When Orders Rise (While Shipping Slows)

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

Hey, good morning.

Hey. How are you today?

Doing good. You know, I'm excited. Tom May is back.

Is he okay?

Great. We have missed him.

Yeah, he's starting to wonder. Yeah, he loves the smell of Ontario in the morning. That's funny. Um, that's an interesting thought. I saw some of those pictures yesterday. We have some friends in, in New York. I don't know if the. Tom's down in North Carolina. Hopefully all that northern Canadian wildland fire smoke isn't heading down. Down that far.

Yeah, yeah, it's really weird, right? It's like we're. We're usually the ones with all the fires.

Yeah.

Here it's once again super overcast. Looks like it's going to rain.

The sun would need to come out to dry out the grass to have a wildland fire here. Right.

So I don't know.

I guess we saw the sun for the afternoon yesterday for a couple hours, so we didn't.

No, no such luck here.

Well, all right, well, hopefully, hopefully the best is coming soon and we get very quickly back to our normal Southern California weather. And we're gonna. Darlene and I are going out with some friends tomorrow, gonna get out on the water and do some sailing. So I'm hoping for some sun, so. Should be good.

So good morning to Brandon and Brian also.

Yeah. I got some folks coming in also on other platforms as well, which is great. Good stuff. So agenda for today, we're gonna talk a little bit about.

Talk about golf. We're gonna talk.

We are gonna talk about golf.

Right? We've changed the format of the show. Right.

It's now a. It is now a LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube live and podcast about the antics of Kevin and Tom's Golfing Sports Center.

Yeah, Sports Center.

There you go. Very good. No, we're gonna. We are gonna talk about golf. We're going to talk about golf, about how that impacts, you know, organizations. And there's some interesting thoughts that go with that after the, the live golf and PGA Tour announcement this week. We'll get into that, though. But you know what? There's Some interesting things going on now with labor slowdowns and issues going on in the ports here on the west coast, both in Southern California, Northern California. And the trickle down effect with that, we're going to talk about a little bit and how that ties into reshoring and so forth. And, and you know, you start connecting the dots on this and what this means to day, to day life and it becomes pretty powerful. So we'll do that. We're going to talk about, of course, you know, how do we not talk about AI? So we're going to chat a little bit about AI in customer experience, which is great. Yeah, There you go, Mahesh. That's funny. Our good friend Mahesh in Canada saying we're color coordinated. No, Mahesh, I'm in white. Tom's an eggshell. So it's a little. Oh boy.

Isn't that impressive?

Yeah, my wife has got that design thing going, so I've heard that before.

Yes.

Mahesh, we'll have to get you a Lead Smart sweatshirt with the logo here on it so we can color coordinate when you join us on the, on the broadcast. So thanks for that. But we're going to talk a little bit about customer experience and how AI ties into that. And then as we mentioned, we'll talk about what does that Liv Golf and PGA deal have to do with wholesale distribution, digital transformation and the like. So that's where we're headed today. Tom, anything to add about where we're going?

Nope. Let's do it.

Good. Well, let's talk first about why we're here. So I'm Kevin Brown, that's Tom Burton. We're lifelong friends. We're also the co founders of Lead Smart Technologies, which is a AI enabled CRM customer intelligence and sales enablement tool that helps wholesale distribution companies as well as manufacturers drive revenue and understand their customers better and help their teams grow. So what we do each week is we gather the news from around the world about the economy, technology, mergers and acquisition, sales and marketing. Different things that impact our focused marketplace, which is manufacturing, wholesale distribution and that ecosystem and the other parties that play into that arena as well. We bring all that together in a newsletter that we send out every Friday morning bright and early. It's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. If you don't get that, whether you're listening live with us today on YouTube Live, Facebook Live, or LinkedIn Live, or you're listening later in the day on one of the podcast formats and you would like to get that newsletter that we Send out each week, just let us know. Send an email to helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that right out to you. So we do this broadcast each week. We kind of talk about that. We get some guests in here and there. We get some good guests coming up in the next few weeks. And Tom, let's jump in now that we've done our homework there.

All right, here we are.

Yeah, so just kind of a quick article here that that came from. It's, it's data that modern distribution management pulled together. I think Mike Hockett's with us today from there. I don't know if Tom or any of their other part of their teams are. But you know, they pulled together some data from the Census Bureau and a couple of other groups and you know, back to this kind of lukewarm economy that we talk about. You know, there's ups and there's downs, but you know, there was a little bit of rise in manufactured goods over the month of April, which is a positive thing to see. May, we'll see what happens with all of that. But it's just kind of this lukewarm thing that we've been talking about a lot lately.

Right? Yeah. And as it says here. Right. Inventory or manufacturers goods have been increased but shipments remain down. So what that means is inventories are increasing as shipments go down. But it's good that there's a lot of production occurring anyway. And if even if shipments are down, there must be some expectations that that is going to pick back up.

That'd be interesting. You know, with. Since we're live this morning here, I know we have some folks that normally join us who are distributors, different parts of the country, some industrial distributors I, I know had planned to come in if you have any thoughts or ideas about that. You know, one of the things that comes to my mind in this particular report is you mentioned about the idea of the inventories being up is I think we're still in that glut that came in end of last year, beginning of this year where people during the shortage of through the pandemic, right when the had the shipping crisis, is that inventories went up because people were buying anything they could get their hands on. So I'm guessing we're going to see that starting to fall off. And we're going to talk in a few minutes about the whole concept of what's going on with the ports again and how that trickles down and talks about near shoring and offshoring. So if anybody has any thoughts they'd like to share with on that. I'd love to hear that and kind of get a, get a view of that. So it's. We'll just keep, keep watching. You know, stock market was, was up this week and things have looked pretty positive across the board there. So that's good. I, you're. You're a stock guy more than I am. I just had a little alert pop up on my phone this morning that said something about officially entering a bull market.

Yeah, I think what that meant is that we're the 20 down of the bear market has. We're no longer 20 from the lows. So we've now. I don't know if that means entering a bull market.

Yeah.

Or. And yeah, I think that, you know, I don't want to get into this, but I think the market right now is a bit overpriced, a bit over overbought. We'll see how that plays out over the next week or two. But yeah, certainly a lot of more bullishness than bearishness. That's for sure.

That's it. Well, let's just kind of see. We're going to keep watching this as we always do, so we're going to move on. Interesting news kind of coming out of CNBC here talking about this challenges in the west coast ports. A lot of it is a little bit bigger, you know, where we are here. In fact, these two ports we're talking about are kind of dead center between where you are today and where I am today in Los Angeles and Long Beach. But, you know, they talk about this vessel buildup that's happening again and you know, we've talked about this many times, is that, you know, it's astounding. You and I are both originally from Long beach, where these ports are and you know, going down to the beach where we're from, you know, you would see some ships out there anchored. And then as we went into the pandemic, you know, side of things, we not only had a slowdown in the ports because of the pandemic, but we had this glut of ships. And you know, if you looked on some of the, the ship tracking apps and so forth that are available, you could see that, you know, there were ships stuck in Shanghai and other Asian ports because they couldn't even get started here yet because they weren't going to bother getting started here because they couldn't get into the port. Well, this article talks about. We're not seeing that yet, but we are seeing a slowdown. I'm going sailing, as I said, tomorrow afternoon and just south of there a little bit. So I'm going to kind of take a look out there to see what the anchorage looks like. But it's kind of a, it's an interesting thought that we're, we're not nearly that impact that what happened previously. But we are at this place where we've got, you know, labor unions that are causing some headaches. They talked about this in that article. They used the term labor gangs. And they've got this conflict going on there where they call these, these labor gangs will do, you know, slowdowns where they just will get less accomplished. And based upon their contract, they can fire them for one day. I don't know if you caught that in that article. And then things are back to normal, but they can't fire them.

So you go to the penalty box for one day.

Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, they've got these strong contracts. They've got, you know, contracts coming up for renewal and so forth. But now we've got this slowdown. And this article is pretty interesting. It's called, it's, as I mentioned, for those of you that are not watching us live and can't see what we're showing here, what's on our screen here that's on the live version of what we're doing today is we show a copy of that newsletter that we mentioned that we send out. This is an article from cnbc. It's titled vessel Buildup Grows at West Coast Ports as Maritime Supply Chain Begins to Break. So if you wanted to Google that or search that article, it's worth a read. But it is interesting because, you know, we think about it and you, I'm like, when I first started thinking about this, it was like, okay, we're going to talk about this on the show. You know, it's another deal about labor show slowdowns. But here's, here's something that came out of that that we really got to think about. And if you picture in your mind, if you're not looking at our screen right now, that shows this ship with all these containers. Picture one of these containers that, you know, container ships that has thousands of containers on it. Well, it mentioned in the CNBC article that they were tracking one particular ship. So what was on that ship? Tires for Tesla, IKEA furniture, Trader Joe's food, European wine, granite slabs and porcelain tiles. Well, that kind of hits a lot of different places of your life, right? This isn't just, oh, well, you know, some, some Bearings that are supposed to go to a factory or out there. It doesn't impact me. It does impact you. It impacts all of us. And this can really hit into kind of a domino effect because we can go right into that situation if this doesn't get taken care of. And it talks about here that there's some national organizations that are calling for the Biden administration to try and step in on this is. We could go right back into that, where we have trucking issues, we have rail issues because of the shipping issues, and we have pricing issues, inventory issues as well. So.

What it's saying is, if you really take it down, is that the labor are able to hold the ports hostage to a degree. Right. And they can use that to leverage to get obviously better contracts and more money and, and so forth. And obviously they've seen that by, by when slowdowns occur, what that impact will be or could. Yeah. So it's. It's kind of a perilous situation to a degree. And, and if there was an outright strike. Right. You would end up with, again, a lot of the same issues. I don't think that, as it says in there, I think the government would step in before that became too big of a issue. But who knows, right until that occurs. But then I think that ties in really well into this next article. Yeah.

Before we jump ahead, though, let me interrupt you for just a second. Tom May had made that comment earlier today. He says, what is that potential longshoreman strike mean to distribution contingency plans. Contingency plans and so forth. I, I would assume there's a lot of people that are following this extremely closely, to Tom's point here, of the idea that, hey, you know what? This could have a big impact. And it's not, it's not just distribution. Right. It's the, the, you know, monster manufacturing companies of the world, the Honeywells, the three M's. Right. The Fords, the. Whoever it might be is, is impacted by that. So I just wanted to address Tom's comment there because he brought that up in the comments here on LinkedIn. So thanks for that, Tom. So good. That reassuring point that you were starting to mention.

Well, this. We've talked about this multiple times, you know, on the show. I thought this was kind of interesting. Is the. From the MDM article as they were looking at phone calls, earnings calls, and again, this is where AI and other things are going to become more and more valuable to see how many times the terms of reshoring was mentioned. Right. Calls and reshoring. Meaning bringing stuff back onshore or, you know, not relying on everything being from China or offshore. And they said that, you know, those conversations are happening more and more often in the boardroom and in the investor calls and in the earning calls that are actually going on. Makes total sense, right? On what we just talked about. I mean, who wants to be hold, held hostage by the supply chain or the workers or all of those things? So we've seen that, you know, there were kind of three points that they mentioned in that article, but about why this makes sense. All of those are things that we've talked about before. But if you really look at it, what they're saying is, is that the costs, when you start to look at all of these things, the cost actually may be cheaper to bring it back in, even into the U.S. not just into, you know, other parts of North America, but in US And I think they even went one step further and said a lot of, you know, towns and small towns that were kind of really decimated when things moved overseas, they see an opportunity for some of these to be revitalized a bit.

Right?

Yeah, I know, I know where my wife is from in New Hampshire, if you go out a little bit into the rural areas, there was a lot of areas there that were really decimated by the loss of manufacturing jobs and so forth that, you know, have a lot of infrastructure and things like that that in theory could come back and you know, a little bit of modernization come back online pretty quickly.

Well, I think you're spot on with that. And you know, they, as they talked about that, right. And I think we need to use two terms for this, right? There's onshoring saying coming back to the US and then there's near shoring that might be Latin America somewhere, right. And specifically Mexico with the maquiliadores and so forth at the border with that manufacturing piece. And it's just, you know, now when you, you look back at the supply chain issues that have been going on and getting ships across an ocean, there's these factors and then, you know, I don't even want to start down this path today. But then there's the whole issue of the tension with China, right. And so you reduce that risk of the tension that's going on, you know, both politically and economically with China into that, but talks about three factors. You started to mention those a little bit. The first one, desire for more resilient supply chain. I think that's great. You know, that makes a lot of sense. A lot of people learn some big Lessons through Covid about, you know, management of supply chain. We talk regularly about, you know, AI impacting that and web four and things like where web two, three and four really impacting those things as far as supply chain and manufacturing and in real time data. But what I thought was interesting was the second point that they talked about about customer demand fulfillment. Right. And that's a huge challenge. I mean, if you think about it, I call it the Amazon effect, right? I, I, you, you heard me talking. You know, I bought, he bought the new Apple Ultra watch earlier this week and it, I got ordered it on Monday and it took till Thursday to get here. Oh my God. I was upset.

Oh my God. How have you lived the last three days?

I had to wear a different watch and, but I, I told Darlene, I said I feel like a spoiled child. I was checking my phone.

I know. You are a spoiled child. No doubt about it.

All right, okay.

Three days.

I, I want to be careful because I can see there's some people that are live here that know me well and I, I want to stop the harassment that could come from that. But, but if you think about it, right, the Amazon effect, people have an expectation of things are coming quickly, right. They're not. I don't want to wait for things. And if you're waiting for something to come across the ocean where you might have a ship that's not leaving Shenzhen, you know, or Shanghai because of the, the congestion in the ports here, big difference with that. So then the last thing is they talked about and you started to mention this, right? You know, labor rates are increasing in other manufacturing places such as China. Right. China's developed and middle class and they didn't have that when we started moving offshore there. But in closing, kind of on this article, there's a quote here and in fact, I'm pretty sure, Tom, you would have to confirm for me, but we're going to talk later today briefly about the Industrial Supply Association's upcoming online events that we're both participating on different panels, but I think one of the. You're on two panels. I just noticed you're, you're popular. I'm only on one, but James Doran from the Dorn Group, who does a lot of work with both manufacturers and distributors as kind of a strategic advisor and researcher. But I think James is, I chatted with him a bit at the ISA event in Phoenix recently and his team, but I think he's on one of the panels that you're on, actually. And they just made the great comment I really want to reiterate this that you're. Because you commented about this, about where Lauren, your wife's from in New Hampshire. You know, he said that manufacturers and distributors that he's consulted with, he shared with them. He said he speculated that reshoring trend would help revive the rural communities in the US that were devastated decades ago when manufacturing went overseas. You mentioned that the next piece of it was the article referenced Baird's equity research that was done in August of 2022 released a report which forecasted that industrial distributors have a 15 billion dollar incremental revenue opportunity over the next decade via reshoring. So, you know, these are easy to just say, hey, reshoring, cool. You know, near shoring on shoring, whatever. Yeah, interesting. But the impact of this is dramatic, especially when we talked about wholesale distribution. So.

Yeah. And if you look at even the demographics in China, right. Given the fact that their population is shrinking, their population's not growing and it's shrinking rapidly. So there's going to be fewer. If you just look out over time, there's going to be fewer workers, there's going to be fewer people. Of course costs are going to go up. Costs are already going up. You just look at this and it's like, you know, really makes sense to kind of take a really hard look. Obviously that's happening per all these earnings calls of how we bring things reshore. It'll be interesting to see what that does overall for the economy here in the US and so forth. Just very interesting to watch a lot of this stuff come full circle.

Yeah, good. Well, let's jump ahead. This next article about generative AI will change B2B customer experience as we know it, which I thought was kind of a great piece to talk about with this as well. This is from B2B 360 and good, really good article about, about customer experience. You want to jump in on that or you want me to start?

I can start. I mean, so here's, you know, what, what. And I'm seeing this over and over and over is I, as I do our own research and our own work on it and then just also talking to customers, what's really going to happen if you look at how we do customer experience now, even if I have a website or I'm searching for something on a website or so forth, it's basically I go and I search, I sort through all the options and then I try and make a decision. Right. That's what I do. And even in customer service, if you call somebody what do you do? You short through the options 1, 2, 3, or whatever the case may be.

Well, my head explodes.

Yes, it can make your head explode really quick. What's happening is in this world of AI is we're shifting from options to conversations. So what do I mean by that? It's that rather than going and searching and sorting through options and looking at things and trying to figure out which is the best thing to do, we're going to have a conversation. And generative AI drives those conversations.

So I'm hearing a. You heard it here first moment coming from you.

Yeah, I don't even know if I heard it here. It's just, it's kind of what's happening, right? It's. You look at even some of the things that are going on, even with Google and the Google search process and so forth. It's the world of search and look at transactions, look at options. Figure out options is going to go way more into conversation. And if you think about the technology behind the scenes that are driving those conversations, you inherently are going to be able to get information that you would never be able to figure out on your own through reviewing options and kind of piecing the puzzle together on your own. Okay, right. Because there's just so much more capability here. So yeah, it's going to change. And they talk about this in the article here, but yeah, it's totally, it's, it's already changing. And in some industries, certainly in the wholesale distribution industry, I believe that we are going to see even the way that people interact with E commerce websites, how they make purchases, how they do research, even if you're out on a job site. And to be able to just pick up your phone and use voice to text on something like this and have conversations back and forth, conversations are really going to be the thing that changes the experience.

So. Article talked about three things. A more advanced conversational experience for customers, assisting support agents and then understanding your customers and what they're asking. So those three points. So I'm going to throw this out to you because you're as well versed in this as anybody that I've talked to in the last. Oh man, that might have been my third compliment this month and it's not even the middle of the month. So that's, you know a lot about this stuff. We're going to leave it at that. But this article made a super bold statement. I want to get your, your thoughts on this before I share mine. It said, you know, we use the term CX or customer experience and they said it's becoming as important as your product or service.

Well, I think, I think it was something I said on a previous show.

Oh, here we go.

That experience, the experience is going to be more important than your brand or your product.

I think you did say that.

And that's basically what is occurring. Right. Because the experience, when somebody really takes advantage of AI or conversations, the experience that can be provided is orders of magnitude better than what can be done with the older technologies. So you inherently, your brand and your product and everything else gets elevated by that experience that's there. And you know, you always hear judge the book by the COVID Right. You're judging, you're going to judge the book by the experience.

Yeah.

And I do believe that we've talked about this. I think there's a real opportunity for even smaller distribution distributors and localized and ones that have specialized services to really elevate themselves. We were talking with one of our buying group partners this morning about this and they were, I mean, they're seeing this as well, is that it's really, how can you provide a much more superior experience and do it quickly and if you do so, you're going to be able to really, really compete even much better with some of your much larger competitors.

Yep.

Yeah.

So powerful, powerful stuff here. Right. And it's interesting, this article I thought was good. Right. It didn't, it didn't talk about, you know, eliminating positions with, with AI. It talked about enhancing. Right. How your customer can self serve. Right. But then one of the points that it made too was it talked about how seamless like that transition can be. Because I mean, think about your current experience. You know, you might be on somebody's website trying to find something, you can't find it. You know, the last thing you want to do these days is pick up the phone and like try and call because you're going to go through, you know, voicemail, heck to get, get through that of prompts and so forth. And then the chat agents, you know, if they're bots right now, I just, I don't know about you. I've just never had a, I don't say never. I just haven't had a consistently good experience with, you know, bots trying to answer support issues for me. Right. Because they're just pulling from a knowledge base.

Yeah. They're not using generative AI, most of them. I mean, there's more, there may be some that I'm, I've been testing that, that are going to do that. But that's historically they're not using, they're not using AI technology or, or language models to support those things. So.

Good. So with, you know, with that, right, this, this talked about that transition over from self serve to wanting support. So this could just be literally somebody, you know, on a website looking about the specs and capabilities of a piece of equipment you sell as a distributor you manufacture perhaps. And they've got as far as they want to go on their own. And now. Right, and this goes back to Omnichannel buying same, same idea. Right.

Zero, right. Press zero for an operator.

Well, but now it could literally be into that prop that says, you know, Judy has been monitoring this, this conversation we're having through AI. Would you like to speak to her live? She's available.

Sure. Right.

And Judy knows all that's just happened of what they've done in that other setting and now that transition be. And I think I've really understated the value of what can happen in that transition. But we're not, we're not talking about, you know, eliminating jobs here. What we are talking about is something we talked, spoke about last week which Mike Marks had brought up recently from Indian River Consulting is like you need to go figure out how to hire people from the business school, not the, the computer science school that understand AI because it's going to become part of all of our jobs that we can understand how to get the prompts going and how to use AI properly in our day to day work. Doesn't matter what we do.

Right. Yeah, well, and you're constantly, what you're, you're. The responsibility you have is to constantly be training, I'll use that word training in air quotes, training that AI. So it's providing even a better and better and deeper experience. And what's going to happen is as people start using these and become more fluent with conversational activity, they're going to inherently want to go deeper. Yeah, right. And as you go deeper, you know, that requires more training, that requires more data, that requires a lot of it requires care and feeding. There's no way you're just going to put these on autopilot and let them go. So you're, it's not that you're going to be not having people behind the scenes making all this happen. And I do agree there'll be a hybrid model as well where you can actually reach out and have a conversation with somebody along the way.

Well, that, that was a big core of this piece of the article.

Right, right.

Was talking about. It's that transition that happens where they can really go, okay, I'm, I'm ready. Right. And you know, you speak to this, you wrote about it in your book. You talk about it on the other podcast. You're on the Social Selling with Brandon Lee, who's with us this morning, and it was on with us a couple of weeks ago. Right. Is the customer is going to decide how they want to communicate with us.

Right.

Whether you're a distributor, manufacturer, service provider, whoever you are.

Right.

They'll decide when they want to talk to somebody. But now what happens is you've got this database that is now. And I'm jumping into your world for a second here, but we've got this, all this data within our organization, across E commerce, marketing, automation, ERP data. We've got all that available that's matching up against the questions that all of our customers are asking. And now that service level just goes through the roof because now we're getting generative or prescriptive information that's popping up for this live person because the buyer raised their hand and said, I'm ready to talk voice to voice or face to face Now. Right. And now they might just roll right into a zoom call out of using an AI search tool to be face to face with somebody. But the data that's now available to that agent, customer service rep, inside sales, whoever it might be, and this could go all the way down to the counter level at an industrial tool supplier or something like that.

Well, and I just want to hit on before we leave here what Tom was saying. I like the second part. He says if I, if AI can qualify what a customer is looking for, help the CSR give them a better experience. But, and I like the second part here. And, or make a deal if needed. Now again, you have context because if somebody's conversing through the chat or through the conversation, you now have, you now have context. And so if you're on the sales side of the equation, you can start to understand, well, what deal should I potentially introduce here?

Okay.

What I know more about my customer or what my customer is even looking for? So, yeah, it's those sort of creative ways of looking things that are not only going to make it a much better experience, but make it a lot more profitable and fruitful. Right.

Well, and think about it, right? Because so often as salespeople, right. We just dive to the lowest price point. But now if you could take all of this other data of other, other orders and other things that have gone on in an organization, say, hey, customers like this. That bought these things were willing to pay this price when we offered this service.

Right.

And the margins can be impacted with all of this. This is a really good, good conversation about where this can go. I think, you know what I'll look forward to, I'll make some time instead of the side Sunday afternoon, because I think you should go build that. And I actually have.

No joke, I actually have a couple prototypes that. On some of the stuff that we're working on and that I'm, you know, we'll do. Like I said, we keep talking about this. We haven't done it yet, but do a webinar or something to show some of the things that are possible and what's happening and what it can actually do. Because I think sometimes when you see some of the capabilities and the experience, it starts to, you know, get the juices flowing on what's possible.

Yep. No, that's. I think that's great. So we just need to continue this conversation because things are changing. They're changing fast. They're going to impact all of us, but if we do it right, they're going to impact us for the better.

Yeah. And I'll say to Mike, he says, love this conversation. Selfishly, it's going to greatly impact our product.

Yeah.

I would agree, Mike, that it's not only just going to impact your product, but it. And I'm not, and I'll speak for myself, it is impacting our business and greatly impacting our business. And if we don't take it seriously or we assume it's something that's going to go away, or I have a couple of years or three years to figure this out, I. It's really what keeps me at. Up. Me up at night, even on our own business. Yeah. Because the changes that are happening and the speed of which it's happening. I know we keep talking about this over and over, but it's coming to fruition. It's like what we talk about a week ago is almost irrelevant or redundant in the. The following week. So.

Well, anyway, let's. Yeah. Before we, you know, hit that right.

You.

You've mentioned the power and the magnitude of, of AI, you know, and generative tools and so forth, as we're talking about the magnitude. And we talk about that consistently here. And, and, and I get. Whether I'm on the phone or at an event, I've talked to a lot of people that are regular, you know, listeners or watchers of this broadcast and, and, and they've commented that this has been helpful to them. Right. To see, start seeing some of the magnitude of what's going on. And that's our intent. There was a CNBC kind of their Midday, I think it was right after. I think it was on Wednesday was the Apple. I think Tuesday was the Apple's worldwide developer conference. And then Wednesday they had this session where they were talking about. They had three different people on cnbc and I don't know if you got a chance to go back and watch that. I shared some stuff with you. But they had, you know, multiple billionaire folks that have made money, their money from Search with Google and other organizations on talking about the magnitude of what this is going to have in our lifetime. So I'm going to just, let's just end this with this thought and before we move on and talk about PGA and live here. But multiple people. You've said this before that artificial intelligence can have a larger impact on our life than the Internet has had. And I mean, it's easy to shake your head, go, yeah, yeah. If you stop and let that sink in for a minute. What has the Internet meant to our life?

Sure. Right.

And, and this, I think the Internet has also caused some negative impact on our life.

Right.

And so using this in the right way, I think we're going to see. So anyways, we can move on. I just that, you know, we're hearing more and more people that are. Have lived through the, the building of the Internet, I guess I'll call it, who are looking at this and saying, wow, you know.

Yeah. No, I mean, as you start to peel the onion and understand the capabilities, you see what the potential impact. But yeah, and I think this feeds in really well to our Sports center article about the PGA and in the Live LIVE merger here. So, you know, I've been following this off and on for ever since it happened. And the whole. So if you're not a golfer. Right. The Professional Golf association, which has been around for years, a Saudi group, Saudi Arabian group, created this separate tour called Live Liv. It actually stands for 54 because they play 54 holes instead of 54 holes instead of 72 holes in their tournament. So that's where liv is, the 54 in Roman numerals. That's just where it came from. And you know, a lot, a lot of controversy. You can read about it. If you haven't read about it, you've, you're, I'm sure you've heard about it. A lot of big golfers moved over there. Phil Mickelson and a whole bunch of other top golfers Bricks Kafka, who just won the PGA Championship. So it's been a, and a lot of finger pointing back and forth. And what was announced on Tuesday is the PGA who was, you know, fighting and finger pointing with the Live group and live decided to merge along with the DP World Tour, which is the European Tour. And people, you know, if you read this article, they're going to talk about that. It's all about the money and so forth. And I agree it's about the money. But I think this whole thing, and this is why we, we put this, this article in here as a warning for wholesale distribution. Why did this happen? Is frankly because the PGA model is outdated. And if you look at the PGA model prior to all of this, the things that they do now with tournaments and how they do tournaments and how people make money and how the players make money, yeah, there's been some changes to playoffs and more money. But it's what's been going for what, 100 and years or 120 years or whatever it is or longer. It hasn't changed and it wasn't adapting and it wasn't moving into the world that we're in now. And the one thing that you're going, that I believe here, I am going to say you heard it here first, is that if you look ahead at.

The pg, wouldn't be Friday. If we hear first, if you look.

At what's going to happen as a result of this merger, and I know it's still subject to some approvals and some regulatory things, but they're looking to create a for profit organization with these three golf organizations, PGA Live and the DP World Tour in a for profit. The PGA Tour is a non profit organization. Up until now they do things and they, you know, donate money to charity and all that. Now they're going to make it a more a for profit. And what I believe you're going to see in the world of golf in the next, I don't know, two years, probably three years, it'll look much more like the NBA or the NFL. There'll be teams. There'll be teams with golfers on them that represent cities. They'll still have individual tournaments, much like, you know, you'll still have the Masters and all that, but you'll still have teams. You'll have teams. You'll have the concept of free agency. Golfers will be able to move from team to team and get paid from all of those types of things. You start incorporating that into the whole, you know, sports betting that's increasing all the time. You're going to see a big shift from the more traditional to a much more aligned with what you see with other sports franchises, even franchises. Right. The franchises that are there. Why is that happening? Because the old model is outdated and live. And you know, and Phil Mickelson. I'll be quiet here in a minute. But, you know, a lot of people criticize Phil Mickelson for going over to this other tour, but I believe it wasn't just about the money. I think it was part of it. We have to change the mold. We have to do things differently. We have to adapt or we're going to die and live with their money, force the hand on this. And now we're at a place and I, I really think that the PGA commissioner had some big guts to make this happen because it was going to happen. Something like this was going to happen somewhere in the future. So.

Well, I mean, there's. There's a million places to go with this.

Right.

And you know, Mike just made that. Mike Franz and in Minnesota just made that comment about, you know, it's the way it always been doesn't cut it anymore. And I, and I think that's what we. That there's a lot of stuff that goes with this whole thing that frustrates me.

Right.

You know, you got.

You just.

You called me spoiled earlier. You know, Phil Mickelson in this article talked about, you know, the way reason he went over was because of the. The obnoxious greed of the PGA. And I'm like, Phil lives about 45 minutes south of me. And Phil's big decision of the day is, is he taking the small jet or the big jet that's in Carlsbad? You know, so I again, I kind of look at this and, and they quoted as well in here the a professor that teaches about sports marketing, I can't remember at the university. And she said what she. I think she said it has. She teaches her students is if you want to know how to spell sports, it's spelled M O N E Y.

Right.

So there's. I guess there's a lot of challenging stuff that goes with this. Right. I think the key is being in tune with what's going on. Right. Being ready to make change and be focused on how change can be beneficial to an organization and don't get stuck.

Right. Yeah. And. And even golf, which is all based on tradition. Right. I mean, and I respect that. I respect the tradition, but it is a bit broken or has been a bit broken from a Business model perspective, Right. I mean, we have a friend who's played on the PGA Tour for many years, and I remember talking to him early on in his PGA career and he was telling me how hard it was just to make ends meet on, on the PGA Tour. Right. And here's one of the top people in his profession in the whole ride world.

He doesn't have that problem anymore. But.

No, but not. But still. But it's not like, it's not like if you were in a team or be able to join a team and you're making, I mean, guarantee. I mean, look at the, the level of some of the players that are here, right? That and really that they're not being able, not able to be compensated to the level of their ability for a lot of them. Some of them obviously make a ton of money.

Well, that's the differentiator, right? You have a sport like you have tennis and I'm sure there's others, right? Where you. And this, this is, I think, a great transition to look at it, where we talk about it, transitioning to the business side of it, right. Is in professional golf, like professional tennis, you go home if you don't succeed without getting paid.

Right.

And that was your discussion about Paul, right. Is, you know, unless you're in the money, right, and you gotta be top 20, you're probably losing money by the time you paid your caddy and your travel, travel and sponsors and things like that.

But it's still tough.

Yeah. So when was, you know, when was the last time that LeBron James paid for getting on an airplane?

Exactly. Right.

This doesn't happen. I think that ties to your point of the change that's going on with all this. You know, it's. I think that if you want to look at this right, is we need to be prepared. Things are changing. We can, we can grow our businesses, we can make our businesses better if we embrace and adapt. Part of me really hates this example of live because there's. And in the pga because it, it is. I'm glad you brought it up, but it's been bugging me for the last two days since you said we should talk about this today because there's so much bad stuff, right. You know, I look at. There's the bad stuff that goes with that, that translates to the world. There's a great takeaway of what could happen because if you look at, look at Rory McElroy, right, one of the top golfers in the world from, from Ireland. Is that right? Yeah. And in Tiger Woods Tiger woods, you know, could have had between 7 and $800 million just to go play on this tour. And he said no because of wanting to support the PGA and some of the ethical things. Right. In the, in the PGA's lawsuit.

Right.

They talk about all these atrocities and the connection with nine, eleven and the Saudis and all of these things, and all of that went away over money.

Right.

But to your point, right. Is don't get left behind. Like, and I guess the. I guess the ones left behind are the Tiger woods and the Rory McElroys and the guys that stayed behind. It didn't take the money.

Yeah. And again, my, my point on this is not about whether live or, you know, some of the more moral issues and things like that. It's messy. And is this, was this the ideal way for this to happen? Probably not.

Right.

The point being here, whether it was live or some other external influence, is the model was broken and outdated and eventually it was going to end up getting disrupted. And it is now being disrupted. And it was disrupted through the live process. And it's in. It's just as Mike said. Right. The way it's always been done doesn't cut it anymore.

Right.

And it doesn't matter what you are if you're golf, which has the most tradition of probably any sort of thing out there, or you're a wholesale distributor. But. Yeah, I mean, I, if you. I'm not. I'm not here to.

You're right. You're right. And that's why I said, I'm glad you, you brought up. I just. This is a. There's so much wrong with that whole thing that we could have.

There's a lot of toxicity.

That's not why we're here.

Yeah, but if you take away the toxicity and you just look at what caused all of this, it's because it's just not going to be that way.

Yeah.

Anyway, I know we need to move.

Right along, so we do. So if you're. Again, if you're listening on the podcast later in the recorded version of this, we're looking at a newsletter that we send out every week. It's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution. We talk about a number of different, different topics related to M and A and sales and marketing and the economy and technology. Obviously, if you don't get that email and you would like to just pop us a note, helloadsmart tech.com we'll get you added to the list. And you'll get that every week as well. Little plug here. For what we're trying to do as well though is if you're whether it's a podcast you're listening to or LinkedIn, Facebook Live, YouTube Live that we're broadcasting on today, click the like button, the follow the share tell your friends because our audience is growing consistently. We really appreciate that and we want to get more feedback from people. So tell your friends about what we're doing. What's on the screen now is we have a segment each week called Industry Scuttlebutt. We talk a little bit about M and A and things going on. The only thing I wanted to mention that's here is staff to the Specialty Tool and Fastener Distributors Association. They've got an event coming up this fall in San Antonio will be there in their technology center representing Lead Smart there. And they just I just saw the list of keynotes and the speakers there, Dirk Beveridge, who you've heard speak before, Tom. And I've gotten to know a little bit. Dirk's going to be there is one of the keynotes. Alan Belio, that is pretty hard hitting, impactful economist will be there talking. So looks like a really good event worth taking a look at. I think. It's staffed@stafda.org I believe you could find online. So let's hit that. Let's. One last thing I wanted to talk about. Each week we have two other segments. One's called a Tech talk and one's called A Good Read. That's in our newsletter. Such a simplistic piece. I don't know if you look closely at this article. It came from Inc. Magazine. It's under the Goodreads. It says a CEO says this one question can replace performance reviews. And it's just so powerful and we.

Want to what is the one question?

Would I hire them again?

Right.

It's like literally, you know, that comes down and it says just a quick quote says you hire someone initially and then if all goes well, you hire them again 12 months later after you're doing these reviews and so forth and said that second hire is the crucial hire. Even though it wouldn't be a stretch to say you continually hire someone through throughout their career. But the question was with a full year behind me, knowing what I know now, would I hire this person again? And I just what a great way to go in. We, I mean we can have pages of questions and metrics and data and so forth, but at the end of the day, would I do it again?

Yeah. And most people can answer that question within a snap of a finger when you ask it.

Well, it goes along. Goes along with, you know, higher slow and fire fast. Yeah, great concept. So anyways, listen, we've done some updating on each week we put in, by the way, we've got the Public Distributors Index Tracker if you want to look at the stock status of publicly traded wholesale distribution manufacturing companies. That's available on our newsletter. And then the ISA summer session events are coming up. Those are in the newsletter. That's isapartners.org you can find that Industrial Supply association, some good events. You're speaking at those. I'm speaking at those as well.

Be sure to put the one on June 20th on your calendar. That's going to be by far the one of the. The better ones in June.

Only if you have trouble sleeping.

Yeah, well, we got Mike Hockett and who you mentioned.

Yeah, that's a solid group. How did you get in?

I. I figure I'll just be there to balance them out a little bit, you know.

I wonder if I'm gonna get an invoice for having you there for that. That's a pretty powerful group you're sitting with. I'm happy to. Happy to hear that. That's super good. Hey, let's get rolling. Let's get out of here. Let's wish everybody a fantastic weekend. Thanks for coming. Thanks for joining us. Have a great weekend, do good things, be kind and hopefully we see you next week.

Yep. Thanks everyone.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode and our guests. Each week we try our best to dig into the topic 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 and hold 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@lead smart tech.com.