Nothing to say, yet
Transcription
The transcription is a conversation between two people discussing the launch of a podcast called "Find a Way to Podcast" that will feature topics related to their company, ECI. They want the podcast to be lighthearted and educational, and they plan to bring on guests who are experts in their field or employees who exemplify the company's values. The first episode will be a CEO spotlight where the host will ask the CEO, Dan, some questions. The conversation then transitions to Dan talking about his background and how he ended up at ECI. He mentions that he started at Fisher and eventually joined ECI through a mentor and friend. He talks about his experiences in different locations and his involvement in building the RAS business. All right, so it's going. Are we live? Yeah, we're live. So I'll just, I mean, I can edit as we go, but. Okay. That sounds good. You ready for this? I'm ready. All right. Okay. I don't know if this microphone's where it should be or not, but. I think it looks good. Okay. You sound good. Well, it sounds good. It doesn't even look good. I mean, we're not, this is radio, not TV, right? That's true. Okay. It looks like you're not up against it. It sounds okay. I've been told I have a face for radio. Is that nice? It's not really nice. I use my daughter to say it. Well, I guess she can say that to you. All right, so we'll get, we'll get this kicked off. I have a little intro. Does anybody know we're doing this, by the way? Have you introduced yourself? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. So hello, ECI. I'm excited to bring you guys the first ECI podcast, Find a Way to Podcast, featuring myself, Rose Bull, and our fearless leader, Dan Smith. We'll be covering several topics that are ECI-centric that we believe will enrich the already structured company updates and any business unit updates that anyone else attends. We want this to be lighthearted and educational, and we hope that you learn what it means to be an ECI employee, who we are, where we've come from, and how we move forward into the future. Obviously, our episodes can't be interactive, but after this hits your headphones or your speakers, we'd love to hear your feedback and topics that you want to learn about. We will be bringing on guests who will either be experts in our field so we can learn from them or to spotlight certain employees who exemplify what it means to say yes. The first episode that we're bringing to you is a CEO spotlight where I'll be asking Dan some hard-hitting questions and we can get to know him a little better. Hard-hitting. Hard-hitting. Oh, boy. And I'm sure you can't wait to talk about yourself for the next 30 minutes, so let's get started. You should let her – I know. I'm just trying to get the mic right. No, you should have just left it. The video would probably be more entertaining. That's too complicated. Are you going to tell everyone that I refused the opportunity to prep questions and prep my answers? You already are telling everybody. Oh, okay. All right. And we have the ability to add out anything stupid that I might say. Should I say yes? Yeah, I think so. Okay. If we do, right? If we do. We do have the opportunity. Is it an honest zone? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. All right. Do you want to do another one? Sure. Okay. All right. So how did you first learn about Fisher and talk about your path to ECI? That is a softball. First of all, congratulations to this idea. This was Rose's idea to do this podcast as a – Oh, you're not taking partial credit? As a way – oh, I will eventually. As a way to reach – If it's good. If people listen, then you'll take credit. Right. If it's terrible, it's your idea. Yeah, that's fine. Do we get to see how many hits we have and stuff? Is that correct? We get to see how many people listen? Yeah, we'll be able to see. All right, good. We'll see if it's a hit or not. Yeah. Well, congratulations on the idea. No idea is a bad one until it is. Right? Okay. So my – I can't hardly believe it. I think it's – I've been here between ECI and Fisher now 20 – it'll be 27 years in May. Wow. Which seems crazy because in many ways I still act like I'm about 26 years old. So I graduated from WVU in 97 with a degree in electrical engineering, and it was probably about halfway through my junior year that I dawned on, you know, I'm not all that good at electrical engineering and I don't like it all that much. Okay. But I don't want to stay in school for a whole lot longer. Yeah. So I thought I better figure out what I'm going to do with this degree that doesn't involve actual electrical engineering because don't know if I was smart enough to be really good at it and didn't love it all that much, but I was three-and-a-half years through or two-and-a-half years through. Oh, that's a long time. Yeah. So it was – we were going to make the best of it. So in the interview process, I also kind of knew that I wanted to get away a little bit. I think I wanted to get out of town. It's funny. My very first – I grew up in small-town West Virginia, so my very first airline flight was actually a job interview. So I didn't get on a commercial airplane until I was flying to Marshalltown, Iowa, for a job interview. Quite a first flight. Yeah, quite a first flight to Des Moines. I thought, this is great. Got picked up, left, and landed. Nothing changed except it was a lot flatter. So, yeah, so when I started to look for jobs, I was looking for something in the technical sales arena, thinking that's a way to use my technical degree and, I think, technical thinking skill set in a way that didn't require me to actually get deep into the engineering field I had studied. And I went to Fisher. I grew up small-town, so I loved Marshalltown. There's a lot of people that knock Marshalltown because it is a super small town in the middle of Iowa. I say super small. I think it's about 25,000 people. But the way Iowa is laid out, there's town and then nothing, but farmland for miles and miles and miles, and then town. If you overfly it, it's literally like there's a spot that's town and then a whole bunch of fields and then another spot. And so Marshalltown was small, but that fit me. I mean, that was kind of where I was, kind of how I grew up and where I came from. So I loved it. A lot of people don't like it. I loved it. I started there in 97 and spent about three and a half years there. I think that's right, yeah. And I was not actually in a rush to leave. A lot of people get out there and they're ready to go to the field as fast as they can. I probably naively didn't even know that that was necessarily available to me. I just took the job out there planning to stay for however long I stayed. I didn't have a master plan. So did Fisher have or they were recruiting at the time? Yeah, that's a good question. So there was a guy who became a mentor of mine for many, many years. I still stay in touch with him. There was a guy, John Gardner. I was a graduate of West Virginia. He's actually on the school of engineering board right now. And John was the global vice president of sales for Fisher. And so, believe it or not, Fisher recruited WVU on campus. So I interviewed on campus there and then got a second interview and came out there and then ultimately got the job offer and decided I liked Iowa. And interestingly, I had another job offer to go overseas with a military defense contractor. But I decided to go to Iowa. And, like I said, loved it. I mean, I just enjoyed it. Small town feel. Fisher culture has always been amazing. So that will be in me until the day I retire. Out there, if you started in Fisher, you generally come in with a class of people every year. I don't know how many they recruit. It seemed like about ten or so back then. But, you know, so maybe there were six or eight. Then there were six or eight in the class in front of you and six or eight in class behind you. You're all similar age and similar backgrounds for the most part. I shouldn't say similar backgrounds. But something landed everyone in the middle of Marshalltown, Iowa. So there was something common there. And lots of friendships that still endure today. Like I said, I was in Boston last week. And, you know, one of the guys that's an executive at NECI was a guy that came in with me. I got to have dinner with him, and it was good to catch up. So, yeah, the friendships have endured. And after a few years there, one of the impact partners was Reps at the time, Fisher Reps, that I supported with ECI. And a guy named George French became a good friend of mine. He's retired now from ECI. I was in Charleston, West Virginia, and talking about needing a successor. He was planning to retire and asked me if I was interested. That started the ball rolling. And Jeff Scott introduced himself to me and made a flight out here and interviewed and got hired. So I started as a Fisher Valve salesperson in Charleston, West Virginia. And I was there from – actually, there was a little bit of it. There was about a six-month stint in between there where John Gardner, the guy who hired me from Fisher, went to work with the systems business in Austin. So he had been – Emerson took him out of Fisher, put him in the systems business in Austin. And I guess Jeff had called him to get a referral. And John gave me, I guess, a good referral since I ended up getting a job. But John said, well, why don't you send him to Austin for six months, let him learn a little bit about the systems business and work with me. So I actually left Marshalltown in the summer of 99 and went down to – I think it was summer of 99. And went – see, it was 99 or 2000. And I went to Austin and spent six months there. And then right around Christmas, New Year, you know, packed up a U-Haul and a car and made the drive to Charleston. And I stayed in Charleston, West Virginia selling valves for – until about 2007 is when I moved to Pittsburgh. And that was when the RAS business was picking up, which was a little bit by accident. The RAS as we know it today got most of its roots through a company called Chesapeake Energy making a big acquisition in West Virginia. And us having a presence there had some good relationships with people that landed there. And then we started to build the RAS business on the backs of a company that came into West Virginia and invested millions and millions of dollars in wanting to take all of these antiquated gas wells that had no electronic measurement on them and, you know, bring them to current. And that was the – that was the real – really the genesis of what's today the RAS business. So we started that down there. And then I moved up here in 07 to get that RAS business kind of cooking into the shale plays that came along. And then at some point a few years after that, I moved into the VP of sales role in planning for succession with Jeff and hired a good friend and fellow by the name of John Cormier to come run the RAS business. And he came in and took it to places I probably wouldn't have or couldn't have, which was great. And then in 2000 – late 13, early 14 is when the transition with Jeff occurred. So that's kind of my journey. Yeah. Still Marshalltown roots and still believe a lot in that Fisher culture and how important it is to keep, as you can see, the walls of my office are old Fisher heritage pictures and stuff like that. Yeah. But, yeah, that's where I started, and it's been a fun run. Yeah. So it was – we were called local business partners back then? Yeah. So if you go back through history, it was at one point, I think, FRA, Fisher Rep Association is what it's called. And that was – and I know I think you've got a podcast planned to go into some of the history, so I won't steal too much of that thunder, right? Yeah. But the Fisher rep – you know, all of us – what we know as impact partners is 18 of us now. Excuse me. The impact partner network began – oh, God, I mean, Fisher's over 100 years old, and I should know the date of the first representative, but it's going to be 100 years. I know John H. Carter last year celebrated 90 years. So some of these offices have been, you know, essentially a century old. And they started out as the Fisher Rep Association. Fisher was the only – you know, all of these businesses started selling Fisher control valves and Fisher regulators. And Fisher was owned by the Fisher family. And it wasn't until the Fisher family sold the business to Monsanto Chemical and then eventually Emerson that they began to expand and pick up other lines until Emerson decided it was – they wanted to build this automation business. They wanted to go out and essentially acquire businesses that were first or second in their space or could be. Yeah. Rosemont, Micromotion, you know, Badass, and, you know, I could go on and on. Fisher Control Systems, obviously, systems business. So we were Fisher Rep Association for many, many years. And then as we became more than just Fisher, it moved to LBP, which was – actually, I think it maybe moved to Fisher Rep. Then it moved to LBP, Local Business Partner. And I remember, you know, when I came into Fisher, that's what it was. And it was really, really, really important that the identity of what's now Impact Partners be that we're local. That, you know, what we – the secret sauce in Fisher's eyes for many, many years, many, many decades, was we want to put people – we want to have people in the field who are local to their communities who can tailor their offerings, their skill sets, their technical expertise to what the local customer base needs. Because you might be in a – you know, in an area where it's heavy pulp and paper, you know, what your engineers and your inside and outside sales people need to understand is that more than it might be power or chemicals somewhere else or steel or – and then also just, you know, local cultures are different. And so to have, you know, the person in a plant being called on by someone that might be a neighbor or that might see them at a Friday night high school football game or, you know, or – Not someone who's flying in. Not someone who's flying in. Yeah, exactly right. You know, even if you go back to – George French would talk to me about the early days of the Charleston office in West Virginia. Even within our own geography, we found it important to be local to customers because, well, Pittsburgh and Charleston, West Virginia don't seem far apart in terms of miles or time. I'm like, sorry, backed away from the mic. Rose just yelled at me. You're just seeing it on video, audio. It's simple hand motions. I just got yelled at. So the – but, you know, culturally, there's differences. And, you know, when I was in West Virginia, which was one of – by the way, which was one of the most fun times of my career, the years that I spent in Charleston, you know, we were a little office of Jody Traub, who's still with us now, was there at the time, and myself and George French and those that know Armando, he came down and spent a little bit of time there. But we had a pretty core group of people that we knew were our customers. We saw an off-site of work. You know, we lived in the same community. And that kind of mattered. You know, it just – it kind of mattered that people wanted to do business with people that they knew, that lived where they lived, and, you know, it sort of mattered. So that whole local – the word local in the local business partner vernacular was purposeful. Fisher thought that was important. And then eventually, for lots of reasons, when we did the – a few years back, we did the – which was a big deal, by the way, we did the co-branding with Emerson, which is when we went to the new color scheme. For those that don't know, maybe – or a lot of people maybe don't know that the current blue and gray and the color scheme that we have prior to that, we had red and black. And, you know, every impact partner at the time, local business partner, every local business partner had wildly different logos and their own colors. And, you know, as customers were getting more global and as customers were spanning across territories, they were looking at that saying – having no – there was nothing that would tell them that we were related to each other. Yeah. So the idea of branding under common colors with Emerson, with each other, and then creating a name that we could sort of trademark and protect that only these 18 offices could carry. You know, the term local business partner was also used in other world areas. You know, it was used in other places. So it was a little bit genericized. Is that a word? Sure. That was the word for today? Sure. I think people get it, right? And so making it Emerson Impact Partners sort of gave it something that was just ours. Yeah. So the color scheme, the logos looking the same, the fonts, the – developed a tightness with Emerson and also set apart these 18 offices because we are very unique. We invest in ways that others don't invest on behalf of Emerson, on behalf of ourselves. We work together and collaborate in ways that most rep networks don't. Yeah. Most distributors, industrial rep networks, they're competing with each other. Right. You know, we don't compete with each other. We're in the boat together. So that impact partner kind of gave us that tie in. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask, too. I know that the partnership now is – like, you know, I've lived through it the last 10 years. You're a veteran now. Oh, my God, I know. You're a veteran now. Yeah. Dare I call you old at this point? I guess you can. Okay. All right. It sure feels like it someday. But, like, that partnership of sharing resources and things like that, I think that also makes it very unique, like you coming from Fisher. But I get my question. Was that unique then or the people – so were you – that was my other question, too. Were you in GIS for – and for everyone who isn't familiar with that term, global industry sales, it's the factory support for the Fisher side of our business. So global industry sales in Marshalltown, they have engineers who sit in their office and they are the support for all the impact partner networks. So they'll have somebody in GIS for pulp and paper, for chemical. You know, they're industry specific. So when you have something that comes up that's a severe service application or something that's very industry specific, a solution or something like that, then that gets sent to GIS for support. So my question was, was it GIS when you were there? And then follow-up, was that – was it as fluid as it is now with sharing resources? Sharing resources between impact partners or with Fisher? With both. Yeah. Yeah. So the first part of your question, it was called – at the time it was called SDNS, sales development and support, what they now change to global industry sales. Okay. And it was on the third floor, and I think it's on the second floor now. But conceptually, it was pretty similar. At the time that I was there, we had – it was divided by industry groups. There was a row of cubicles. There was hydrocarbon, pulp and paper, power, chemical, and OEM, I think, were the groups. And then there was a regulator row. At the time, regulators weren't McKinney. They were in Marshalltown. Oh, okay. And the RES business was also in Marshalltown, all branded Fisher. So all of that was in Marshalltown. So it was fairly similar in structure, maybe a little bit different. At the time when I started, everyone was an application engineer when they hired in. And then your first kind of – I don't want to call it a promotion, but was every group had six to ten application engineers and one to two what they called sales engineers. And the sales engineers dealt more on the commercial side of things in terms of conditions and pricing and that sort of thing. So in there a few years, that's something you could apply for. At the time, there were – God, I'm going to say there were at least mid – there were at least twice as many reps as there are today. That's what consolidations done, the impact partners used to be. I think Don Churchill was telling me at his retirement that when he started his career, which would have been in the, I think, late 80s, he'll quote me on that, but I think he said there were 42. And now there's 18. So I think that was pretty similar. I will say it's different today. One of the advantages of having 18 impact partners versus 30 or 40 is we do a much better job now. And I've been in this role almost ten years now, so I've been able to sort of see the inner workings of the impact partner side a little bit, and all of us as all 18. I think we're a much more collaborative group of presidents and offices together now, probably because it's simply easier to get 18 on board for something than it is – you know, sometimes that's even hard. Like when you're doing the trying to get 18 of us who are all similar – you know, we all think – we all like our ideas best, right? Right. Probably pretty similar PIs. Yeah, we're probably similar PIs. We're all high A's, right? Is that trying to get 18 sort of herded in one direction can be tough. But we've been very purposeful, I think, as a group. We call it SGP, strategic growth partners. So if you hear that term, that's all 18 impact partners. I think we've been very purposeful getting better at working together and collaborating faster. It's always taken us a long time. You'll see as we roll it out here soon in our strategic plan for this year and our strategic vision for the next three years, one of our main tenets here is going to be speed and agility, is we've got to be able to do things faster, you know, answer questions for customers faster, find new mechanisms so that when customers do need to get to us, they get to us, not in days or hours, but maybe seconds and minutes, you know, because that's what the market's starting to demand. Right. And so it's the same thing on the impact partner side as a total. We're developing the tools like INET because there's no INET. INET would have had a really hard time, I think, being developed 20 years ago. Yeah. Getting everybody on the same page. Well, they tried. Yeah, they did try. Yeah. Getting co-investment, you know, because INET, you know, for those who don't know, it's our inventory sharing tool that allows impact partners to see each other's inventory. And so, you know, now instead of, you know, only having access to our inventory and then having to make 17 phone calls, we have the ability to go in and see what others have and see if we can serve customers better that way. That was a purposeful investment on behalf of all 18. And we got that done in a couple of, maybe a year and a half, I think. You probably know that better than I do. Yeah. But it was a pretty big deal. Yeah, it was. Pretty big deal. It was, yeah. So, yeah, so anyway, long-winded answer. Apologize for that. But the Fisher thing, I think, you know, SDNS and GIS today, pretty similar. Still this model of bringing in young talent, developing them, full well-knowing that many are going to go into the field, into the field being us, being the impact partner network. It's not unusual. It's on an unusual path, but I took. Yeah. And then also, you know, Fisher acknowledging you need to strike that balance between keeping some talent, right, and then knowing that they're also building talent that's going to go out like I did, you know, go out into the network. But I still think it's pretty similar, culturally very similar. You know, and then on the impact partner side, I do think that we're getting actually better and better at collaborating between each other. I think that's gotten – that continues on a positive trajectory. Yeah. Yeah, I've definitely seen that in the last couple years. All right. A little bit of a more personal question. Oh, geez. And you could try to – I don't know where it will take us, but what do people misunderstand about you the most? Well, for that, I guess I'd have to understand what people misunderstand about me. Oh, well, I'm sure you've heard – you hear things, you're like, well, that's not me. Was there something you're not telling me? Are you keeping – I don't keep secrets from you. Okay. All right. Okay. No, I guess – Or even like you hear a first impression, you're like, wow, I'm kind of surprised you thought that. Yeah, I guess I hear – and I don't know how much of this is me versus the role that I'm in, but, you know, I hear that people are – I don't know if I'd say afraid, but am I approachable or unapproachable? And I think part of that, you know, if you look – you mentioned the PI earlier. If you looked at my PI, and I'd share it with anyone, I'm probably more introverted than people would think. You know, and I guess for those that, you know, listen to this, don't understand that, the scale on that introversion is one that if you're more on the extroverted side, you kind of draw energy from crowds. Yeah. You work a crowd, you have a night, you go home, and you're kind of energized and you can't go to sleep. Yeah. The flip side of that is you can do it if you need to, but it draws energy from you. Right. And you go home and you're tired, and that's more me. And so I think a combination of that and that my mind is – and this isn't a good quality. It just is what it is. My mind is always sort of in ten places on the next thing, and sometimes forcing myself to be present is hard. So if I'm walking from here to the coffee machine and I look past someone and I don't see them or acknowledge them, a lot of times that's just because my crazy brain is on ten things. And, you know, it's not because I – It's not even walking to the coffee machine with you? Yeah. Yeah, it's back in the office thinking about something. Right. It's writing that email. So, you know, I guess I feel that I'm very approachable. You know, I've always felt and believed in a super open-door policy. Come see me, say hi, and if I'm over at the Ops Center, I want to see people and hear what they're thinking. And, you know, I actually do draw some energy, believe it or not, from small group settings. Yeah. If I stop in over at, you know, over at Skid Tech and chat with them a little bit, I actually leave energized from those, you know, engagements because I don't get them all the time. So I think this whole approachability thing might be something that I feel would be a little bit misunderstood. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. No, that's a good one. Do you think I'm unapproachable? No. Oh, boy. I think you looked up and to the right. I read somewhere that's a sign of lying. No, I didn't do that. Okay. Nobody knows I did that. I just told them. Everybody knows you did it. No, I think, I mean, you're also the president, so I think part of it is you're doing the most important work for ECI, right? So if it's something that, me personally, like if I haven't thought, if it's half-baked, I'm not going to bring it to you. Yeah. You know? But if it's like, I mean, if I'm 80% there and I'm really excited about it, then I'm willing to share it with you. I just think that, you know, some people might not have that balance or not feel comfortable. Yeah, I actually think that's a good approach. First thing you said is, I don't think, and I mean this is going to sound cliche, I don't think I'm doing the most important work here. I know you don't. Right, but I mean like the perception of our president is doing the most important work for ECI. I guess maybe the most important work to me here is that we get our culture right and that everybody has a, you know, sort of energy and understanding about why we're doing it and what's good. So I think that's, or why it's good, I think that's my biggest job. The important work, you know, the finding ways to say yes, making sure customers are well taken care of, making sure that employees are taking care of each other and staying safe. I mean, that's the most important stuff that we do, and that's done by hopefully everybody that's listening to this. That's listening to this every day. The second part of what you said, I actually agree with that. I think it's a good, 80% is kind of a good number, roughly, you might add. I think that if you try to bake your ideas to, you know, 95 or 100 before you bring them forward and before we bounce them around a little bit and go back and forth on them, sometimes you go too long. You know, it might be a good idea we should have been working on together six months ago, but you spend the last five and a half months kind of baking that last 10 or 15%, right? Yeah. You and I have talked about that before. But, yeah, you don't want to come in half-baked, right, at, you know, 50% too. But I love, you know, I love having – that's another thing that's energizing to me is if we've got our teams boiling up ideas to their leadership and then the leaders in the teams kind of working those ideas a bit and getting them to that sort of 80% thought out and then saying, hey, let's get some time to talk about it. I love those conversations. Yeah. You know, and if it's to – like I said, if it's to 98%, I might say, geez, why didn't you bring that six months ago? We could have used that, you know? Yeah. And the reality is – and the other thing is we might find that after we work it a little bit, it's not a great idea. That's okay. And if it's not a great idea, then it'd be better to stop at 80, you know, than to spend all the energy getting it baked all the way to 98, 99%. Right, yeah. But, yeah, hopefully I'm – you know, and I – hopefully I'm – I will say this. It sounds as if I'm more approachable than probably a perceptionist. I would – yeah, I would attach to that, yeah. You know, okay. That's good. Yeah. You didn't look up and to the right that time. There you go. That was good. Honest answer. So, yeah, but I think the – you know, I think new ideas generated from everywhere in the organization are important. Yeah. And you jumped the rim. You're jumping around a little bit, but you went there. It's – you know, even if two or three out of ten are good ones, that's okay. You know, let's – but the way that we're going to – you know, when you think about an individual person comes up with an idea. Mark Coy has told me this before. There are – I think he's said it on some of these leadership development, you know, seminars or classes or schools. One of the things that they'll often do is give you a challenge and have you work through it and then put three or four people with you. Yeah. And have the group work through the challenge. And at the end of the day, the moral of the story is that the vast majority of ideas get enriched. Or way better. And get way better. Yeah. And the gotchas get identified and the opportunities to tweak it for the positive get found earlier if you get more people involved. Yeah. It's kind of like, you know, I would encourage that if individuals are listening to this and you've got an idea and you say, damn it, this would make us better – am I allowed to say damn it on the podcast? Yeah, why not? Okay. You know, this would make us better or this would – you know, this would help us deliver successful customer outcomes. This would make us safer, especially that one. Oh, yeah. You know, you don't want to bake that one to 95%. God forbid if someone gets hurt then, right? But if you've got those ideas, you know, vet them a little bit in your brain and go to your boss and talk a little bit there. And then hopefully you get by in there and then it continues to escalate and you get the right people involved and things start to happen. Yeah. The worst thing you can do is not bring them forward at all. Yeah. If you bring them forward and they get shot down, that's okay. Yeah. You know, I think probably – Keep at it. Plenty of ideas get shot down, right? Yeah. You know? Yeah. I mean, if you're super passionate about it, then rethink it. It might be just the approach or – Or you might have identified the right problem and the solution is maybe not the right solution, but you put the problem on the table. Right. And then you get people in the room who say, I don't like that solution, but how about this? Yeah. And, you know, at the end of the day, what matters is that we find a solution and we keep getting better. Mm-hmm. You know, who finds it or how it's found is not that relevant. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-oh, she's looking to her questions again. She's got this white paper over there of death, I think. It's not a death. It's so funny. I'm scared of what's coming next. It's a white paper of fun. You called me our fearless leader, and I'm finding myself scared to death of what you're about to ask me. No, I think you'll like this one. What's an insult that you've received that you're most proud of? How am I supposed to like that one? Because I feel like you would – okay, like, let's see. Like, if you heard something – I don't know. Yeah. You were in the gym or something and someone insulted you. You don't know, but you won't need to answer. Yeah, exactly. I'm not interviewing myself. That would be kind of lame. This could come back around to you. There you go. Maybe. There was this one time you – no. If I insulted you, that would be even better. Yeah, that would be great. Let me think about that one. So, well, first of all, full disclosure for those that know me, you know, I'm not – I don't shy away from banter and busting people's chops or getting it back the other direction. Yeah, exactly. You've got to have an insult in there that you're like, wait a minute. You're going to dish it out. I'm actually pretty proud of it. Right? Yeah. So, by the way, for future podcasts, you need to bring the coffee machine in here. Yeah. I know. Maybe. So, I don't know. I guess I'll throw one out. You don't know that I actually even consider people that joke with me about this as truly being an insult. But for those that know me, I'm pretty passionate about WVU and having grown up in rural West Virginia, and that is where I grew up. That's where I grew up. I grew up very simple in a small town in West Virginia. So, I'll get all the – I've heard every hillbilly, you know, redneck, backwoods West Virginia joke you can possibly hear. Probably most in jest, having fun, and probably some meant to be insulting or at least thought to be insulting behind the scenes. Yeah. Malice behind it sometimes. Yeah, there's a little bit, right? Yeah. A little bit of truth behind every joke. So, I think that – I'll use that as an example. Maybe I should have prepped for these questions. Okay. In full disclosure, everybody, I said these to him months in advance. And I didn't even open them. Actually, because I think these podcasts go better if you're not prepared. Oh, okay. Just to have conversation. Otherwise, I'm just trying to memorize the script. That's true. Yeah, I would say that one because I, you know, I'm very proud of, you know, kind of all the good and bad, and we all have those. You know, we all look back to our – look, all of our stories are, you know, pieces of good, bad, and indifferent. But I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, you know, and it's truly what some of the stereotypes are. But I love the state of West Virginia, and I grew up around a lot of really good, small town, hardworking, very grounded, you know, kind of people. And learned a lot. You don't know you're learning when you're in the middle of it, right? Because that's all you know. Right. You know, you grew up – you and me grew up in a, you know, a small three-bedroom farmhouse, and I shared a bedroom in Bunks with my brother who was three years younger than me until the day I went off to college. You know, in coal country, right, our houses were heated, literally heated with coal. So you kind of – you come up that way. A lot of the lessons that you learn along the way, that's where it comes from. And then went to WVU, and I've heard all the jokes, you know, there's like a 98% acceptance rate and all that, you know, all the jabs you'll hear at WVU. And that's why I can take those. But, you know, I look at the school, even the university, and, you know, the university is a land-grant institution. It's West Virginia's school. It was founded with the purpose of taking a state that is less educated than most and provide opportunity for people who are in sort of, in many cases, a cycle of poverty or, you know, the state has a lot of challenges. And, you know, you find in anything sort of whether it's socioeconomic or – most things are cycles that have to be broken. And so that – you know, the charter of that university is to provide opportunity to most, particularly in the state. And so there's probably an awful lot of cycles broken and lives turned in a positive direction and families, you know, grown out of a cycle of poverty and put on a better path by WVU. It's not – its charter wasn't to go be, you know, an elite, you know, 10% acceptance rate kind of college. It's not its charter. And so for what its charter is and for the education that you get for your money, I don't have to get on a soapbox, but I'm proud of it. Yeah. And so bring on the insults. That's okay. You know. Yeah. Unless it's from Pitt fans. That's not unacceptable. Well, you won't be getting that from me. But Pitt fans don't have a lot to brag about these days. No, they don't. They really don't. They really don't. I mean, the state of their athletic department is just really tough. I'm just really sad for them. We should probably just feel bad for them. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that's the best answer I could come up with. Okay. No, I like that one. All right. Here's another personal one. Uh-oh. Okay. What is a funny story that your family tells about you that you're willing to share? I don't have any that I'm willing to share. Okay. No question. I was thinking of my daughter yesterday because I just told you. I told her before the podcast I had breakfast with my daughter yesterday before she went back to college. I told her I was doing this, and she says, oh, Dad, please don't say anything dumb. I don't really know how to take that. But my daughter is a little bit too much like me, I guess, good, bad, or indifferent. She might roll her eyes at that. So I guess one story I remember is when she was very young, three, four, five, six, growing up, she would get really, really wrapped around the axel of something was just, I would say, unjust. Something was not fair. And I'm that way to this day. To this day. It's the things that really get me wound up is when I don't feel like we or I or our people or someone is not being treated fairly. There are many times I should look past that and say, well, in the big picture, that's not a hill worth dying on. But I have a hard time with that. My daughter would always be that way. She'd come home, especially with her brother. So I would have him go, Dad, that's not fair. And I would just say to Dad, well, honey, life's not fair. Just life's not fair. You deal with it. You deal with it. And so Father's Day, God, when was this? I'm going to say it was probably when Maddie's 20. So this has to be 15 years ago, five or six. And Holly would take them to the pool during the day. And she came back. She was so excited for me to watch TV that night because there were news people who were at the pool going around interviewing kids about Father's Day. No. Yeah. Yeah, you know where this is going, right? Yeah. She was excited. She was excited. Oh, my gosh. So they turn it on and they go from kid to kid. Tell us a little bit about something that you've learned from your dad. You know, as one little boy would say, I've learned to be honest and to love everybody and go to the next kid. And they all said, you know, wonderful platitudes probably right afterwards. And they come to my honest as hell daughter and they say, what's the one thing you've learned from your dad? I've learned from my dad life isn't fair. Oh, my gosh. Yep. On the 6 o'clock news. Oh, my gosh. And other people were mortified. I was proud as can be. I was clapping. That's right, honey. It's stuck. Yeah. Yeah, right. You heard me. You actually heard me. Wow. So that story's been told a few times. And it's funny. Are there YouTube clips out there hanging around probably? Probably. Probably. When it's told, I'm made to be, you know, it's laughing at me. I can't believe it. I'm proud of it. I think it's awesome. I love that she actually listened to me. Because every time you, for those with kids, and you know this, where you say this to, you say things to your kids like that. And you have absolutely no expectation that they're hearing anything. Right, right, yeah. None of it's sticking. Yeah. And so what my takeaway when I saw it on the news was it actually stuck. Something I said she listened to. And she was, I love that she was excited to be like, let me tell this news after. Oh, yeah. I'm ready. I couldn't get in. I mean, I barely got in the door and sat my bag down. And she was jumping up in arms to tell me to come watch the news. Oh, it's on the news. And I remember, I knew Holly was there. And I can't remember, I don't even think Ethan was around yet. Maybe he was, but he was super young. I was going to say, she was the only one that was excited for me to watch it. Oh, my gosh. I love that. But, yeah, it was. And there's probably plenty of others out there. Well, that's all for the personal questions. Okay. Yeah, take a deep breath there. Great. Okay, so I have a couple ECI-centric questions for you. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so what do you see as the biggest challenges we're going to be facing in the next five years as a company? Oh, boy, that's a biggie. I think they're opportunities more than challenges because, again, that's probably another cliché. But we're, you know, when there are challenges for everybody, but we're positioned both financially and from a talent perspective to be able to execute on the challenges, I think that puts us in a better position for them to be opportunities. The industry, everyone keeps hearing, and we've been guilty of this, too, you know, as we've talked about it in our leadership meetings. The words digital and digital transformation are thrown around. They're so overused, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's so – I've struggled. It's one of the biggest things I've struggled with is how do we get everyone here to understand what it really means? But our traditional customers, there's a big shift going on over the next few years in a lot of different ways that digital is affecting. One is, you know, I'll analogize it a little bit to – you know, I've talked about this to cars, right? There's this pivot now to not only electric vehicles but autonomous driving. You know, at some point, if you believe the visionaries, you know, people are going to look at it and look back and say, you guys actually drove cars with your hands and your feet and you actually – you kept them safely on the – Right. You know, if you go back 50 years ago, if you talk to my dad who was an engineer in a plant environment forever, you know, he lived through the days when you were going to take plants that were operated by people, you know, they still are, but most of the decisions were made by people looking at screens. Right. And now when you put in control systems and you start to automate a lot of that, you know, there are plenty of people out there that said, oh, my God, you know, things are going to blow up. And, you know, and history sort of shows that the smarter and smarter computers get and the way that the computers are programmed to get, you know, the safer those operations become, right, because computers don't have bad days or too many drinks the night before or things going on in their life and, you know. And so, you know, there's this move towards being able to have cars drive themselves and a lot of being able to execute on that is being driven by data, right, for a car to be able to drive itself. And so when you think about all the decisions you make driving just on the way home, you know, how far up to the stop sign do you pull, how much space do you allow before you are willing to pull out, you know, how do you handle pulling up to road construction or to someone that's holding a sign or to an accident, you know, when do you speed up when it's yellow versus slow down, all of the, and all those decision trees change for every drive that you make on any road in the U.S. So to be able to have a car be able to execute all of those requires just a monumental amount of data over time. So when you look at Tesla, for example, you know, Tesla has been, you know, every time they put another million cars out on the street with I think like 17 cameras and all these sensors and all that data is continuing to feed the engine. And so it's, it becomes exponential, you know, data that's there. Now, how do you, but the challenge of Tesla is, okay, that's just data. Yeah. How do you take that data and actually make it usable? How do you sort of contextualize it and make it, and create the software packages that will then take that data and actually, until you do something with it, it's just data. How do you actually create the tools that allow it to safely drive? It'll never be 100% safe. The goal would be is it safer than we as humans. Right. And so we're watching that go on right now. Right. It's in real time right now. Our customers are going to undergo similar, they already are. Yeah. How do they make their plants or their mills or their operations in general? How do they capture all that data that's available in the plants, in the instruments, in the valves, in the control systems and the historians? How do they capture all of that data and develop or implement the software programs that will allow that data to run a unit or a plant more autonomously? So you have less and less need, right, for human intervention, and then the humans can do more value-added tasks right within there. So that shift, you know, for many, many years, for 20 years, ever since Fisher introduced the DVC, you know, position, smart position in the 90s, we've been telling customers you have access to all this data you don't use. And it's true. Yeah. And now I think customers know that. They know they have all of these data sources in a plant that aren't being properly aggregated and properly utilized to be able to make plants run smarter, safer, more efficiently, to be able to put out product that then is going to be cheaper to consumers, you know, more cost-effectively. We can produce pharmaceuticals, or we can produce power, or we can get gas out of the ground. You know, ultimately, the cheaper that is to us, the consumer. And so I think one element that we're going to see over the next five years is how do we adapt our business? And we're working this. But how do we adapt our business so that – I mean, there's no company in our geography. And probably I would say the same thing for all the geographies of the impact partners. There's no company in our geography that knows our customers' plants better than us. There's nobody that understands that sort of operation, technology, insight, know-how, maintenance, how the plants work. No one understands that better than our engineers and technicians and our people. So we have that knowledge. Yeah. So how do we, as we go forward with Emerson and other companies developing the industrial software that will take that data, bring it into the software, and then utilize it? We have an opportunity there to take all that knowledge that we have developed for decades and decades and marry that to what's coming and help our customers make that data actionable and give our customers a competitive edge in the marketplace. Yeah. And that's going to happen. And, you know, five or six years from now, the hardware that we sell today, at least some elements of it, will be less differentiated and a little bit more commoditized – I hate to use that word – it will be a little less technically differentiated. The differentiation is probably going to reside in the services and in the software and in the ability to make that data do something for customers. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. That's kind of a macro challenge for us. Yes. And then I think for us internally, our customers, the actual physical people in the plants, are getting younger and younger, right? People retire every day and they get replaced by others. And we have to continue to understand – you're going to see a little bit of push in this for us over the next year – how do we make sure that we stay relevant to new generations as they take over the plants and how they want to be served, right? Yeah. I mean, we're, you know, 50, 60 years, as long as we've been in existence. Our model's been we've got people on the street, you know, technical resources, smart people that can sit face-to-face like you and I are right now and have conversations about challenges customers are having, and we work that hard, right? And that needs to stay there. That's a unique thing to us. That's the local part, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that has to absolutely stay there. Yeah. But then there's a lot of customers out there with, you know, things we've learned since the pandemic that how well we can utilize technology like Teams and Zoom and video conferencing in general. Right. Right. And podcasting. And podcasting, yes. We're finding a way. And things like the portal, which, by the way, I think is something that's going to be a hot button for me this year. We at VCI, I believe, are woefully behind, and we've got to catch up in getting our customers using those digital tools like the portal. Customers are going to want to interface that way. I want to interface that way. Yeah. You know, we have people to call on us, you know, whether it's our medical broker or financial auditors, but we have people that call us and say, hey, we need to get together. Would you rather do it on a Teams call or do you want us to come in and see you? I'll take a Teams call all the time. Yeah. Because I can still see them. It kind of has a start and an end point, right? I can schedule it around other things in my day. I think a lot of customers going forward are going to want to do business with us differently than they do today. Yeah. A lot of them are going to want to do it the same. Yeah. But now I think there's an avenue for digital sales representation, right, where we might be able to call on people behind the computer screen and call on a different segment of customers that maybe don't want face-to-face or they aren't big enough to be face-to-face, right? I think that technology is allowing companies like ours to respond much faster to customers. We've got to get on board with that. Yeah. You know, whether it be through customer portals or through things like Teams, whatever those might be. So I think in the next three to five years, on the customer side, our challenge is that whole data software, helping customers get to run autonomous plants. Yeah. You know, to where plants or segments of plants can run themselves and not have to have people there, you know, in the control room doing every little thing. They can sit and oversee, but then they'll have to. I think that's a challenge that we're working in that direction. And then internally, I think it's, you know, how do we keep what's been really good for us for years and then carve out these new ways that customers want to be dealt with? Yeah. And make sure that we're there and ready for that. Right. You know, chat functions and chat bots, you know, all that stuff's coming. Yeah. You know, the customers want to click and say, I want to get an answer to a valve problem, but I don't want to call someone. Mm-hmm. You know, I want to be able to either go through a portal and plug in my order number, or I want a chat bot that asks me the difference between an ET and an EZ. And, you know, and maybe during working hours, they can talk to a person. Mm-hmm. And maybe during non-working hours, it's bots. But those are the things that I think in the next 35 years, you know, we've got to continue to get better at. And we're well-positioned to do it. Yeah. You know, we just – to me, the biggest challenge, and maybe failing on my part, has been maybe this will help these conversations like we're having here. But it's been trying to get everybody to kind of understand that. Mm-hmm. So that when we ask people to participate in certain things, whether it be getting data fields right. I know this is a frustration to yours, Ruth. When we're entering orders, getting data fields right. Yeah. And keeping them clean. Because all the things that we want to do internally to make ourselves smarter, to be able to use machine learning or AI to better predict what's coming from a customer, that's reliant upon our ability to keep our data systems clean. Yeah. And we've never been good at that. Yeah. And I think part of that is because maybe I haven't done a good job of making everyone understand why it's important. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a huge hill to climb. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're right in the middle of it. Yeah. Right. You have been for a long time. Right. So did that answer it? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I don't want to go against time here. So I only have... I thought we were going all day. Oh, we could. Yeah. This is a nine-hour podcast. Do you think everyone would want to do that? No? Okay. Do we get the ability to see how many people came on and then do we get to see if they all leave us at 20 minutes in? I don't know. I don't know yet. I'm going to say yes. So everyone has to... Well, we won't hear it at this point. It's too late. Yeah, right. I don't know. I love all my questions, but I'll pick one. You should love all your questions. You wrote them. I know. Yeah. All right. So let's see. Since this isn't in the general theme of the podcast, what is maybe one of your own personal stories or a story that you've heard that highlights saying yes? So I can't... In my brain, when you ask that question, I go about 20 different places. You've got to pick one. Well, I think the saying yes, I think the finding a way to say yes thing, I think when customers view you as a say yes organization, I think sometimes everyone misunderstands that to be big things, and I think it's way more a collection of small things. I don't think these are always big things, or at least we don't view them that way. But to a customer, like the small thing that solves that problem and gets them on to something else is a big deal. Like there's been just countless times I've heard stories over the years where a customer has to get an order out for overnight delivery. They have to have it the next morning, and a truck's already come by the warehouse, and someone from the warehouse throws in a truck and drives it to the UPS store, or in some cases, and we do this a lot when I was in Charleston, West Virginia office, if we had it down there, or just threw it in and drove it to the customer. So I think sometimes one of the challenges of growing big and staying small, that's one of our challenges. I'm meandering a little bit here. But when we – I was talking to Jeff Scott at Dale Robertson's recent get-together for retirement, and he found something in his office, and he brought me this piece of paper that was a 2007 printout of our goals. And at the time, I think our company-wide goals for ECI, that was the year we did the ARCE acquisitions. In fairness, it was right before that. But I think our goal that year was like either 17 or 19 – it was 19 million. And, you know, we're well over 200 million now. Yeah. And so when you're 17 million and you're 35, 40 employees, everyone's sort of a jack-of-all-trades. You're just – the nice thing about that size – you really are an engaged, just get-after-it organization. You just do whatever you have to do. Right. A customer needs a regulator, and you can't get it in time. We would go get it off the shelf, write a note to someone, throw it in the system, and we would drive away with the regulator and drop it off to the customer. Yeah. As you grow bigger, you have to have processes in place, right, because you have to have more controls. You're just – you're getting bigger, and you have – you know, your inventory that was a million is 20 million. And so you just – you simply require more controls and more following of process, right, so that it's not the Wild West. Right. But the danger of that – you know, I've said it before. How do we – a trick is how do you grow big and stay small? And by stay small, I mean how do we keep that mentality that the process, the normal process, will work and needs to work, and we need to follow those business processes for 95 percent of our business? But the 5 percent is often where we get to be recognized. Yeah. Like anyone out there can take a regular PO, process it, deliver it in the normal time, and like any company that's competent at all can do that. When the customer calls in and they say, hey, I've got a problem. Like my plant just went down because of this control valve. And what you may or may not know when you take that phone call is that they're losing $100,000 a day by being down. What you may or may not know is that the person on the other end of that call might be watching his annual bonus whittle away right now because he's measured on uptime. Yeah. Right. And so when we go into our business system and we say, oh, shoot, I don't have that on the shelf, and we leave it there, I promise you the person on the other end of that call is getting an answer somewhere. Yeah. They're not just going to sit there and lose all that money and they're just not going to do that. Right. They're getting an answer somewhere. Yeah. It could be as simple as they're going to weld a piece of pipe in line for a while. It could be they're finding another supplier. It could be they're going to pop the existing valve out, polish a trim somehow to make it work and put it back in. They're going to find it. My point is they're going to find an answer. Whoever they find that answer with is in position for the next one. They're in the catbird seat for the next one. That's when we make our difference. When I was out calling salesmen, truly the 11 p.m., midnight, 1 a.m. phone call that I got from a customer, I popped up because that was the opportunity. I do well on this one and the rest of them get easy. So you ask for examples. One of the examples I remember, I'm going to get it a little bit wrong, but it was in the early days of the RAS business when Shell, not the Shell plant we have here, but Shell had a big presence in the northeast part of Pennsylvania. It was part of it was in our territory, part of it was in Proconyx. We had an agreement with Proconyx to sort of jointly support them. I remember Kevin Iverson had the account. I'm going to give Kevin a little shout-out, so we'll see. Kevin, if you actually listen to this podcast, this is your chance to get a shout-out. No one can tell him. Don't anyone tell Kevin that we gave him a shout-out. I want to see if he listens to this. As I remember, and I think I'm going to get it wrong, but he was out there three or four hours away for a couple of days, and they were working on startups. He came back here, and as he was rolling in, I don't know, a half an hour outside of Manessen coming back in. This is when our ops center was at Manessen. He got a call from the customer, and there was something that they had to have that didn't get out, and it wasn't out on the site like it was supposed to be. I can't remember if it didn't get out on a truck. This is, as I recall, Friday afternoon, and Kevin stops at Manessen, finds it, didn't go out, puts it in his car, turns back around, drives back to Williamsport, gets it to the customer, and I think probably gets home at 11 or 12 that night. That's a personal sacrifice, obviously. But the amount of business that we got out of that account and the people there who said, oh, my God, who would do that? Well, the fact that it gets out that ECI will do that or that Kevin will do that, and there's – by the way, I pointed him out because this example came to my head. There's 100 of those that people have done. I've had – well, you had like one of your fisher inside people highlighted. Was it Dom on Thanksgiving? Dean. Dean, okay. Can we edit that out? Since I got – Dom, Dean. Okay, we'll just leave it. It was Dean. You know, that's another – Dom can work and get his out. Yeah, if Dom would get his out, we could save both. Yeah, right. So, yeah, that's a good point. Get on it, Dom. But, no, taking a call over Thanksgiving break, and as I recall, I'm remembering vaguely details, right, but coming in and dealing with a customer issue, that's finding a way to say yes. Yeah. You know, those are – they don't all have to be, you know, huge examples. Yeah, yeah. There's some that are huge, you know, and you're coming back, you turn around, drive three hours back and come back, it's probably a pretty big deal. Some of them might be, you know, a willingness to – when the phone rings at 6.30 at night, you're the outside salesperson. That's usually who it comes to. And you have the option to, you know, press the old go to voicemail button, but I promise you when you press the go to voicemail button, that customer is calling the next person. Yeah. And they're going to find someone. Yeah. And whoever they find is going to get an opportunity next time. Yeah. And so I really do think that if, you know, with the exception of the stay safe, which you always have to do first, there's probably no more important value or something that defines our organization than a group of people that are willing to find a way. You know, usually there's – if one valve won't work, there's 10 others that will. Yeah. You know, if a regulator with a certain spring won't work, maybe there's one that will get them through until next week, right? Yeah. You know, our engineers and our technicians are outstanding at that. Yeah. And they're – many times they're unsaid or unsinging or unheard heroes, but our people that are out in front of customers doing the work every day are really good at that. Yeah. And sometimes inside people, because a lot of our inside people are – we hire them out of college. A lot of them are newer, younger. Yep. That's where I think we need to impress on a lot because probably no one interfaces with our customers more than your team. Yeah. And the inside team. And they're also many times the youngest and most inexperienced in terms of having these opportunities. So knowing how to say yes can be a challenge, right? And feeling empowered to say yes can be a challenge. Yep. And so I would really – for those people that are listening on the inside, or anywhere for that matter, if you haven't been here long and you're not really sure what it means, how to say yes, or am I empowered to say yes, don't hide from that question. You know, come out and ask. Yeah. Knock on my door. Knock on your door. Right. You know, and get an answer to that. Yeah, and that goes back to, like, the approachable thing, right? Yeah. That doesn't even have to be an idea. It just has to be, hey, I have this situation. Can I talk about how – the best way to handle it? Or how would you have handled it if you were – when you were in my seat? Things like that. Yeah. You've been here 10 years now? Yeah. So how long do you think it took before you felt like you both knew what it meant and how to do it? Well, I'm a – I was in a unique situation because I worked with Bob Thompson right out of the gate. So – and for those of you who don't know Bob, he was an old – a retired now service coordinator for IVF. Did you say old? I think you called him old. I did. Yeah, I heard that. I didn't say old, yeah. Squeaked out. I was going to say an old – like, past old, but not like – I mean, he – He would appreciate that. I know everything that you're getting ready to say is complimentary. Yes, yes. But Bob was just – I mean, Bob was just the get it done type attitude. Yeah. No matter what, we were ripping things apart, and he knew where things were hidden. He knew customers that had stuff on the shelf even that we had a good relationship with. Like, I remember calling – like, if he was on the road or something, hey, give this person a call at Duke and see. I know they have this valve on the shelf. Ask them if we can borrow it so we can tear it down and resell it to another customer. I mean, he just – the knowledge he had and the basis that he had with our customers was so – it was just so fulfilling to learn from as a new hire. And like you said, understanding what it means to say yes was – it was very, very easy to do learning from him because there was no limit. There was literally no limit on what we would do for the customer. So it was – I mean, I did most of the cleanup, so I know the other side of it of, like, you know, the consequences of those things. But if we can make it work in our system – if we can make it work for the customer, I'll make it work in the system essentially was what my approach was. Yeah, and I think the company was built on the guy. Thompson was great about that. You're right. And Tim Spinski was great about that. And Tim Spinski's son works for us today. But, you know, Don Churchill and Armando and, you know, all the people that a lot of people in this – listening to this podcast would probably know who retired recently. And I can go way back further than that. But the company, I believe, was built – really, truly built – the foundation was built on creating a brand in the marketplace that that's what we did. You know, when I first took this role in 2014, we all got together and talked about our mission, vision, values. That was when we found the words, you know, find a way to say yes. Or, you know, we debated that a lot. But the words were us just trying to find words to define culturally what we thought got us here. Yeah. And so Thompson's a great example. But that's something that I worry about, you know, because we're so – like I think 60% of the organization or something like that wasn't here three years ago. Yeah. And so that would be something that I worry a little bit about is how do we culturally make sure that you learned it from Thompson and I learned it from guys like George French and Jim Neville, by the way, who's still obviously here today. Jim's one of the best at that. You know, Jim just will pursue yes to the nth degree. I learned it from those people. Yeah. So, you know, we've got to make sure that our new people are learning it from somebody. Yeah, right. Learning it from us veterans like you. Yeah. You're old now. So call Thompson old. That's funny. That's how we started, right? That's right, yeah. We'll take it all the way back. That's right. All right. Well, that was it. I think we're – Is that a wrap? We're wrapping it up. How far – how long did we go? It's a little over an hour. Do you think anyone's going to listen to the whole thing? I hope so. Yeah? I think so. I would. I know I won't. I can't stand the sound of my own voice. Oh, really? Well, I'm going to have to edit this. Will you be able to listen to it all? Probably. I'm going to have to, yeah. All right. We'll see. Okay. So I just have a few – I just wanted to say, you know, if you've made it this far, thanks for listening, and I hope you learned something new. And, like I said in my intro, I want your feedback. Dan wants your feedback, you know, what you liked, what you didn't like, and then what you want to hear more about. And, you know, we'll keep bringing people on, and we're going to keep this going. So we really do want to hear your feedback so that, you know, we get more listeners. So keep finding your way to say yes, and you'll hear from us next time. Good job, Ruth. Thank you. Thanks, Dan.
