Wholesale Distribution Insights: Tariffs, Small Business Confidence, and AI in B2B Sales

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.

How are you, my friend?

Okay. Aloha. Good. I see you have your aloha shirt on.

I have my aloha shirt. I will be home Monday, late Monday night after a glorious 11 days in the beautiful Hawaiian Islands. We did. What did we do? We did five days in. Five days on Oahu and I'm sorry, on Kauai. And now we're on the North Shore of Oahu. Pretty cool. The, the big surf contests are getting ready to, to fire off here. They had earlier in the week started the Pipe Masters at Bonsai Pipeline. And so some of the top surfers from all over the world are in for that. And that's less than 10 minutes up the street from us. And then the big, big wave surfing contest for that's here in Hawaii every year called the Eddy. That's a three month window that they do for that contest. And the window opens up I think tomorrow, sorry, today the window opens up and it goes through March 14th. So when that, when they get a weather forecast coming in that says they expect two to three days of 40 foot or larger waves, then the buzzer hits and people basically have 24 hours to arrive in the North Shore of Oahu if they're not already here. But you can see a little buzz around town. So I'm looking out right now to about, literally about a quarter of a mile up the beach is Waimea Bay, which is a big part of where those contests will be. So pretty cool spot, but plenty to get done today as well. So it's good to be with everybody and to see you. I haven't seen you. I'll see you next week. Face to Face with I'm back in town, but this was 20th wedding anniversary, so my wife, a little present. So we're in a good spot. Right.

Well, let's get started on episode 120 then.

What are we at? What's the number?

120.

120. How did that happen? Tom? All of a sudden, all of a sudden we're, we're, we were at 100 and that was a big deal. I did want to say before we really get rolled today, we did just confirm this week that I think we're 17 January will be the the big hitters are joining us again. So last year we did in January we did a year in review of 2023 and looking ahead at 2024 and we had the illustrious Dirk Beverage and Mike Marks and Ian Heller, Ian with the Distribution Strategy Group and Mike with Indian River Consulting and Dirk with Unleashed WD and the We Supply America Tour. Dirk was responsible for a new section in our newsletter that we published which is exciting from that show and we had everybody confirmed for to do that again this year which is going to be exciting. So if we can keep Mike under under control we'll be in good shape. But I think it'll be a fun show. So look for the announcements for that. I think the date is the 17th if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah.

So that should be fantastic. But anyways, why don't we before we dive into these, let's do a little bit of our housekeeping. My name is Kevin Brown. I'm here with my lifelong friend and business partner, Tom Burton. Tom and I get together every Friday morning and we discuss a newsletter that we publish and is sponsored by the company. Tom and I work for Lead Smart Technologies. We'll talk about that briefly in a moment. But we publish a newsletter again. It's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing. It goes out to 10,000 plus people. And the idea behind that is that we take a look at the the economy and the supply chain in the world. We take a look at mergers and acquisitions and sales and marketing and AI and technology and cybersecurity and general news of the world that impacts manufacturing, wholesale distribution. And we get together each week Tom and I do or guests like we have coming with us next week and the guest server that we were talking about for next month and we look at that newsletter and we kind of break down and look Tom, you often say the story behind the story or I think our bumper music says peel the onion on the on the topics and look at how they impact manufacturing wholesale distribution both here in the US and internationally. We do that again by this through this newsletter. So if you're listening in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, whatever it might be and you don't see our screen today, what is up on the screen for the people who are live with us on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live, Facebook Live and so forth? We what they're seeing is.

A copy.

Of that newsletter and then Sometimes we have some charts and graphs that we share. So anytime you want, you could go back to YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn. If you went to the Lead Smart Technologies page there, then you would see the graphics and the handsome faces of Tom and Kevin that would be there. So that puts us in a good place to be for that to get started today. So, Tom, the last part of that that we'll discuss is two more pieces. One is if you would like to get that newsletter and you don't, the simple and easy way to get a hold of that is to send us an email. You can send that email to helloadsmart tech.com you could then in turn go directly to LinkedIn. And there is a page for our podcast. It's connected to the Lead Smart Technologies page on on LinkedIn. But there's an around the Horn and wholesale distribution podcast link there and you can sign up for the newsletter there. And that'll come from LinkedIn. It'll come to your inbox every week as well as available anytime on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. And then you could go to the website for the podcast, which is www.aroundthehornpod.com. finally, before we jump, we gotta say thank you to two groups of people. One is the people behind the scenes, Lily and John, that work hard each week to make sure this podcast gets out with the newsletter publishing and the editing and so forth. And two, the company that Tom and I work for, Lead Smart Technologies. Lead Smart sponsors our show and pays the bills and keeps the lights on, as they say, and we couldn't do that. And Lead Smart is a technology company that Tom and I developed a number of years ago. And Lead Smart is a, what we call a AI enabled smart CRM and customer intelligence platform. You might say, what is Smart CRM? Smart CRM is something that is not, as we sometimes say, your father's Buick. So historically, CRM and tools that are similar to that are very labor intensive. They're Big brother looking over your shoulder. They're just trying to get salespeople to put in. And we take a completely different approach by taking data from across an organization, from erp, systems, marketing, automation, E commerce and other data points across an organization. We bring those together to feed revenue teams data and information that help them understand what's going on at their customer, how to accelerate and drive revenue in a better way than they've ever done before with a minimal amount of work. And that's what makes it Smart CRM. So if your company is trying to accelerate growth and expand your revenues and understand your customers, your teams and get a better look into your entire organization. We would love the opportunity to talk to you and you can catch us anytime through the show here or Tom and I are both very active on LinkedIn and other formats and you could find us there. So, Tom, that's about it for our housekeeping. Did I miss anything there?

No, I. Bob, speaking your language. Aloha and jump in and say hi far. But I think with that, let's get on with the news.

Was that Brandon's comment there about that was a little bit scary. Was that being able to look up my nostrils? Is that what he meant?

That's what he meant.

Yes. Yes, very good.

Ran for cover. He's like, oh my God.

Yeah, that's, that's very good. I completely understand how he feels for that. So thank you for that and aloha to Bob and I'll try and not to slide in any pigeon English throughout our discussion today.

So. All right.

Well, as we mentioned from our newsletter that we have every week we collate, I guess would be a, a way to look at it, great news points from across across the business world, in the distribution, manufacturing world each week and we have segments that are in the newsletter and we start each week with a segment called the Economy and Supply Chain. So Tom, next week, what I think we're at, what would that be? I think it's going to be Wednesday next week we get to, we find out if there's a third rate cut this year or not.

Have market odds of 99%.

Is that what it is now?

Yeah, that's what it says here. Right on the thing, the reported market odds for a rate cut to 99.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great.

So, so yeah, I guess it's, I guess it's a foregone conclusion. I mean, the, the inflation rate came in high. Sticky Friday.

Sticky is a great term that you, you used that last week as well. And I thought that was, I thought that was a great way to look at it.

So it's certainly not, you know, in that 2 range, but it's not going the other direction. So I think everybody believes for the most part, and that's what you know, talks about in this article. They'll cut on whatever Wednesday you'll hear on Wednesday and then next year it could be a little bit slower.

I think, I think what we're going to see is exactly what you described. And just Tom, as a reference point as we talk about each week here, this is an article from cnbc kind of did a recap on some of the statistics that are tied to what's going on in the economy this week. It was from yesterday and the article says annual inflation rate accelerates to 2.7 in November as expected. And I think one of the challenges to what you're saying, I really like that idea of saying sticky because I think what we're seeing is they thought they were coming back to getting things in line with the first rate cut, second rate cut. You know we had a big event around here with that second rate cut but we won't go in too depth deep on that second rate cut issue because you said that that's getting old at the fact that you lost the bet.

But it's way, way old.

Way old news. Yeah.

For up to date news and information, not things that happen.

They don't want me, they don't want me living in the past. That's what you're saying. I will tell you I, I think we'll be talking about this one for a while though just because you know.

I don't think we will, you know we'll come up with something new to talk about.

Is what you're saying is that I might be talking about it but it's not relevant.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay, perfect. But, but I think what happened was is we got you know a couple of stimulus I guess bumps there to drop rates and kind of hope things start getting a little more balanced. But what was expected from those aren't, aren't nearly as good as, as, as planned and is hoped for. And inflation ticked a little bit again last month and so now we're, we're close to where they want to be in the says the core CPI at 3.3 was almost matching what the forecasts were. But this bump in the, in the consumer price index and then getting the inflation rate around 2.7 there is, is not where they want to be so they're going to have to take some action. But I did, I did catch a little bit yesterday kind of and this ties in. We had our next article talks about is a Reuters article. We'll kind of tie a few of these together today and stick with a topic in general. But this other article about us small business sentiment nears three and a half year high in November. You know that kind of ties in. I'm going to make a kind of a broad assumption. I think quite a bit of that is coming from the, from post election enthusiasm from a business standpoint that okay rates are coming down a little bit. I can invest in my business more. I feel a little bit of a balancing. And then I've got somebody that's talking about, you know, tax cuts and so forth. And I think I had CNBC on for a little bit yesterday while I was doing some work here. And they were had, I shouldn't say which one of the investment companies, but their economists were, and they were talking about even some stimulus coming into the, into the market next year from the new administration to really kind of boost the economy along. And then the tax cuts were starting to be talked about. Exactly what they will.

What stimulus were they talking about?

Well, they were talking about pumping some money back in. So, like perspective or. Yeah.

Easing, you know, that they didn't, they.

Didn'T use that term. They just used the term stimulus. And it was one of those things where I wish that it was recorded what I was listening to so I could hit the back button. I think we live in this world where I, you know, I was looking, this is funny, I was looking at hugely digressing here, but I was looking last weekend as a Thanksgiving weekend, I was with my older sister. We were looking at some pictures of our father that we, who we lost in April. And, and I, she's handing me pictures and I kept wanting to grow the picture with my finger. Like I was looking at it on my phone.

Right.

It's a, it's a, it's a, a picture I was holding in my hand. And, and I think sometimes we, we're listening to live topics and we want to hit the back button because of what they were saying. But they were talking, Trump was being interviewed. He was talking very specifically about where the corporate tax rates would be and the lowering of them in general. And then if you were manufacturing in the US they were significantly lower if you're manufacturing offshore and so forth. So I think what we're just seeing is this next article that we're referencing today talking about small business sentiment being at a three and a half year high. You know, that puts us back into when we had, you know, stimulus coming into the, into the world because of the pandemic and so forth. So I, I think it's going to be an interesting next four to six months.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I, I know a lot of small business people. I think most of my friends, business people, and I would agree that I'm, what I'm hearing from people I'm talking to is definitely a, a bullishness. And I would even go one step further and say an excitement about the future and about the next year can't really, they can't really explain why. They can't say specifically what they're going to do or what will change necessarily, but they think overall, the macro environment I believe is more conducive to their success. Okay, I wanted to hit Bob's comment here because it is an interesting one. He said, you know, federal rate, Fed rates can have, in, have some impact. I don't think they really have, but that's a different story. But with increased SMB activity spurring competition, which will drive prices and inflation down. That's an interesting angle that I hadn't thought a lot about is, hey, if there's more SMB activity, more businesses getting started, is that going to create competition? That may be a long tail. I don't know if that's going to necessarily be something that we'll see in 2025, but it could be a long tail outcome of all this.

Well, I think that's a great, great way to describe that, Bob and, and, or Tom, with Bob's comment down. I do, I do think that's a long tail, but I think a long tail is important to be looking on this.

Right.

We don't want, we don't, we don't want to see, you know, struggle, struggle, struggle, great time. Struggle, struggle, struggle. We want to see this, you know, nice movement across the board with balanced rates. You know, again, I, I really wish I had the opportunity to, had the opportunity to hit the back button and listen to that whole conversation I heard on CNBC yesterday because there was even a discussion about rates being, you know, below 4% in, in, in the, in the threes again, but higher side of the threes by the end of next year. Now again, this is you, you can argue whatever you want. This was one economist from, I don't think it was Morgan Stanley, but it was, you know, somebody in that, that range and, and, but he was, could not have been more bullish. But I, I think, you know, look at what, you know, having free money again is in, you know, 20, 20, 2021 that came along with the pandemic and things like that. I don't think that's healthy. But I think if we can look at some things where some interest rates get down to a reasonable rate where if you're a small business, you could, whether you need, you know, you're an ice cream shop that needs a new freezer or you're wanting to build, you know, a 500,000 square foot warehouse and you're a distribution company, right the cost of money matters. And I've been super impressed with. You know, I just read yesterday about VP Supply, big H vac and plumbing distributor, electrical distributor in Ohio. One of our great customers and good friends just announced the building of a big new distribution center. You've got companies, like, in the same, same space or related space, with Dakota Supply Group opening multiple branches this year, First Supply in Wisconsin opening another huge distribution center. You know, I don't know any of the financials, any of those companies, but if they went to the, to the bank or the markets to get money for those things, that was expensive money.

Yeah, well, and I, I would be absolutely shocked if there was, quote, unquote, stimulus. Yeah.

But I do not, not quantitative easing in that type of.

But that's even different. Right. So you have quantitative easing where they're, where they're buying bonds and they're doing things like that to try and provide liquidity into the market. But the, the, what we had any whatever at the, at the COVID or during the pandemic. Right. Is basically grants and very low interest loans and all that. But I do believe, though, is probably that, you know, the Trump administration is looking at how do we streamline the SBA and how do we make SBA loans easier to get and things like that, Because, I mean, that can be a real nightmare going through some sba.

You can only get SBA money. I mean, most people, you'll hear, if you talk to most small businesses, what they'll tell you is the only way to get an SBA loan is to not need one.

Right, right.

Right.

Well, and even if you don't, even then there's a lot of hoops to jump through.

Yeah, right.

So anyway, it'll be interesting to see if some of those things can happen is there's, you know, maybe the lower cost of capital. There's some easier ways to get capital as a smaller business or at least with less bureaucracy along the way. I think there's a lot of things, tax cuts, there's a lot of things, I think, that can stimulate. I would just be shocked if there were any sort of, you know, things that were occurring during the COVID period. But.

Well, the, the president elect said in the interview I heard yesterday, he said that the intention would be, I can't remember the time frame, whether it was next year was moving forward quickly, was that the economy would be back to the best economy that this country has ever had and the best in the world. And you know what, it's kind of hard to argue if you look at, you know, the early part of this, you know, recently elected president's previous administration, things were moving pretty well in the economy. And the stock market, you know, the stock market is, has shown itself to not care about any of this stuff.

Right.

The stock market and the bond market have been doing some things that are pretty out of whack to tradition in the, in the past year, as we've been for almost two years, we've been going through some of these challenges. So it'll be, it's, I'm interested to watch things. I think it's going to be good for business.

There's still $7 trillion of investment dollars from consumer and that are seen in cash accounts. So that's a lot of money.

Consumer cash.

Well, yeah, you know, personal. Personal Investment, yeah. Right. $7 trillion of savings accounts and money market accounts and those types of things that is in theory available to be going into the market.

Yeah.

I think what you've seen, and I know this isn't part of what we're talking about, but what we've seen, I think with the, with the melt up on the market over the last, whatever couple months since the election is people being willing to take more risk. And I think that risk willingness is going to continue. And why do is there $7 trillion sitting in, in savings accounts or bank accounts? One, they wanted reduced risk and they had higher rates. You reduce rates and you remove the risk tolerance or you increase the risk tolerance, you have an opportunity for even more money to be flowing into the markets next year. So that anyway, that's something else to.

Keep an eye on. So I hadn't heard that amount from individuals that, you know, can be now going into the markets and so forth that there's similar or larger numbers of dried, as they say, dry powder in the investment world. That's sitting on the sidelines too.

Yeah. Yeah, that's totally different, right? That's right.

Yeah, it's a whole different.

Yeah, we're talking about consumer, we're talking.

About professional money, right?

That's right.

Yeah. So the professional money side of that is, you know, probably closer to $10 trillion that's sitting on the sidelines waiting to come back in the market and guess when that money is going to come back in quickly. Right. When, when there's great returns on that money and they can access other money easily. And so, and anyways, it'll be interesting to watch. How does that, how does that impact wholesale distribution and manufacturing? I think all of a sudden now we look at this, if we, this continues and we can get out of this kind of as, you know, you described it and I like that using the term sticky, right? If we need out of the stickiness and get rates where they need to be or you know, not where they were but manageable rates moving forward that we can have this, this confidence that this, this article that we're talking about here, right is being, you know, three and a half year high from this Reuters article within small businesses. You move that into small and mid sized businesses with that confidence. That's what drives the economy, right? A small and mid sized businesses, you know, the markets might be driven by the, you know, the Fortune 100 companies, but it's the, you know, it's that 100 million, 50 million, 20 million or 300 million dollar, your wholesale distributor, the you know, 125 million dollar manufacturer of a plumbing part or something like that. Those are the things that people don't think about that, that drive the economy. And it's funny having you know, been, been traveling on holiday here for the last week and a half, you know, meeting lots of new people and, and you know, effective. It was great, great example. I was having dinner with my, my wife's stepsister, lives here in Oahu and we're having dinner with her and, and her husband, he's an architect and works with a lot of builders here on the island and, and he works with wholesale distribution constantly as you know, an architect with the home builders and building materials. And it still took him a few minutes to kind of catch up on the idea of how big wholesale distribution really is in, in making the world move. And Nothing, you know, 75 cents out of every dollar goes through distribution and globally and that's a pretty big deal. So these are going to be good things for us to watch. So let's kind of jump ahead. In fact, we, let's, we'll just talk really quickly. We posted an article in the newsletter again if, if you're listening on the podcast on Apple or Spotify or your favorite podcast format and you're not seeing us, we do this show live every Friday morning. And later in the day, John, our producer and editor, puts this out to the podcast world and we're discussing the newsletter that gets published each week and that's called around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing. And so you're not seeing our screen where we have these articles, but we're trying to mention where the articles are titled and where they come from that spurs the discussion that we're having today. So this Next article again, this is from cnbc. It says low hire, low fire. The US Job market is stagnant right now. And so they're talking about, you know, that there's a low rate of layoffs, which is good to see, but the hiring that's going on is slow. And this goes back to this kind of, what did we call it? The majority of 2023 and most of this year I think we just said simmering of things within the economy and we see the same thing within the job market. So you know, there's been overall strength that talks about in the labor market with unemployment is historically low, but now there's people that are, there's this kind of balancing act of, you know, we've seen, we're seeing, you know, Boeing and who is a food company that did 8,000 layoffs I think earlier in the week. But as a balancing act, things are, you know, low hire, low layoff, which is just, you know, simmering in that sense.

Yeah, I, I don't, I think the employment area is something that is, I think employers are confused about. And, and I get it, I totally understand it because even, and I think we have an article coming up later on about, you know, upskilling and what are some skills that it, that, that the new generation of employees need to be thinking about. And it's hard to know, hey, is this a person I should be hiring and is this a person I, that is going to make sense long run in the business and do I really need that role or is that, you know, there's just a lot of I think confusion and ambiguity right now that may end up staying that way for the next few months.

Yeah, we'll have to regardless of the.

Growth of the economy. So. Right.

Right. Good. All right. So last and final kind of article in our economy and supply chain segment today as we about talk talked about an article about and this is from this from a written by, it was interesting though. It was written by a service providing company that I ran across and it talks about tariffs and this is available on spend matters, spend matters.com and they talk about, we haven't really talked about it today but we're just going to see more and more of it because we're going to see more and more of the announcements over the next few weeks that are coming available about what these tariffs are really going to be like. And so this is, they call it part one, but what, what tariffs are and what they mean for procurement. So I thought this was kind of good for our audience of Wholesale distribution, manufacturing, because we get a whole lot of people that are on the revenue side of the business. The customers that we service through LeadSmart we work with consistently. But we also have a lot of folks that are on the supply chain side as well. And so this was a nice thing to kind of give us the. Just saw Bob's note. Bob asked me what island I'm on. Bob, I was on Kauai all last week and I'm on the North Shore of Oahu right now. So this article I thought gave a nice kind of breakdown because, you know, tariffs as we are obviously were a big factor within the election. And it's, there's all this kind of doom, gloom that's going on with that as well from one side of the aisle, so to speak, as with related to tariffs. And, and you know, this, I, I think I was thinking about this earlier. Tom, I'll say this now. You know, you're the one who brought this into our conversation, so we'll give you a little bit of credit for this. But it was, you know, the, the Silicon Valley investor and, and Peter Thiel who said this about the new administration and the president elect and he said, what was his exact words?

He said, take him, take him seriously.

Take him seriously, but not literally. And what we're seeing already is this, you know, this thing of, I, I didn't pay much attention to it earlier in the week, but I know there's some more discussion with Canada. But you know, he talked about some big, big tariffs on Canada and Mexico related to border issues. And you know, the next day the president or the, the prime minister of Canada was on a, on a plane to, to Florida to talk with the president about this stuff and finding some balance in there was capitulation on things that were of benefit to, to this country. So good article here about, you know, not just, you know, the different, it talks a lot about the difference between import tariffs and export tariffs. And, and, and then what I really was appreciative about this article. I don't know if you read it closely or not or what your thoughts were, but it gave some good pros and cons about that. Did you look at that at all?

Yeah, no, it did pros and cons and it talked about two different types of tariff. Import, export, import tariffs, export tariffs. That was a good, a good primer.

Yeah, good, good, good overall recap. But I think sometimes we, what I like about these things is, you know, even in my advanced stages of my career, I'll call it, you know, you hear terms or you think about economic factors or whatever, and constantly learning as well about, you know, the depth of things versus versus an overview that we might have. So this is good. You know, talked about that. I'll hit this quickly because we need to move on, obviously. But you talked about, you know, pros being protecting domestic industries, generating government revenue. And I think that's probably a fairly significant part of it that people don't think about a lot is the revenue that can come out of increased tariffs to fund other things within the organization or the economy. And when you start talking about what the discussion is with the incoming administration of wanting to reduce a lot of government waste and government departments, we have this Department of Government Efficiency. Of government efficiency coming in for what are we going to have at 18 months, you know, so there could be tons and tons of cuts there that are cost savings. Right. And then if you see some balancing with some tariffs that are driving dollars in into the government as well, it goes back to what you were mentioning earlier about, you know, investment opportunity. Maybe the SBA has more money to put out there to pump into the, the economy. So I think this was pretty good. Now that, you know, talks about encouraging local production and things like that. But, you know, the risk is obviously a push of increased consumer prices coming out of that. And then the trade war, the retaliation thing, we saw a little bit of that earlier this week and last week from China about the minerals and stuff that they were looking at stopping the export of. So it's going to be a good thing to watch pretty closely. But I might. My gut says what we're going to find is, again, back to that, you know, take them seriously, but not literally is we're going to see some extravagant things that are going to get talked about. But the reality of what we're going to see is some balanced tariffs that help drive things here. So, so this is interesting once you hit Bob's comment there, the. Yep, it's interesting paradox discussing tariffs prevents tariffs. So, yeah, when you. Well, when you carry the big. When you carry the big stick.

Right.

That's, that's the key of that.

Good.

All right, Tom, why don't we, why don't we cruise ahead into our next segment? You just have an article there this week about me. We have our next segment about manufacturing and distribution. In that segment that we talk about each week, there's an article there from Supply House Times, and it talks about distributors are doing more than ever to build contractor relationships. And, you know, there's a lot of reasons behind that, I wanted to see if you had any takes on that article before I jump in.

I have some takes just. And not so much directly from the article, but just from some things I'm seeing and working with our customers. Some of the things we've been running some analysis on using AI is analyzing and this I think ties directly to this is the frequency of when say an outside salesperson or a salesperson works with a, with their customer and the types of things that they're doing with the customer. Right. So the, the types of activity and the frequency of activity. And then we've been running some analytics and reports on that to see trends and tying that back to revenue and revenue growth with different customers. And clearly we're seeing a, it is the two things together. It's the, it's the what are we doing and how frequent am I doing it? And those things together we're seeing some direct correlation even between different types of customers on revenue growth, which we'll be sharing more of later. The point being is, as it says in this article here, right, Competition is stiffer than ever for buying opportunities. So how do you differentiate yourself when you're building and how do you build those tighter relationships that you build that loyalty and retention?

So, and it's not always doesn't need to be driven by price.

Right.

It can be driven by service levels and relationships and things like that. And I think where we're at moving forward is, you know, the, the folks and saw some pretty bold comments and coming to me where I read this earlier in the week but you know, was the CEO of a major organization, he was really talking literally bold statements about companies that would be going out of business because of not taking full advantage of the opportunities that are available to them with technology and specifically AI in that setting. But you know, I've said this from as long as we've been doing this show, right. I don't believe that technology will put the vast majority of people that don't adopt great technology and graded added service levels and so forth out of business. But it will take a major competitive impact that they have away because they don't won't understand their customers like you know, going, going, you know, on the Tuesday donut runs or, or you know, Thursday bagels or whatever it might be. And I see this guy every week is not what his, his replacement is going to be wanting. And so the people that are adopting technology in this article is great. It talks about, you know, some of the folks at Eastern Industrial and South Carolina folks we know well and good. Great folks there. And then again, folks at Dakota Supply Group, I think we've got a few of our friends, Joe, I think, and Paul might be with us, maybe even Stefan from DSG that are with us regularly. There's a big, big chunk of folks from DSG that are with us regularly. They're talking about some of the things that they're doing and in anticipating customer expectations. You know, back to that thing we talk about all the time. Right. But Bill, Wayne Gretzky comment about skating to where the puck is going, you know, not where it's at. And these are, this is a great article again, this is from Supply House Times and it's called Distributors are Doing More Than Ever to Build Loyal Contractor Relationships. And that is not necessarily something that gets driven on prices we were talking about. So good article. No good. Want to dive ahead?

Let's go ahead.

Where are we headed? E Commerce and marketing.

Well, I think this is sort of related, right. B2B buyer satisfaction is on the rise. I, I think this is more from looking at the world of online platforms. Yep.

Correct.

And a lot of the younger buyers in particular just feel like there's a lot of friction and just a lot of frustration in a lot of cases with online B2B platforms. Not, not surprising, I guess. But, and I think to be in defense of, of B2B platforms, right. It's, it's, you can't just emulate Amazon with one click buys and things like that on a B2B platform than the way you could on a consumer platform. So I think there is definitely more challenges on that. But clearly there's some, some, you know, dissatisfaction for this article.

Yep. Well, I listen, it would be easy to kind of beat a dead horse, but if you're, if you haven't listened to us, I don't think I've mentioned this in a few weeks. But you know, the reality of what we're seeing here is just more and more of, and I just saw some updated statistics on this. We've been, I've been mentioning, you've mentioned before many times is, you know, it was 61% and I think now it's or 62% and now it's 71% of B2B buyers are millennials. Right. And the Gen Z's are getting hired behind them. And the baby boomers, you know, folks like us are the people that are getting ready to retire, you know, people our age. And so if you're still getting in your truck and, and drive into this plant or that job site or whatever on a certain amount of times a week or whatever it might be. And your company isn't embracing E commerce, whether it's just data sources that are available online or it's online ordering or building or whatever it might be, it's going to be tough to be able to compete with the people that are driving business now, and they're younger. And I always use the example if, if you've been calling on Judy for the last 20 years, but Judy's getting ready to retire and the person that's, you know, heir apparent to Judy's job, you know, went to the movies last night and ordered their tickets online and, or on their phone and they got an Uber to bring him and they had lunch delivered with, you know, door dash. That's not a great solution if you're the guy that's still just bringing donuts on on Mondays. Yep. So it'll be an interesting time to see. By the way, Tom, before we move past this, there's, we've got a couple of articles today. This one is entitled B2B. Buyer dissatisfaction is on the rise. It's from Digital Commerce 360, but it's written by a fascinating gentleman by the name of Mark Brohan. I had lunch with Mark in Chicago in October, and Mark will be our guest next Friday. So he will be with us on the show. So that's all locked in. I heard from him yesterday, so it's kind of excited about that. But if you get a chance to look at this article, it said, now it's saying, this article actually even says, I just pulled one of the charts up. It says dissatisfaction. It said it's highest among younger buyers is 87% of millennial and Gen Z buyers born in 1981 or later report dissatisfaction in at least one area. Do we have that chart by chance?

I do not.

Okay. And I have to have a doctor pay on that. So dissatisfaction. Price was the big one. But what the another thing they were talking about the third most important factor of their dissatisfaction. Second was industry expertise. Third most important was technology expertise. Right. And I think that just right there tells you a whole lot. And then they talked about ability to handle end to end project from strategy implementation, domain expertise. And so you know what? This, this is almost like an ad for Lead Smart Channel Cloud, our technology.

Right.

Because all of these things, if you take price out of it with our solution and the AI solutions that you and your team have built, it handles all of these things.

Right.

From a standpoint of at least having the data and understanding of those things. Things. So thanks for bringing that chart up. It's appreciated. I think that's really helpful.

So all of these items below price.

Right.

Result in our. In order for those things to be achieved require knowledge of the customer knowledge, you know, the sales people and the. And the customer facing people having knowledge of their own business and knowledge of their customer and then knowledge of the strategies and the things that are going to benefit in that relationship. Right. Those are all things that are that have nothing to do with delivering donuts and it has nothing to do with delivering price.

Yeah, good. Great point. So the follow up article to this is also from Digital Commerce360 Improve the B2B buyer experience by creating customer centric strategies. I don't think we need to dive deep into those strategies but if you're thinking about that.

Right.

And you just. And today's a good example of this kind of merging some articles together and talking more on a topic than particular article. But these are both again from Digital Commerce360. I don't know if Mark wrote both of them but good articles. And this goes in second article goes into developing some customer centric experiences and I think it ties right back to the article two articles ago that we talked about about distributors doing more than ever to build contractor relationships. Right. And so you. You think about the in person relationship and the online relationship. Those two things need to come together as a brand relationship. Right. As and if you're doing this right and this is one of the struggles that wholesale distributors have had forever and it's much more on the distributor side than it is on the manufacturer side is that they're in the position where they've got their self in a spot where the relationship is owned by Joe or Susie. That's the field salesperson. And they forever. I've described this to from way back when I was a manufacturer's rep working and doing some even some sales training with distributors and then other parts of my career since then. Certainly what we do now is the salesperson should be the quarterback of the relationship that the organization has. So in a perfect world XYZ Supply as a distributor should have a key relationship with ABC Manufacturing or XYZ Construction or plumbing their customer. But the salesperson is role is the quarterback not to fully own all of the relationship. And I think there's two parts of that. Probably the most important part of it is if you have an individual that is driving a relationship versus an organization having the relationship then that person leaves or gets hit by A bus. Which is. Yeah, we were on the call together last week with, with one of our customers and that was one of his big concerns. It wasn't something I necessarily agreed with. One of his biggest concerns was, you know, how do I keep my salespeople from taking all this data and running. Running out there? Well, I think that for myself is the, is the wrong mindset. My mindset on that is how do I build an organization that no one would ever want to leave. But. But the other side of that is. So that's first is, you know, salesperson has the, the. We'll call it the intellectual property of what's going on with the customer is the critical, critical piece of that. Of understanding that. What's going on with that. So anyways, I digress a little bit on that. But I think it's important as we're working on those, those strategies in that setting that we can really be clear and, and definitive on. One, the organization owning the relationship. And what the second piece. I'm sorry, that's what I didn't mention Tom was the second piece of that was that when the organization has the relationship sometimes salespeople get myopic. And it's like I call on Tom but I miss the fact that Tom has three other counterpart buyers in the organization. But because Tom's the guy that I take to football games on Saturdays or Tom's the guy that I've known forever, I miss all of these other opportunities within the organization. So me as a wholesale distributor and I can drive my relationship across an entire organization versus just a buyer. So the CEO of that 300 person construction company understands the value proposition and me as a building material distributor to them now I win because my relationship is across an organization.

Organization.

So anyways, those are my. That's my pontificating on that topic for the day.

So where do we want to go next?

I what do we have there? What Salespeople gain from B2B E commerce and customer portals. That's you know we. Let's not spend. It's what we just covered.

That's. Sorry, that's just the one we just covered.

No, we just talked about experience as well. And then the second one, the next one there as well though is also from Digital Commerce360 and really the whole section that we're in today is really beneficial to the value and this is E commerce and marketing. But the value that balancing having a balanced look at E commerce and field sales and inside sales is the organization of the future. Cause this one talks about the next article is about what Salespeople gain from B2B E commerce and customer portals. Because in part of what this is talking about is that it's very easy for field salespeople, especially, you know, older one. Excuse me, older ones who have been around forever is the idea that they're in a position of wait a minute. If my customer is buying online, I might not be managing and controlling the relationship like I had. And as well as then being worried about do I get compensated the same way? Or worrying about, yeah, maybe they're paying me the same way, but are they always going to pay me the same way? So there's. This is a good article and it's, it leads right into the next one, which is from sales and marketingmanagement.com which talks about three ways Gen AI shapes and empowers B2B enterprise sales and marketing. And I thought that ties this kind of put the. I tried to lay these articles out for us this week in a way that we kind of drew them all together. And this one kind of puts a bow around that one, which I like. Did you look at this too close? Very closely?

Yeah, I did. I did.

Any thoughts on it?

I thought it was fine, but I thought it was missing something very important. Oh good.

Let's. Let's catch, let's catch the ones that they talked about. Why don't you hit those, why don't.

You hit those first and then I can talk about the one that's missing.

Okay, let me see. I've got this up on the screen here. 1. Gen AI brings structure to unruly data sets. This is referencing an Oracle study that says 78% of business leaders often make decisions and then look for the data to justify their decisions.

Yeah, it's awesome.

You see that all the time, right?

Sure.

Then it moves on to say number two is gen unlocks experimentation at scale, which is pretty cool, right? Because now we can start plugging in, thinking about digital twins and so forth in that setting and we can look at scenarios and experiment with what could be going on in the business. And then number three, gen supports but doesn't replace human creativity. And it talks about, you know, using Dall E and other tools for, for graphics and so forth with AI. But you still have to start off with an idea I think was the point behind that one. So it says, and it kind of wraps up with Jenny, I require sales and marketing teams to pivot in understanding how to use them and benefit from them. So anyways, those were the three point structure to unruly data sets unlocks experimentation at scale and expands and supports and helps human creativity. So what were we missing with that?

Well, it was actually part of number one, if, number one, what they were talking about data sets, they were focused on unstructured data, if you noticed in there. And I think it's a big miss. I know it's a big myth. It's not a thing. I know it's a big miss. To be thinking about your data as it relates to AI is only the unstructured data, meaning all of the stuff is in documents and things like that.

PDF, spec sheets, that type of stuff.

Right. What I'm. What we're seeing is maybe even more valuable is the structured data that you have in the organization, which is the data that you can put into a spreadsheet. Right. It comes from a ERP system or a CRM or different things like that where you have all the structured data. And if you can combine the structured data in AI with the unstructured data, truly one plus one is five in that situation. And I think it's really being overlooked. I think it's even being overlooked by some of the AI. Overlooked. Maybe too strong a word, not given enough. Enough importance at this point in time. And I do believe that's going to be a key key. I guess I believe I'm proving it. We're proving it every day.

You see it every day. Right.

The key thing to really being able to have that knowledge and understanding and all the things that we just talked about. So anyway, good. But in that I thought it was fine. It just. I thought they'd missed the boat a little bit on not talking about some of the ability to leverage structured data as well as unstructured data.

So what they really missed was that they didn't ask you to edit the article.

That's probably true. Or even have me write the article. So. But you know.

Okay. All right. I've got a list of articles. If you're right. Whenever you're ready. I got a list of articles I'd like you to write. So.

Hey. Well, you know, OpenAI just released a chat. GPT just released a great product yesterday for accelerating writing of articles and building things and stuff like that. So.

Talk about that real quick. I didn't see that. I must have missed it.

Yeah, they have the 12 days of. 12 days of Christmas or something where they're releasing new. A new feature every. Every day for 12 days. I think they're on day six today or seven, I'm not sure. And Yesterday they released what they're calling canvas, where you could bring up a document. Let's say you're building an article, but right there on the screen, you can interact with it and ask it questions or ask the AI questions to help refine what you're doing right there in the article and what you're building. So it's not like you just ask the AI to build an article and it spits something out and then you have to go edit it and figure it out. You can collaboratively go back and forth and build content through there. Really I've used it a couple times now. It's really, really a time saver. And it, I think why no, it provides more quality content because you're not just producing something, going to AI produce something and doing a few edits to it, you're collaborating with it.

So anyway, I'll log in and check that out later and get some others on our team looking at that. I also saw earlier in the week that they expanded out and launched more with. Got a nice little note there from Rodney Williams. Thanks for the compliment about today's show. Appreciate that. And the sora, the, the what do you call, image making tool, they've expanded that out. Although I went, I saw it the day after the announcement, I went to try and log in and use it. And that's video.

It's text. Video, yeah, text to video.

Right. I've got to wait my turn to get logged.

They're not letting anybody in, so.

But it made it sound like they had let a lot of people in, but they were kind of hit their, hit their max. So I guess I'm in line now. Yeah, you and me both good.

They also, they also released some really good multi, multimodal stuff yesterday or the day before. So it's worth checking out.

Before we jump on with that though. Tom, let's, let's describe multimodal and what multimodal is in the AI world.

Well, basically the ability. You know, right now most AI, right, you think of, you sit down in a chat bot or you put in text. What they released is the ability and it's not available yet to everybody. So I hope it's not one of those things where they release and then it comes out six months later. But.

Haha.

Just kidding, just kidding. But basically what they were showing is you can take a video, you turn on your video camera and it, you know, maybe you're filming, you're working on something or they were showing making coffee, but they were. So you're videoing what you're doing, you're having a conversation with the AI. The AI is watching what you're doing and using that to help facilitate the conversation. Well, think about that for business. I mean, we did an example of this recently of taking like a photo of a job site and putting that into AI to help provide like a quote, building a quote based off a photo or. But now think of a video, going to a video at a job site, having a conversation with what it's seen and then using that to drive, you know, building the quotes or proposals or all of those things that are there. The problem is not the problem. The. Some of these things aren't. All these pieces are not quite tying together yet. But you can.

Well, it's not fully baked, right?

Well, it's baked, but there's just a lot of pieces that have to come together to make it really work well for business. Yeah, but there's, you know, anyway, I didn't realize this. They have a full team at OpenAI that is focused on multimodal, which is how do, how does AI work with visual, audio, sound, all of those things. And then Google released Gemini 2.0, which I haven't had a chance to look at. So a lot happened this week.

I'll wait for your text message on Sunday afternoon after you've played with it over the weekend.

Yeah, very good. It's all about agents, supposedly.

Okay, well, let's dive in as we. We've already kind of eased into that already. Our next segment in section is technology, cyber security and AI. And so the. We had, earlier in the year we had a presidential director. What do they call that? Presidential order about the regulations and management of AI. And it was to me that seemed like a little bit of a grasping at straws based upon trying to keep up with the fact that the EU was putting such hard regulations in that says we'll at least throw something up there. But now there's I guess pretty solid rumors that David Sachs, who was one of the founders of PayPal, who went on to then found yammer that was sold to Microsoft. Right. That and that he is going to be involved in the, in artificial intelligence policy for the government. So this looks like we're going to start seeing not, not barriers but incentives and innovation that's being promoted and really a prompt and not just behind AI, but behind crypto as well. And you know, we've talked about this. I think we talked about a little bit last week about the blockchain and so forth. And man, I would, I would be excited right now if we see this time that we're coming into over the next few years where we're seeing AI Crypto and the blockchain all kind of coming together in, in a one. What are you laughing at there, Tom?

I just saw a comment that Bob saying they're closing the barn doors after the horse has already escaped the.

But anyways, getting to this place where AI Blockchain crypto are not, I guess they're just part of our daily life and they're used for what they could be maximized for. And I think we have a mindset of some of the people that are going to be allowed apparently. Let's just say right now it appears that there is going to be a strong influence of some people from the technology world that can help the government understand the value again. And we have listeners. I saw some stats we're going to talk about next week. Our stats from the year on some of the stats from the podcast. But typical week where we're downloaded and 25 plus countries, five countries over the course of the year. 55 countries. Yeah, but I, I typically look every week and on average we're downloaded in 20 plus 20, 25 countries. So as I talk about things today here in the U.S. from that standpoint is really looking at. From a standpoint that says I think we have a, a ton of benefits that could come from obviously AI the blockchain and crypto. Now we don't know enough about the average person, the average politician, the average business person doesn't understand enough of how those things could come together and be a benefit. So there are these fuzzy things out there that nobody wants to really address. And I think what we're going to see from some of the people that are going to be associated with this administration is I think we are going to see a lot more of that coming together in ways that we can understand. Understand it much better. So.

Yeah, well, I mean I've listened, you have to, I think to a fair amount of David Sachs in his, his viewpoints on things. I think his viewpoint is very similar to what I've said a year ago or two years ago is let's let the market sort it out a little bit before we start. So I think pretty much right away that executive order, which was worthless anyway, is going to be thrown away and it's just going to be taken out. And I think that it'll. I think and dav David Sachs is not against regulation.

No.

Right. In fact, he's actually been a bit more. If you look at, you know, some of the business type people that are out there. He's been a bit more in favor of at least having some form of regulation on things.

Yeah.

What I do think though is that the regulation or the guidelines or whatever that ends up getting created will be much more oriented and aligned to real business and to the evolution that we're going through. Right. So that we're not building something that's out of date two minutes after it's. It's published. On the crypto front, I got, I have so much to talk about on that. I just. We don't have time. Okay. The crypto front is. Got so many different tentacles coming out of it that could have significant impact to a lot of different things. I think the risk for, you know, nefarious actors and issues actually short term may be a much bigger situation with some of the things on crypto and digital currencies.

Okay.

Yeah, like I said, I could, we could talk 45 minutes about this alone.

So I have that today.

Yeah, we don't have that. But I do think nonetheless, I guess going back to this article is that I think we're going to see much more business centric guidelines and policies versus arbitrary bureaucratic regulations that may or may not make sense for, for actual business and application. So that's good.

Well, Tom, let's kind of push our way ahead here. The next article that we talk about here in the newsletter is bullish AI spenders report higher ROI rates. So this is from CFO dive.com CFO Dive said 97% of businesses investing in AI are seeing ROI with higher returns for those allocating 5% or more of their budgets according to recent surveys.

Survey.

So I, I didn't go in and look at, you know, sometimes, you know, we say according to the survey. Well, what was the survey? How many companies? What type of companies? But I think the core of this in the, at the end of the day, the thing to be thinking about is am I allocating? Not just, am I not just thinking and talking about artificial intelligence and how it can help and support my business, but do I have a budget for it? Do I have people associated with it? Do I have a process or within my organization about how we're going to be working with artificial intelligence moving forward? Because the people that, frankly in this, this is just fact at this stage, right. The people that want to hide from that. I talked recently at an event to a large wholesale distributor with 10 plus locations and a. So I don't want to say a large business That's a long time business. Close to 100 year old company. They have made a decision in their organization that they want none of their systems in their organization connected to the Internet.

Nothing.

Nothing. No, nothing. Nothing will be connected. They don't. They've developed an internal. Basically they're using the old servers, they've got Excel, but nothing is connected to the Internet.

And because they're concerned about security.

Okay. Yeah. And sure, just shared with really nice guys we were talking with but the ownership was, that's their opinion and what they're looking for. I shared with them some, some white papers and some documentations that our company at Lead Smart that we published and, and kind of like the idea. But the owners, that's their view is the safety issue that has translated to the CEO and then you've got a VP of sales who's banging his head against the wall because he needs these tools. So you know, anyways, I don't want to beat up on anybody too much like that, but this is. Hey, the people that are bullish spenders are seeing ROI and on that and it's probably not big or significant yet that, because I think people, I think we're a little bit earlier in AI right now to really probably document things as well as we're going to be able to over the next couple of years. But my, my view of things as any organization is you need to have a group of people that are responsible for it across disciplines in your organization, need to have allocated some budgets and you need to have a plan of what you want to do in your business. And saying that I bought a marketing automation tool that has AI does not say I have an AI plan or because your ERP system has now released some things that, that said the.

We.

Have now have some AI capacity within our tool does not mean you have an AI plan. Because you buy our AI enabled smart CRM solution does not mean you have an AI plan in your organization. I think there's a lot of that that's important. Important.

Yeah, I, I just. My only comment on this is if you're going, if you're a business and you're going and you think you're going to be serious about AI, don't just dabble. Now is the time to lean in to a plan and a strategy. If you don't think AI is going to value your business or whatever the case may be, then that's your decision and, and that's fine. But I think if you do believe that, that the capabilities and the things that it can bring to the table. You really need to lean into it and, and not just dabble or learn about it and spend a lot of time learning about it and then don't do anything with it. Well, I think this year it needs.

To be, it needs to be an initiative in your organization that has people involved in it and that has budget. Right. And those are the places. Well, let me rephrase that. The absolute best place you can start. If you're new to this, it's simple. Subscribe to the around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution Newsletter. Join us On Fridays you'll get your, your, your, your beak wet, so to speak, your toes in the water and then build your, build your plan around your organization. It's on before we jump ahead and we've got a lot to cover so we're going to kind of move forward fairly quickly here in a moment as we get ready to move into our sales at M and A. Rodney Williams asked a comment a few minutes ago and he said are we currently using Co Pilot Agents or Google Notebook lm, which is pretty, pretty darn cool. I've not been doing anything really myself with Co Pilot yet. Have you been playing with it?

Not, not a lot, no.

Yeah, but we have both played with Google's Notebook LLM and I don't think we're going to start it this week. But Lily, that when John's done editing the podcast and so forth, Lily's using some tools and, and Tom, you introduced me to Google's new Notebook LM and what we're going to be doing, Rodney, and answer your question related to that is, you know, we have our hour, hour and 15 minute a week podcast right then on YouTube is the entire recording. And then we have some shorts that show up on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and YouTube as well. Some short segments from the week. But Lily's been doing some testing with Notebook LM from Google where we're going to start using that and it's probably might even be the first of the year before we finalize it. But there's going to be a weekly roughly 8 to 10 minute recap of this podcast that's done by Google Notebook. And what that does is to Rodney's comment and is you can put text in, you can put URLs in from YouTube MP4s, things like that in where it will analyze those and recap them. The way we're using it for the podcast will be two people talking where they're going to have listened to the podcast recording and they're going to recap that down. So for people who, you know, might normally like to listen to our entire entire show each week but don't have time they could find on Ideally it's going to be on the LinkedIn page for the around the Horn podcast where you'll just be able to hear a recap that that Google Notebook language model really the Google Notebook tool will be using. So we're testing that right now. Rodney. So great question. Appreciate that and appreciate you being with us. So Tom, sales and M and A segment we're going to next Winning in the B2B world takes B2C strategies from businessreporter.com Any thoughts on that one?

You know, I think we've hit on some of these things already in the interest of time. A decent article. I thought it was a decent article. Definitely worth taking a look at, but I think maybe we should move ahead.

Well, just just kind of real quickly talks about B2B business cycles or just too long. It says it fails to meet the changing needs and expectations of customers, especially within the technology industry. But the the crux of this is coming back to saying and we talk about it here regularly as a gray area, right? Our that millennial buyer and the Gen Z's that are coming in, they're living in what we refer to regularly here as a gray area that they they're expecting to starting expecting to see B2C type buying experiences in a B2B world. And so to try and continue, I think it ties into so much of what we talked about to your point earlier today already is if you're trying, if your mindset is status quo, we've always done it this way. My grandfather started the business or whatever it might be. Or I I'm taking over a PE run company and as long as I grow by 9.7% year over year, EBITDA growth or whatever it might be, everything's good. If that's your mindset, there's a lot of trouble because your customer thinks about your business differently. And if you're not thinking about your business differently, your customer is thinking about your business differently.

And this is, you know, short long story short, they're saying get rid of the friction, right? Make it easy to do business.

Great. Great recap.

Yep.

Good.

That's good.

Okay, so the other article there that we posted in the Sales and M and A section is about M and A a nice article that the folks at Industrial Distribution had a nice interview with Middle Ground Capital, which is private equity firm that invests in middle market B2B companies, mostly wholesale distribution. Nice. Kind of talking about their view of what's going on now in M A types of companies that they're looking at the things that they're seeing. So I appreciated that article. Good. Okay. Want to roll into people in leadership.

Yeah. Well, I guess we touched on this first one here.

Yeah.

Workers fear. Workers fear their skills will be obsolete within the decade. Right. And what does it say? Encouragingly, 44 believe upskilling is their own responsibility, signaling a focus on self improvement. Half of us respondents cite technology as a key driver for upskilling. Hey, look, I couldn't agree with that more. I. It's, it's just funny. It's like I look at how I do my job every day is com. I won't say completely. Significantly different than it was a year ago.

Okay.

About how I go about doing things, how I incorporate AI into the things that I do and how I do it, how I look at it. It's like. And so I think this upskilling is a lot of it is mindset, understanding how you want to go about your job, how you want to be efficient in your job. It's not just learning the nuts and bolts of technology at the same time.

Right.

And I think that's going to be a key thing because think about it as an employer, right. Do you want to have somebody who comes in and is like, hey, I'm leaning into the new world of how we do things and here's how I'm doing it, or do you want somebody who's like, I don't know, just tell me what to do? Right. It's, it's, it's. I think it's going to really differentiate the candidates, especially in a tough hiring market. Good.

Well, this really. Let's just kind of do a recap on our People in Leadership segment. And I referenced when we started our discussion today that this is the segment that we was influenced in our 2023 recap and looking forward to 2024. But last January that our friend Dirk Beveridge helped us with, he said, hey, you guys don't talk enough about people. So the next week we added our People in Leadership segment and we've got Dirk and, and Mike Marks and Ian Heller coming back. As I mentioned at the start of today's show, for those of you might be coming in late January 17th, we'll have that team back together and we're going to look at last year and, or this year and looking into 2025. So that'll be great. So three key components of our People in Leadership segment this week. One article from Fast Company, two from HR Dive workers feel their skills will be obsolete within the decade. Nearly half of managers say their companies don't develop leaders or doesn't develop leaders. That's an article from. From an HR drive there. And that upskilling of the future workforce to unlock the potential of AI Bringing this all around into a nutshell is if you're an organization that wants to thrive moving forward, you have got to be working on that AI strategy we were talking about earlier. But thinking and being focused on how does that AI strategy impact the people that work for me and the people that I want to hire. So I need to be upskilling my people, not expecting them to do it on their own. But looking at how we as an organization are doing this for our people, to develop our people and grow our people, and that we've got a program for that internally. And as a worker, it then becomes. Or as an employee, it becomes my responsibility to look and say, what am I taking advantage of what my organization does for me? And then as we blend in the AI tools, we're going to. No matter how we slice it right tomorrow, we are going to have employees whose jobs will not be the same because of AI. I listened to a podcast. I know you listened to it earlier this week. It was with Mark Benioff, the founder of Salesforce. They have 70,000 employees, and I think he said within the next two years, they'll probably have 70,000 employees still. Some of them might have changed, but many of them will have a different role or an augmented role. And we need to be. Have a mindset as individuals. And I'm prepared to experience that. That and an organization is prepared to train people to do that and support them in those changes that are going to happen. Because if you don't want to be negatively impacted by artificial intelligence in your workplace, then you need to be a person that is prepared to understand how you can use AI in your job to grow. So I'm done pontificating on that.

Yeah, you're on a pontificating role today, man. I guess you're having too much fresh air.

Let me out of the office a little bit here and there. And you never know what I might come up with. Right. So.

All right, let's through and wrap up here.

Yeah. Well, then we have our industry scuttlebutt section each week that we cover as well. This talks about a handful of acquisitions, really three of them there we don't need to go into those. That's, that's fine. Let's catch our last article that we have. Each week we cover what we call a good read. And that's down there at the bottom. How to Grow, Break habits and Redefine leadership for success. I could go in and continue to pontificate on that. I won't. But that article ties very well into everything else that we were just talking about. So where I was pontificating, how's that?

Yeah. So I think to summarize on all of this, look, I know there's skepticism about AI I know people are tired of hearing about it. I know people think that, oh my God, we're in the trough of disillusionment and all of those things. Right? I, I understand all of those things, but I just know from firsthand, I just look at myself and I look at the people that we're working with. How radical, if used properly and used with. If you look at the world through people, process and technology.

Right.

Those three things together, if you're looking at your strategy through that perspective, is the, the impact that it can have positively. And then you combine that with some of the things we talked about earlier, economically and macroeconomically and all of that, it's quite, quite remarkable. And there are, and there are going to be winners and there are going to be losers. And you said earlier on, I don't think people are going to go out of business or whatever. I don't know, maybe not in distribution, but there will be in other industries for sure.

So I, well, I mean, I think the reality of it is, is if, let's just use distribution.

Right.

And, and I would think if, as we talk to our audience about distributors and manufacturers, I think where you would more likely see somebody closing down would be at the manufacturing side if they can't keep up. Because if they can't support their distributors, their distributors are going to move over this way. I think what you may end up seeing, and I felt strongly about this for a long time, you might find that you've got a five location distribution company that is in three or four years from now, maybe five to seven years from now, that if you're not embracing not just AI, but technology and general to understand and serve your customer better, you might have a single branch with a fraction of the number of people and a fraction of your revenues. Sure, maybe, maybe you're not, maybe you're still in business, but your business looks nothing like it used to.

And, and you look at, you know, and Obviously you probably talk to more people than I do and some people, like you said, are not.

And sometimes I just talk.

Yeah, the, yeah, that's okay. But the majority of the people we talk to are all talking about hey, how do I grow 15 a year? How do I double my business in five years? My goal is to double our business in five years. Well, if you're talking like that, then in my opinion, you have no choice but to start making this transaction.

Well then to add to what you're saying, I think that's a great point. Right. And you have to decide, let's just say hey, we have a lot of customers and a number of prospects that we talk to in our business is that are, are at that point. And these are, you know, really nine, nine digit companies. Right. From a revenue standpoint and or nine figure companies that want to double over five years. Right. Well when you start looking at that to your point is if you've got three companies in a marketplace, let's just say, you know, California, where you're at today, you got three companies that are all competing in the industrial bearing and power transmission market that all want to triple in growth. The people that are accelerating that through technology are the ones who are going to get there the fastest. Right. And if one gets there, how does the other one get there? Because if you've got two or three people wanting to do the same thing and there's a finite amount of resources that are out there to compete with, well, somebody's not going to win in that setting or not at the level that they had expected.

Yep.

So good. Hey, great show today. Nice job.

Yeah, well enjoy the rest.

Can I just stay here and do next week's from, from here as well? You, you handle all the meetings we've got in Orange county next week?

Yeah, that's fine. Whatever you need to do, I'm here.

We've got a couple of evenings out that if I'm not there, the wine will probably be, the bill will be cheaper if I'm not there because of the wines I might order.

That is true. That is true.

So I'll be back. I'll flying home from Oahu on, on Monday, be charging hard. I've got a bunch of stuff downloaded that I'm going to be working on on the flight. So get ready when I hit send when I get home. So that'll be the good, the good part. So anyways, I will we thank everybody that's with us. We'll I'll kind of recap and close down I'm again, I'm Kevin Brown. I'm here with my lifelong friend, Tom Burton. We can do this, try and do this every Friday. The phrase that we use internally is if no one's on an airplane in the hospital or a planned vacation. But we're happy to do that today while I'm on a planned vacation. We decided to still have a show because we only have one more show this year after this week and we're in a great spot. Bob just asked me a question. Bob, I'll send you a LinkedIn note to tell you exactly where I'm at later. Yeah, it's asking me where I'm at. But, but I'm right near Waimea Bay across the street right now. But as we do this each week, right, we try and pull these, this information together. We, we work together, Tom and I, closely to try and help the audience that we serve within our company, Lead Smart Technologies. Again, Lead Smart is a AI enabled smart CRM and customer intelligence platform that works very different than all of the other CRM platforms that you might be used to seeing in our market and outside of our market. But our goal is to get an audience together like we had today with great comments from people all over and, and share thoughts and ideas. And we do that through our newsletter, the around the Horn and Wholesale Distribution Manufacturing newsletter. And wrapping up today with that is if you don't get that for we'll recap it again is you can send us an email@helloadsmartech.com and we'll get that out to you right away. Probably what's growing the fastest is right now is if you just go to LinkedIn and you search for around the Horn podcast or you go to the Lead Smart Technologies page, hit the follow button on the Lead Smart page. But then there's a sub page, it's called a Spotlight page there for the podcast and you can subscribe so that you'll get the newsletter will come to your LinkedIn feed and the newsletter will be emailed to you from LinkedIn as opposed to the 10,000 plus people that get it from us. You can certainly do that. And then if you are listening live and you would like to go back and see some of the charts and sorry, if you're listening on the podcast and want to see some of the charts or graphs that we talked about, then you can catch the, the recorded show on LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live or Facebook Live by going to the Lead Smart Technologies page there. If you have thoughts or ideas about how we might do better at this or guest suggestions and things like that that might be helpful. We would love you to reach out to us if you're not connected with us on LinkedIn, please again, reach out to Tom and I. Be part of our network where we like to share a lot of information and data and the benefit that you could do for us if you like what you hear. The return that you could give us by the return favor is hit the subscribe and the share and tell your friends about what we do and that will just increase our audience and allow us to do more and get more feedback and ideas. So that is it for me. As we say here in Hawaii, when something's ending, we say, pow, we're done. And we'll wish everybody a great weekend. And Tom, I will see you on Tuesday in person and I'll look forward to that.

All right, sounds good. Thanks everyone. Have a good weekend.

Aloha.

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