. And be on the defensive, right. Go on the offense and create jobs.

Yeah, great point, Tom.

There'll be a lot of jobs created with, on the offense versus trying to play defense to keep the jobs. Yeah, I think it may be different types of jobs they made you require some different skills. There's no, no doubt about that. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of job. If you're growing at this race, there's definitely going to be room for people to be involved.

This was an article written by two McKinsey executives as well. I didn't reference that. And their point here really was about in the first, the very first one was make skills development a core part of your transformation. And so look to your point that you just made a moment ago, things are changing, right? It's not that. And I don't think we're going to have to look at these things as it's not like Joe in the warehouse that drives a forklift now has to be trained to program a computer. No, Joe in the warehouse that drives a forklift most days now has to also understand that there's going to be some robots running around or some other automations in the warehouse and he's going to need to be upskilled in that setting to support his ongoing job. So I think we're in an interesting time, right? And I think, you know, we may look back in a few years and listen to some of these episodes again and kind of get some giggles out of it. So, Tom, before we jump ahead to the next article though, I just did want to jump in here and remind everyone if you're, if you're live with us, you're seeing the newsletter that we put out every week that newsletters called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing. If you don't get that newsletter and you would like to just reach out to us at helloadsmartech.com or directly at www.aroundthehornpod.com, which is a website for our podcast and we'll get you added to that list. So if you're listening, you don't get to see it. So sometimes we describe things a little bit further than normal because of those that are listening on the recorded podcast. So Tom, we've talked a number of times recently about, over the past six to eight months about qxo, which is a large fund including a in an integrated technology company that goes with that that's led by Brad Jacobs. Brad Jacobs is the guy that consolidated trash companies around the country that became waste management and then consolidated local and regional equipment rental companies that became United Rentals. He is reported to have a net worth of himself of over 6 billion. He's put this interesting and unique fund together to go out and start buying large distribution companies. Maybe I'm not aware of it all. I was anticipating more of a focus that he would be buying some large Regional players and so forth with this. But do you like to say olive out of the jar? Is that right? First olive out of the jar.

First olive out of the bottle. Yeah, yeah.

Was a 9 point billion, $9.4 billion offer for Rexell, which just absolutely astounded me to catch that. So any thoughts on that?

A.

Pretty aggressive.

I mean I don't. Yeah. I don't know what the strategy is. Right. It's. I don't know enough about what his strategy is and why making such a mega deal in the beginning, how that fits into his. His roadmap or his blueprint.

Yep. Well, it's interesting. I mean it's, it's obvious a large group. If you, it's. If you looked up Brad Jacobson, I don't know him. I know a lot number of people that know him, but I don't know him. But actually interesting of his Wikipedia pages was quite intriguing. But I mean I get their focus on being very aggressive and wanting to get. Get jumping ahead. But the, it's an interesting piece and Rexella is such a large player in the electrical and electronics market that that, that's a big statement. So we're going to watch that closer. We're going to continue to pay attention to it as it goes. So. All right. E Commerce and Marketing 15 Exciting Trends that Are Impacting B2B Digital Marketing 2024 article from Forbes. Any quick takeaways from you before I dive in on that?

You know, there were a couple things in there that really I thought jumped out as being One of them is they were talking about newsletters, interestingly enough.

Yeah.

And it's funny that they just yesterday I learned in LinkedIn, for example, you can now send a newsletter associated with your business page. You couldn't do a newsletter associated with your business page until recently. And LinkedIn is giving newsletters a lot of priority in the newsfeed and the subscribers and, and all of that. So what they were talking about in there is. And I wanted. I've heard about Beehive I hadn't heard about. The other one is basically rather than sending newsletters out by email like we do every week. Right. And we know when we send it out by email. The fact is, is a lot of times it's not going to end up in a large percentage of the people's inbox. Right. The spam and you know, even if they've asked for it or whatever, the, the corporate spam filters and all that stuff decide that it's not going to get past the past the spam wall. So by having a newsletter channel outside of email, which LinkedIn is and what these are I think is a really. It's something that I know we're going to explore is a really interesting. This was just one example of things in here that I found that were. What I liked about this is it wasn't the same old same old. There were some unique and really interesting strategies of, of what they talked about.

Well, I mean unrelated to this or. Well, let me rephrase it. It wasn't mentioned exactly in this article. But you talked about you know, kind of some old school. It was number four on the list old school strategies. We were on a call earlier this week. You together with our agency and marketing agency for Lead Smart and we were talking about direct mail.

Right.

When was the last time you heard somebody talk about direct mail and B2B SAS.

Right.

It just so it's interesting. So these. I'm not going to hit them all but the other interesting was, you know one was that I'm talking about video storytelling. You know we, we think about that as you know it's. It's not a new. New concept of. And necessarily successful. Let me rephrase that. Not, not that it's not successful, it's not new but it's not been as successful with people even trying it in wholesale distribution. Seen a little bit of it and. But not a whole lot of it. So that, that it says that under this particular one a more strategic use of video in ongoing consumerization of B2B experiences is a key trend. And you know, isn't it interesting we talk about that, that they made that statement. We talk about it constantly about buyer journeys and buyer expectations is the consumerization is a great point. So I like that there's again there's 15 points in or we can't talk about them all. One of the thing was though is human driven connections.

Right.

Just getting back there and having lunch once in a while. And there's the only other one I'll mention just so we can kind of jump ahead today was that tying your why to your prospects pro purpose. Right. So you know that kind of goes back to Simon Sinek's famous talk about understanding your why within your business. And so that's the first step is even understanding why you're. You're here. Right. But then after that is putting energy to understanding the purpose or what is your prospect's purpose, what drives their business. And when you understand those things you can crystallize was the term they used. Your message between your why and their purpose. And now all of a sudden you see some pretty amazing results.

Yeah, I think that'd be a great exercise.

Yeah.

Because, you know, you hear a lot about product market fit and all of that, but I think the, the extension to that would be why purpose fit right to your why in their purpose align. And are you communicating in the same way around this? Right.

Yeah. And the last one I wanted to. I'm sorry, Tom, sorry to interrupt you.

Oh, go ahead.

I just say the only other one of these 15 that I'll mention is apparently there's this new thing that's supposedly successful we should look into. So they call it LinkedIn Live. So maybe we should check in on that.

Yeah, you just need to make sure you have a good computer and a decent microphone that doesn't cause you to crash. And it's a really good, it's a really good platform.

It arrives Monday.

Okay.

You know this. Actually I'm going to miss this MacBook because it got me through the pandemic. You know, we spent a lot of time together.

Well, put it in like a, you know, a little case or something.

Yeah. I'll put it up on the wall behind me in a little shadow box.

Perfect.

Love it. Good, good, good. All right. How to improve B2B demand generation with qualifying buying groups. We can kind of hit that fairly quick. But I thought it was. There were some, some pretty good points in there. The, the interesting thing for me in there tomorrow is, and I talk about this a lot and I think you subscribe to the same theory because we, it's what we are looking to do within, you know, our company at Leads More Technologies is the idea of aligning sales and marketing. Now that's a simple statement, but most companies don't do it right. There's just push, pull. Right. Of sales and marketing. We look at things from having a revenue department where everybody has a goal that they're working together to achieve. It's not how many MQLs did I develop in marketing to marketing qualified leads to throw over to sales as a sales qualified lead then and sales saying marketing sucks and marketing saying sales sucks. No, we're all achieving a revenue goal. Right. And there were some really good points I thought in this article related to that. They gave five key points in there as well that were solid. Any takeaways from you from that article?

Yeah, well, I just, and just to. To clear up what they mean by a buying group. Right. What they're, what they're talking about in there.

Thank you.

Is in, in B2B there is generally a group of people that are making the buying decision. It's not an individual generally, it is a group of people. And even if all of those people don't have authority, they have influence to the buying decision that's there. So their point being is, and this is almost like we were just talking about the why and the purpose. Right. You'll align to the reason to make sales and marketing more in alignment is so that as a team you can do a better job of communicating to these buying groups. And I think they even called it a marketing qualified buying group or something.

Right.

That you've done enough to actually, you know, a lot of people get a lead, right. And they say, oh, I got a name, I scanned a badge at a trade show or somebody signed up at my website or whatever. Well, that, that could be. It is most likely one individual out of many in A. In a meaningful B2B purchase that is making those decisions on, on how you're going to work with them. So understanding the entire buying group is. And marketing as it relates to the whole. And selling to the whole buying group is really the, the key message in there. And I thought it was very relevant.

Good. Good. So let's, it's. You know, I think all roads lead back to aligning all, all groups within your company.

Right.

For the, for the common goal. And I think people miss out, you know, sometimes I think purpose within a company and our core values ties to the old thinking of a mission statement where I remember consulting with a company years and years ago and they invited me to a day and a half of meetings with a third. It was an organizational development company where we sat in a room and in. I'm laughing as I think back through this with. I think the lowest level person was a senior manager. The rest of those directors, VPs and executives working on a mission statement. And, and it was a cool exercise, right. But at the end of the day they just had something to frame and put up on a wall. Right. As opposed to what are the core values within the company that we operate from. And when you have core values, you can hire related to your core values and you can put those things together. And then all the divisions within your organization or groups within your company should be working and aligned on those core values or your purpose. And when you put those things together, that's where you see the, the shining star of companies that are way ahead of their competitors. Good. All right. Technology, cyber security and AI. I'm gonna. Let's move past this first article, but I do want to mention it. It's from cyber security dive. It's 98% of organizations worldwide connected to a breached third party vendor. So end of the day, all but 2% of companies worldwide are connected with an organization who has been breached and are doing business with them and have some level of connection within their organization. So go Cyber security. I have a good friend, I think you've met my buddy Ed before. Ed leads cyber security for a huge national company and we keep laughing. It's because his son just graduated from high school and isn't sure exactly. Trade school, college, what is he going to do? And I keep looking at this and going, you know, a young guy learning all of this could be making, you know, 150, $200,000 a year very, very quickly at a very young age if you really dive in and understand cyber so good. Hey. So evidently there was an event with the folks, our friends from Salesforce this week.

There was, there was Dreamforce this week. Yeah.

Tom, before we jump into that, let's clarify something about when I say our friends. So we, we mentioned at the beginning of the show, those of you who know us or may already know this, Tom and I are the co founders of Lead Smart technologies and AI enabled customer intelligence and CRM solution. As you probably know, every piece of software in the world is built on a platform of some sort. Lead Smart. Our product is actually called channel Cloud. The Channel cloud is actually built on the same software development platform that salesforce.com is built on. So we're at Lead Smart. We're one of about 500 companies globally that Salesforce allows to develop on their platform and use their cloud solutions. So while our customers solely have a business relationship with us at Lead Smart, no business relationship with Salesforce. Their data sits in Salesforce's cloud. So we get to take advantage of the technology that Salesforce is developing along with the technology that we've developed to bring unique, vertical specific solution to wholesale solutions to wholesale distributors and manufacturers. So that's a little bit of a background of why we get excited about this. Not just because of what's happening, but because we're what's called a global strategic OEM partner of Salesforce here at Lead Smart.

Yep. So Salesforce had Dreamforce this week and the entire show revolved around a new. A new product that they're releasing, an AI product called Agent Force. And I'll try and keep this simple. So what that is is, you know, they've been building, they've been A big AI proponent for a couple of years now. And basically they're saying, hey, we have rebuilt a new platform that allow you to build AI agents. Think of like a, an AI something that has AI that takes data in, reasons with that data and then potentially does an action and is very interactive. And that could be a customer service agent, it could be a sales agent. Again, these are all AI. I think they released I think 97 different templates they said of different agents that are available. What's. And this article though talked about two things. One is Mark Benioff, the CEO kind of called this agent release the killer app of AI which I've heard that term before. Yeah, I, I've, I've heard that as well and I agree. You know, I've told you and I'm going to show a video here in just a second. But I've, I've been saying that really for AI to kind of become mainstream and really start to generate, there's needs to be. Companies need to be able to see that killer app. Right, right. The things you can do with chat, GPT and writing emails or writing a blog post or a press release. Well that's helpful. It's not the killer app that I think a lot of companies have been looking for. So you know, Benioff was saying that hey, this is the killer app. You're, you know, where were you when you heard this announcement? You know, a lot of hype. Right. Which he's very good at.

I was in a Waymo.

Yeah, yeah. It was like the way we call it, the Waymo moment. Right. When you're. The first time you drive in a, in a self driving car, it's. Yeah, you remember that. But he also, what I thought was interesting is he, he talked a lot about the fact that in so many words, hey, this is early stage stuff and things may not work as well as you may expect. Right. So he took a big bold move to release something which we've, we've heard a lot of people talk about stuff but not release things.

Yeah.

Knowing that we're still in the early stages and they have a very tight relationship Salesforce does with open AI. So they get a lot of the technology that us mere mortals wouldn't get access to along.

When you say us mere mortals, what you're really referencing there is other technology companies like Lead Smart. Right.

Any technology, anybody who's trying to build with the open AI.

But there's companies like Salesforce right here, then there's companies like us. My hands are off here. And then there's the day to day user. Joe. Joe user. Smaller technology companies, and then the sales forces of the world. Yeah, right. There's three levels of what people get to see.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I thought it would be worthwhile to show, it's about a minute, a video of an example of an agent. And as you watch this video, you're going to look at this. It's. You're going to see a. This is actually something that Saks Fifth Avenue has implemented in their company for, for customer support. But as you look at that, think about the possibilities. You know, there's things. There's certainly flaws with this by. By no means, but you can start to see the possibility. So let me go ahead and play.

So, Tom, before you, before you start, can I interrupt you for just a second? So two, two things, I think they go with that, that I'd like to add to what you're saying because this is an exciting time. First, think of. And you were sharing this with me yesterday was we're still nascent or embryonic or early in AI. There's just so much left to come to see where we even are today with these things that are in fact working. Think about not just how cool this is, but then that it's just going to continue to get better. The other side of it is you mentioned that this is Saks Fifth Avenue. If you're listening and getting a chance to watch this, and even if you're listening on the podcast, you don't get to see this. It's fine. Listening will be fine for you on this as well. But think instead about Saks Fifth Avenue. Think about Acme H VAC and plumbing supply. Right. And these agents working within there, both supporting sales marketing executives, all aspects of the company. This just happens to be a customer service spin on it. But think about agents. And to your point that you were telling me about the other day is maybe even multiple agents per person working within your organization. I just wanted to add a little bit to what you were commenting about, thinking about what could come.

Yep. All right, let's run this video.

Hi, I'm Sophie, your SACS AI assistant.

How can I help you today? Yeah, hey, Sophie, this is Patrick. I'm wondering if you can help me with my most recent order. I think I might have got the wrong size. I'm sorry to hear that, Patrick. I'd be happy to help.

Is this about the Saks Fifth Avenue.

Collection cashmere baseball bomber sweater you purchased on September 9th? Yup, totally is. That's the one I tried it on and I think it's just a little bit tight.

I'm sorry the sizing didn't work out. Based on your purchase history, a size.

Medium should provide a relaxed fit.

How does that sound?

Yeah, that sounds pretty good. But I noticed you said cashmere. Is it going to shrink? The sweater is 100% cashmere, so we recommend dry cleaning only to preserve the natural fibers and avoid any potential shrinkage. Would you like to go with a medium? Yeah, let's do the medium. Great. Based on your shipping address, you should receive it within three to five business days.

Does that work?

No, I have a pretty big event coming up. Is there any way I can get it in like one or two days? Unfortunately, that's the fastest shipping available for this item.

Would you like me to transfer you.

To someone who can assist you further? No, not right this second.

Sophie.

Thank you, though. Pretty impressive.

Yeah.

Well.

And you know what, what I look at it is, and I think a big takeaway of this for me from this, this weekend was this. Is that what we've talked about so much about augmenting versus replacing, right? So so many people are concerned about being replaced and AI is going to replace and this, that and the other. What a great tool to augment, right? And so imagine if, you know now our customer service people or inside sales or whoever it might be, right? When a call gets to them, they know. And we talked about this a number of times recently, right? When you answer the phone in your CRM, up pops all of the things that are likely going to be going on with this customer, right? And it's not about what to sell them, it's about servicing them at this point, right. And I, I really, my appreciation from it was in like we were messaging you and I were messaging this morning about this is for me is again, it's about the augmentation. You can still tell that's artificial, right? It's just the fact that in that setting that it's. I got, the gentleman was able to get all this information, you know, and if you think if you replace the cashmere sweater with the details about dry cleaning with this type of wire or this cutting tool or whatever it is, and she was out there literally, right. Just to show what was really happening with this. What she was doing is accessing erp, right, CRM, a data lake that's likely full of spec sheets and so forth, and bring all that together almost instantly. And that's where we're moving with all of this. So if you, if you Take that back to you're a, you know, a medical equipment distributor. And now, you know, when, when even, even when they're calling Kevin because they want to talk to the person, that digital twin or that agent can pop up and get things started. And they're never going to wait on hold because the digital twin will always be there.

So there, and there's two big takeaways from this. And I know we, I know we can move on, but this is great conversation is that obviously, as you said, was driven off of data. Right. And the, the other thing is it wasn't just order data, but it was customer data. Right. People have a lot of order data and transactional data in their erp. As we know, very few people end up with customer data that they can use to fuel something like this.

Yeah.

So as I like to keep urging people over and over and over, get your customer data, act together and look at it as strategically as you would look at your order data, because these two things together are going to drive it. The second thing, if she, if he would have said, you know, it's fine. Right. The three to five days or whatever for the shipping was fine. What the, what the agent would have been able to do is actually then facilitate the action of making that happen. Right, right. To then, you know, or make the order for it for him. Get the shipping, probably even give them a tracking number or whatever. Right on the call. Right.

Yeah.

This. The third thing, which I guess I only had two, but now I'm going to go three and maybe four is that is the. This was all built without code. Right. This wasn't. You know, traditionally when you think of a chat bot, you think of a lot of decision making code. Like if thens and all that stuff. This was not built in. And these AI agents are not built off of decision making type of things. They're built off these large language models. So he could have just as asked you, who do you like in the Rams game this week? Right. And you would have gotten an answer back.

Whoever they're playing is the answer.

Right. Right. And, and so it's just, and, and going back to your point, it sounds like a bot. And it was. Does sound like a bot at this.

Stage, but it sounded good.

But that's gonna get, that's just going to get better. That's just going to get better and better and better. I mean, that's the.

Yep.

Early stages of it. So. Yeah, my. So I guess the punchline of all of this is I agree with Mark Benioff that The concept of agents in business is the killer app for AI, right. Agents that can take data, can reason, right. Make a reason and think and think through things and then take action is the killer app for AI. We have not been able to do that yet and still can't do that yet because technologically we're not there to have those. You know, we're hope, I hope Salesforce is going to be able to pull this off. But. And I'm sure they are in some cases and they have a lot of resources that are, that are backing these up in these large companies. But again, none of this happens without having that data platform in place with your customer data, your, your order data and those two things working together.

So yeah, the agreed. And I think what's interesting about this too is, you know, the, one of the things that I'm really appreciative of our relationship with them at Salesforce, because it's our view as well, the Salesforce looks at things, right. Is I think they make the comment that your data is not our product, I think is the comment that Mark Benioff made in that setting. And you know, that's one of the risks when you start looking at, at your AI vendors is what are they doing with your data as it relates to other models and things like that. So important thing to consider as well. It's exciting time, right? It's exciting time. Business and careers. I mean, you know, I, I don't this, you know, I just was thinking back to Zach Cass, that was an early stage person at OpenAI that spoke at distribution Strategy groups event last October in Chicago on AI, you know, and he said that the magnitude of AI is long term for us is going to have a similar impact to fire when cavemen or whoever it was figured out fire that was the implications of this, you know, way exponentially greater than the implications that the Internet even had. And that's astounding if you think about it, because we wouldn't be sitting here without the Internet. There would be no lead smart channel cloud product in that setting.

There'd be no LinkedIn lives. Yeah, I wanted to just touch on, I think this is great that Lars is saying is that, you know, Kelley School of Business in Indiana is launching an executive class on AI marketing. And I mean that's going to be so critical. I mean you look at the curriculum and in higher education is going to have to change very, very much to be, you know, adapting in this, in this AI world.

Yeah, that's good.

All right. Where do we go with the with time we got left just where we're at.

We posted another article from Supply HT Artificial intelligence stats for distributors to keep in mind. You know trying to get there where we're thinking about things are more than just a buzzword. You know we were talking earlier this week in a couple of meetings and you know it's really I as I said I'm headed off to the industrial Supply Associations event next week and back for couple of days and off to a SaaS CEO summit and then three weeks in a row of affiliated distributor meeting along with the NetPlus alliance meeting as well. And common theme with these things is going to be about AI being kind of a shiny object versus bringing it into our business to achieve things. And we're early in this but having a digital strategy is so, so important. We were on the phone earlier this week with a a huge distributor won't even mention the market that they play in because somebody could probably figure them out pretty quickly. That's putting a digital roadmap together for the future of their company. That and there's a whole AI component to that and having a road map of not just your technology or your tech stack but your digital journey and your AI journey as part of the digital journey I think could never be more important than right now because it's. We talk to companies every day who have gone out and bought a lot of software but they're not getting any value from the software or it's poorly adopted or it's not helping drive revenue or accelerate growth. And with a plan in place you can go do great things.

So yeah, I mean I think every software purchase that any company makes right now has to be a step on an AI. It needs to be a readiness step on that direction. Some of these things with AI, with the agents and things we're just talking about, if you're not thinking from that mentality. Right. That what I'm putting in place now needs to be foundational for these things that are coming. You're going to end up having to rip and replace and a lot of impact, unnecessary impact to the business.

Yep. Good. Let's kind of jump to this this next article as we move into our sales and M and A section. We'll go through these pretty quickly today, but this is from sales and marketingmanagement.com how to Increase sales without discounting. And you know I this sounds a little rudimentary but I've spent my whole career in manufacturing and distribution and watching normally intelligent people just want to compete on price and come back and talking about, you know, what if we got to lower the price? And we even hear that sometimes in our company, you know, people talking about, well, what if we, what if we gave them a killer deal? And, and that's not the right answer. Right. The right answer is, you know, having alternative strategies. They just, they talk about a few of them. We wouldn't spend a lot of time but increased perceived value. Right. Bundling of products, improving support, focus on quality, create an exclusive experience, embrace non discount limited time offers, build strong brand loyalty. And if you're, to me, I think the one, the most important one of these they talk about is perceived value. If you're playing in a price game, you didn't identify two things identify or share. One is identify the needs and the pain of your customer that you're going to solve. And you've not shown them your perceived value because if you're showing them your value in solving their problem, price becomes secondary in most instances. There's, there's times that things are so commoditized that there's no choice, but in general that's the case. So I thought that was an article worth looking at.

And we have a white paper coming out here, an ebook, I think, I don't know if we're calling it a white paper, an ebook on organic revenue growth. There's so many different opportunities nowadays in distribution for organic revenue growth that does not involve discounting.

Yep.

And you know, that's different than inorganic growth like buying or you know, opening new branches or, or whatever. But you know what, how do you get more out of what you already have, the organic growth aspect of it? And you know, just by going through this process, we've identified, working with our customers and, and what we've been putting together in this ebook, there's just so many ways to organically grow without discounting. And I think this article touches on a few of those things.

That's great. Good. So following up here, McKinsey published an article about five fundamental truths, how B2B winners keep growing. The crux of this, we need to kind of move ahead here today. But this is. If you don't get our newsletter and you'd like to get the, and find this article, just ask us at hello atLead smart tech.com and we'll get you the newsletter. But this was just the core of it was a really in depth look at Omnichannel selling and we talk about Omni Channel selling just about every week. McKinsey was just unpacking it better in this article, I thought it was pretty valuable.

It was an outstanding article. It was very thorough. Very. I highly recommend it. It's one of the, one of the better articles I've actually seen, just in terms of depth, in the level of content that they had.

Great, good jumping ahead there to our people in leadership. Article from Axios. What Amazon strict return to office policy says about remote work. And we have entered that place now where I think people are realizing that there are very select people that are successful in working remotely and a lot.

Fewer than people thought.

Yes. You know, we got forced into it in 2020 and now we're at a place where we have to kind of take a look at things a little bit differently and, and say what really happens. And I've said this for as long as we've been talking about this, is there is something to be said for talking to somebody at the water cooler or walking around the corner to the sandwich shop or sitting in a lunchroom. And it is to the benefit of the individuals and the benefit of the company. Amazon came back last week and said, okay, I can't remember the exact number, but it was if you were within a, a certain number of miles of the company, you needed to be in the office. And substantial amount of people now are stuck in that setting.

Right. You know, it's an interesting thing. I was, when you were off the air earlier, we were talking about, you know, New Hampshire, for example, where all my in laws are. And in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, right after or during the pandemic, tons of people from Boston moved up there because they were all like, hey, I don't have to work in the office anymore. Yeah, I can be out in the, you know, rural side of things. And I'm wondering, you know, and prices drove up and so forth. I wonder what that's going to do to real estate in some of these areas that are, you know, more rural or more out there. You know, if a lot of those people that move to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is an hour plus away on a good day from Boston, what happens if they have to come back to the office? You know, it's great to say I'm going to commute, but that gets old pretty fast.

Yeah.

You know, pretty quickly.

Well, I think you're right. And I don't know this, but I don't think you have the, the, the train or transit system going into Portsmouth that you necessarily would have from Philly to New York or somewhere.

Like, they do have some trains, but it's not, not set up to Be a commuter type of thing?

Yeah, no, no. The. I think what we're seeing here, there's two sides, but I think what you were just describing there is the potential for a downturn in some markets because people are going to need to be selling and moving back if they want to keep their job. The other thing is, I think what we'll see is a lot of job openings for companies that are making this move. In this case it's, you know, if you are a completely remote company that has your team and is going to stay completely remote, there's going to probably be a whole lot of E commerce related talent out there that's available looking for jobs, but they're fully remote and you need to be prepared to be to work with that. I think the other side of it is that to your comment about real estate is commercial real estate has been just killed. Could not have been worse off in the last four years than what we've seen in. And I think we're going to see that turning around because there's going to be, you know, I mean, think about it. We were just talking a few minutes ago about Salesforce.

Right.

I don't know. Something hits me about 16 floors. There's the Salesforce Tower, which is now the tallest building in San Francisco. Well, it went empty.

Right.

And they had just moved in I don't even think a year before. And I think it's. I think it's 16 floors of that building that they have that it went empty for all of that time. And now they're, you know, bringing people back as lots of companies are. And this article is about Amazon doing so. So I think that the, the reality of cutting to the chase on all of this is high remote, problematic hybrid probably gonna hybrid done. Right. Probably the best for. I hate this term, but I'll still use it. Work life balance and fully in office depending on the business that you're in.

Yep. I wonder if we should start an ETF about going back to the office.

You're busy.

You're.

You need to go develop agents. Okay. All right.

Create an agent to create ETFs.

Yes, there is. Okay.

All right. Hey, let's, let's zip through here. I know we're getting really.

Yep. So we were just to finish up on our people and leadership segment. Final article was related to insights into retaining warehouse workers. We've talked a lot about in the show for a few years, a couple years now about the challenge with hiring warehouse workers. So some good tips about that. So let's RIP Right by. Quickly. Our industry scuttlebutt section we do each week. Friends at Tipco in Maryland just partnered and I think it was actually an acquisition, another acquisition for them. Whitecap bought Job site supply in Indiana and the Industrial Supply association launched their Women in this Industry mentorship program. They've done a phenomenal job at isa. Brendan Breen and his team, the volunteers that work with them on the whole concept of not just women in industry, but they've got, they call it their emerging leader program as well for younger folks in wholesale distribution and manufacturing to raise their game and grow with mentorship as well. So like I said, I'll be back with them in Florida for a couple of days next week and I'm looking forward to seeing all of them. So that's kind of it. We've got a final Goodread section. Just an article from Inc. Magazine in there about emotional intelligence and that kind of. Oh, you know what though, we should hit on that special feature, Border States, the large distributor, that core is electrical, but do a lot of other things. They publish regularly. Their supply chain update. They did their September update and we've got a link to that here in the newsletter as well. So some good stats in there, but let's, let's get ready to call it a day here, my friend.

Yep. Glad we recovered from, from your early difficulty.

Yeah, I apologize for that. I think we, I think you nailed that. Probably what the problem was is I think I've got too many things plugged into a four year old MacBook.

Yeah.

And, and I'm hoping that's the case. So next week I will be turbocharged beyond belief with some new technology that's supposed to arrive on Monday. So I, my thinking is that this weekend for you, my friend, is probably keep your spending and shopping down because where are we at? Are we at October or November? Is the next Fed meeting?

October. October and December, I believe. Yeah.

Yeah. So you need to set a couple of dollars aside.

Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna talk to, talk to Lauren and we'll work out our budget so that we're, we're, we're eating a little bit less in the next, next week or so.

I'll try and take it easy on you on the wine.

Okay, Very good. All right, thanks everybody for all the comments. Thanks.

Yeah.

Keeping us moving when we were in the beginning there.

Yeah. Sorry about that. Yep. And before we go, Tom, thanks to everybody, as you said, for being with us. Thanks to our sponsor, Lead Smart Technologies. Anyone at Lead Smart can be of support to you or your team as you want to look into your digital transformation strategy and how to use AI in your business to accelerate growth. Love to talk to you. The one favor though that we do ask people every week is if you like what you heard this week. You love the comments from people like Will and Lars and Brandon and the whole group that Bob and the whole group that commented today, plus the hundreds and hundreds of people that are listening that didn't. If you like what you hear, if you like it live, hit the the Follow button on Facebook Live if that's where you are, or LinkedIn Live and follow Lead Smart Technologies. If you're listening on YouTube, hit the subscribe button. And then if you're listening to the podcast, subscribe and leave a review. That'll get this out to other people. Tom I I'm going to get these stats together and we'll talk about them further. I looked at the podcast stats last week. Over 60 countries the podcast has been downloaded.

Well, we're gonna have to start speaking some other languages. I I was astounded by to translate everything for us.

Did not think Azerbaijan or Nepal would have people downloading our podcast, but should.

Do a live show from Nepal. That'd be great.

Okay, yeah, we'll go with that. On that note, everybody have a great weekend. Thank you. Look forward to seeing you again soon. We won't be here next week, but the newsletter will go out. We'll see you soon. Be looking for some great new guests coming as well. Be kind, be safe, and do good things.

Have a good weekend. 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.