Learning Without Scars
As a third-generation educator, it is easy to say that teaching and training are in the blood for Ron Slee. From his beginnings as a coach, through his time at McGill University, Ron developed a foundation for the work he does today. From working within dealerships, to operating a consulting company, creating a training business and running twenty groups, Ron has been directly involved in this Industry since 1969. Ron has been known as the industry expert for years, and has brought this expertise to bear through his training programs. Today, Ron provides specialized, job function based internet based subject specific classes, job function skills assessments, as well virtual seminars and webinars. These courses are designed for manufacturers and their dealers, as well as independent businesses in the construction equipment, light industrial, on-highway, engine, and agricultural industries through Learning Without Scars (www.LearningWithoutScars.com). This platform is a continuation of the work begun by Quest, Learning Centers which was established in 1996. This training is aimed at improving dealer parts and service operations through qualified people that are knowledgeable in using operational metrics and current market and operational best practice methods.
Learning Without Scars
Revolutionizing Strategies with Expertise
Unlock the secrets behind data-driven marketing and discover how actionable insights can transform your business strategies. This week, we sit down with marketing maestro Mets Kramer, who shares his expertise on moving beyond basic data reports to harness the power of data indicators and triggers. Learn how to leverage KPIs effectively and the critical role of real-time data monitoring in revolutionizing your operations and boosting customer retention.
Our conversation also delves into the profound impact of data analysis on improving communication within organizations. Drawing inspiration from Patrick Lencioni's "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job," we discuss the importance of clear job structures and measurable goals. By implementing quality systems and providing accessible, role-specific dashboards, businesses can promote accountability and effective communication across all levels. This approach can significantly enhance job satisfaction and performance, turning every employee into a vital contributor to the company's mission.
Finally, we explore how embracing change and technology can maximize business potential. From the complexities of data integration in large corporations to understanding market segmentation, we cover it all. Real-life scenarios illustrate how interconnected systems and proactive employee engagement lead to enhanced customer experiences and overall business success. Whether you're looking to improve employee satisfaction, foster a culture of continuous learning, or stay ahead in a fast-paced, tech-driven world, this episode offers invaluable insights to propel your organization forward.
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Aloha and welcome to another Candid Conversation. I'm joined again today by Metz Kramer and Stephanie Smith. I changed the order this time, put the guy first, which is out of character for me, and we just finished a rather vigorous I think, beneficial discussion on marketing and we want to continue that down a different path Now, focusing a little bit more on the data side of things and responding to a comment Stephanie made earlier that a lot of people don't understand the data issue. They think it's going to be a lot of work to get the data, the data issue. They think it's going to be a lot of work to get the data. So I'd like to start that way and, metz, maybe from a technical systems perspective you can open up that door for us to walk through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the way that I would address that is by addressing the fact that too often, even when you say data analytics, analytics seems to mean for a lot of people I print out a report which could be oldish, and then I have to go with my ruler and pen and go through the report and find the things I'm trying to find. Find the things I'm trying to find and I think people need to start realizing is the beauty of information and any sort of system is that you should be building on the data. You know you can do a little bit of work. I'm going to build, you know, a view of the data that segments my customers, this kind of data, into. You know, say three, these three groups great, I've built that now. Now, that's there. Now I'm gonna. Next, I'm gonna build the next piece and that and they get built into each other.
Speaker 2:And if you get stuck only making very simplistic data like oh, here's a report of all the people that opened your email on MailChimp and then you have to go through them oh, I know that guy, he opened it Like that's getting stuck in, sort of step one of data analytics. You should be taking that and go okay, every time that Joe opens an email, and if he opens it three times, that's great. I can read that in a report. Now I want my next system to say look for anyone who opens it three times, and when that happens, I want this to happen right. So that's and.
Speaker 2:We had a conversation about this a long time, ron, long time ago about data indicators and triggers. You know, and, and analytics means taking that data and building on it to something useful. Right? If you read the same report the same way every time, say, it's just like part sales by month. If you do the same thing and you pick out the same stuff every time, you should be training the computer to do the thing that you do after you read the report.
Speaker 2:That's what it means to move forward and that's why to say that this data stuff isn't hard in a sense is because you do get to build. You get to do a piece of work and then do the next step, and then do the next step, and it doesn't just disappear, because it's built into the system you're building and the more of your own data you have in your warehouse from all different parts of the business to play with, to noodle with, and then make it a piece that you're going to plug into your larger model or your action center, the further you'll get ahead. You'll actually be able to act on all of this data.
Speaker 1:Let me draw a parallel back to marketing. Well, let me draw a parallel back to marketing. The old school view of marketing is brochures and trade shows and advertising and that kind of thing. The data that everybody, the parallel is the data that everybody deals with in the dealership, is the financial report, the P&L. Yes, and most of them don't understand what the hell that is to begin with. And so now we've got an evolution from the quote business system, world target or different consolidators who do exactly what you're talking about. Mets make a program that is going to create a report that goes back to a KPI and hardly anybody understands what the KPI is. One of the most revealing things to me was in the United States. 95% of the companies in the US fail to achieve their strategy. You know what the primary reason is.
Speaker 2:No one reads the KPI reports.
Speaker 1:Communication Nobody knows what the hell the goal is.
Speaker 3:Everybody's got their own interpretation of what the goal is and everybody is building in silos to me what their interpretation of the KPI or the goal is.
Speaker 1:I love you. I love you, that's exactly right. And a partner of mine a long number of years ago. His name was Malcolm Fares. He was the vice president of dealer development for PACCAR. For years he was the coordinator for Boeing on the lunar landing. This is one smart guy graduated from Annapolis, was a Navy pilot until he broke his back from Annapolis, was a Navy pilot until he broke his back. He said management is about three words understanding, acceptance and commitment. And he made that U-A-K so people would remember it. Everybody has to understand what we're trying to do. That's all communications. Then the part that to me was appealing and that Mac and I talked about a lot is everybody has to accept that what we're trying to do is the right thing to do, and most companies don't allow the employees to have a fight about it, a debate about it. Imagine that oh, yeah, yeah, this is what I tell you to do. Damn it, do it. Don't talk to me Exactly.
Speaker 2:Our company will achieve this percentage of that Precisely.
Speaker 1:So this whole thing, mets that you're talking about, customer retention is an example Most business systems. They have to run two reports last year and this year.
Speaker 2:It's ridiculous two reports last year and this year. It's ridiculous. Yeah, but that should be an active display board that is monitoring all of your customers in real time and starting to highlight hey, so-and-so has slipped in the last couple of days.
Speaker 1:Precisely the buying pattern changes a trigger, yeah, no, it's simple stuff, but not in a printout report.
Speaker 2:ron, oh no on the screen, on a big screen or on your phone, with a notification like well, you know if.
Speaker 1:If so, I'm good, I get nasty on this stuff. I'm gonna do it on your laptop, I'm gonna do it on your tablet, I'm gonna do it on your phone. It's there. I'm gonna do it again tomorrow and i'm'm like Jack Walsh. He had a red, yellow, green management style. It was green, I'm not worried about it. If it's orange, send me a plan. If it's red, you're in my office.
Speaker 2:Management by exception. This is data analysis by building exceptions.
Speaker 1:And that's where I was going earlier, stephanie, where the equipment sales executive manager territory, whatever they have a group of people that they're doing that red, yellow, green to. That's the granularity to me for marketing.
Speaker 2:But it's all data driven. Well, go ahead, Stephanie.
Speaker 3:I was just going to say it is all data drivendriven and it is dependent upon people collecting the data. I also like to think of it in terms of the accessibility to the data and understanding the data, but all data has a story and the dashboards that we were just talking about actually puts the story together for you in a meaningful way that makes it actionable, so you can have data. Like Metz was saying, you can have as many spreadsheets as you want, but you need a dashboard to help you visualize the data so that you can make it actionable. But in order to do that, you also need to understand what is the data components that you need to run your business today and what are the market data points that you need to help understand what's actually going on and how you're performing.
Speaker 1:I would give every employee three, maximum five specific measurable I'm going to call them goals, not metrics tied to their job and every day they're going to. You know, patrick Lencioni had a wonderful book called Jobs, jobs, he. He was talking about the fact that jobs people don't understand what they're doing and and he wanted everybody to be able to leave the job every day and he coined a word called immeasurable. He wanted everybody who could leave the job to be able to think about what they did today and say you know, I had a good day today.
Speaker 3:Well, because they understand what the expectation was. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, that's what those three things are. God, I can't remember. It's amazing the things that you lose as you get older. I can't remember the name of the title, but the key with that whole damn thing. Going back to Jack Welch, how do you run 150, 200,000 employees? Right, you've got to have the structure and everybody has to know what the hell we're trying to do. And as a starting point, metz, I think that's lacking from an information perspective.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes we build from it, build it the wrong way. Everyone promotes and Stephanie used the term dashboards, and dashboards tend to be top level, and so we're watching sales versus budget. To look at an analogy quality systems at manufacturing organizations. Don't look at only the end of the line and what went wrong, right? I worked with a truck manufacturer for a while and they had a guy at the end of the line and that guy fixed everything that was wrong.
Speaker 2:True quality systems simply look at all of the steps along the way and make sure that the quality is in every step, and then you can assure that the result is going to be high quality.
Speaker 2:Sales, or any sort of metric or goal in the organization, has to break down into the contributing components that will get you the result you want. And so you don't even really have to watch for the result, because at some point you'll know you'll get it. And yet we're addicted to dashboards that start at top level and then, when something doesn't fit or something's not performing the way we want, now we've got to start digging, and digging is hard, and so the power of information is to start looking at the little contributors to the quality output that we want the number of visits we're going to a sales rep and what was a success rate, and how do we fix that? Like we don't hit the guy because he's not hitting enough places, you know. Or we look at the quality of those visits and how do we fix that? And then the end result of his sales will just happen right, and that's what we should be approaching the information and the interesting thing, I think, is that's what we should be approaching the information.
Speaker 1:The interesting thing, I think, is that's an evolution. When we talk dashboards, that's a remnant from continuous quality improvement or TQI or whatever the hell in 1990, 1980. Yep, your point, metz. On the production line, every stage along the way, is a 95% efficiency. Six Sigma looked at that and said well, that's cool, I got 20 steps. That means I'm 50% efficient. At the back end To your guy fixing everything and the people that caused the problem never know they've caused a problem. There's communication, again in a different way. It's the same thing, except we're putting marketing on steroids with actionable triggers based on data.
Speaker 3:You can do the same thing, though, with anybody in the company, right? If you're measuring along the way, like what Metz was saying, then, whether you use it for marketing or you use it for HR purposes, you're tracking information, and it removes the notion of finger pointing in any given direction, and it helps promote accountability.
Speaker 1:The way I look at it is like a sports team. You know, take basketball. There's five people on the floor, there's one, maybe two, that are outstanding players, there's three, maybe four, that are part of the machine, but you take them away and that guy who's a superstar is nothing, and you know it's really interesting.
Speaker 3:And every job to your point, I think, stephanie is every job in the company is there to satisfy customer needs and wants this is when NASA was trying to put a man on the moon and JFK went to NASA for a visit and he just happened to bump into the janitor and he said what do you do here? And the guy said I'm here to put a man on the moon. It does come down to communication everybody rowing the boat in the same direction, but that comes to access to information and a firm understanding of what that information is actually telling you.
Speaker 1:We haven't done and this is something that bothers me a lot we haven't done a very good job of involving every employee in the company, like that janitor, in what we do. They're worker bees and we don't pay attention to worker bees.
Speaker 3:So let's go back to that dashboard for a second Right. Like you're right, most dashboards are parent view for leadership teams or whoever's at the top of whatever department. But if you have what Metz was saying, if you have different dashboards set up for different people along the way so that they can measure their own goals and objectives, it now allows people to insert themselves in the conversation. So if you have a service manager who rolls up to a service director who is noticing that productivity with a certain model is suffering, you now can have a much different conversation than if the service director is the only one that has access to the information and is the only one that's seeing the parent view. It goes back to what Metz was saying. Right, the guy at the top is probably going to dig down where the middle person is going to dig down and up and side to side to understand what the actual problem is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm not complaining about the word, other than the word is a remnant. We need Stephanie, to coin a phrase. Metz that does this. The book that I was referencing is the three signs of a miserable job, and it goes back to the same thing that Metz was talking about that people don't. We don't have many people in the company like that janitor. They feel anonymous. That's one of the three signs. They don't understand their role in the company and they don't know how to measure their performance. We have data and we have the ability to create analytics programs let me call it instead that can measure all that stuff. Can you see anybody in the dealership, mets, that's trying to do that today? Or Stephanie?
Speaker 2:So here's my pet peeve, and it comes. It comes from my, my history, you know, and it comes from my history. I started with Tormont and we had a full backup of DBS in our own data warehouse and from that we built the tools that allowed people to understand every piece of the dealership and contribute to and Tormont was good at this. They had this. My first program was 40 and 04. So these were 40 metrics by 2004. And they all broke down to branch level. When we started selling that information systems and tools to other cat dealers, the first thing that would happen was I came to realize that every dealership looks at their stuff differently.
Speaker 2:They have different priorities, different goals. They want to do it a different way, and so they need to change that. And so here's my pet peeve we live in an industry with too many systems out there that are closed that they make it exceptionally difficult to get at your information, to integrate it into tools that you want to use. If I'm on platform X and I want my data in HubSpot because Stephanie rocks HubSpot, then we're like oh, we don't do HubSpot, we have this tool, or you can get some of this data this way, or we have constructed and this is what Tormont recognized really early on, we have constructed the perfect dashboard. It works for everyone. It's like no, it doesn't, there's no such thing. That's the first thing we have to understand about information is that it's going to be different for every dealership. They need access to it to understand it for their market, their product. The software itself doesn't do it, it's just. It's always about information and then being able to understand that in your own light.
Speaker 1:What's really interesting is similarly, I predated DBS. Smart guy Is that even possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had a thing called dealer data processing which was started about 1967. It was all batch, it was a service bureau. Paper was sent in and key punched and reports went back and all that stuff, and two of the guys that were involved with that kind of I was a young pup then and put me under their wing and helped me through a whole bunch of stuff. But what they did then is they sent me all around the world to dealers that were underperforming. And, to your point, matt, I was able to go into a dealership and essentially every single one of them had the same financial statements, they had the same chart, so everything was defined the same way.
Speaker 1:So there's challenge number one, because every damn dealer now, cost of sales and service is an interesting thing. Cost of doing business for the AED doesn't have a cost of sales. It has expenses for technicians. So we have these weirdo things. That makes Stephanie has to be much more creative, much more skilled at being find the source of the data, let alone the formulas of the data. And this is my pet peeve who owns that piece of data? Who owns that data element? If anybody touches a data element that I own, I'm going to cut them off at the knees and we don't have any of that today and we have disparate systems. Salesforce is a good example. There's a customer profile there, there's a customer profile in the emphasis and CDK and all these others, and they don't talk to each other. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Which is crazy, and you're duplicating data at that point.
Speaker 1:Oh shit, tell me about it. And then we had that debacle about three, four weeks ago with CDK having the system go down and we had CrowdStrike last week. We're at the point that we're getting seriously exposed on data. Yeah, who cares? I don't know anybody Like that CrowdStrike thing that shut down airports, for goodness sake. Shut down a couple of airlines. I don't see any residual. Nobody's doing it. It's gone out of my memory now, kind of like.
Speaker 2:They were sending out $10 gift cards for lunch to their affected customers.
Speaker 3:Got one, they did.
Speaker 2:You got that one, you heard that one.
Speaker 3:No, I was affected by it. Remember my flight? Yeah, you had to drive home.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm sure you'll get a gift card. Yeah, no, I got one For a $10 lunch.
Speaker 1:So just to show you how stupid I am. We put an interactive system in at Hewitt in the early 70s and I think in Canada we were one of the first ones to do that. We had seven stores and the parts sales order number. Well, we want to be efficient. We're going to rotate it from store to store to store. Whoever comes up next gets the number. It's a great idea, unless you have checkpoint recovery and the system goes down. How do you recreate which order goes where? It was a pain in the butt. We've got all of this stuff, all this data reports that people pour through inventory management looking at suggested orders. They go through line by line by line. Oh, I don't want four, I want two. Why? We don't understand the damn business, isn't that true?
Speaker 2:The way to understand it is to build on. It is to build on what you read, what you read in a report, what you learned last time is to build on it, and that is why the models, the companies we always aspire to be, are where they are. Amazon knows when something gets listed exactly what kind of traction it should have, what its sales should be gets listed, exactly what kind of traction it should have, what its sales should be, and if it isn't achieving that to within like 1%, some analyst is looking at that page that displays that product and trying to figure out why is it not selling? Oh, this is in the wrong spot. That picture isn't right. Now it will perform the way we want. Stephanie, you're making great faces form the way we want.
Speaker 3:Stephanie, you're making great faces. So Well, yeah, because when it stops performing, they cut it immediately, and that that is I mean immediately. I've got clients that are leveraging Amazon right now to sell attachments, and so if it stops working at any given point in time, amazon will trigger you and let you know. Hey, you basically have like X amount of days to figure out what this is going to look like, or we're going to cut you. We don't do that today. We hang on to inventory within our fleets because we don't really understand how it is or isn't performing or what is going on in the marketplace in terms of actual acceptance of it.
Speaker 1:That's because we're back 40 years on how we look at the market. We're playing with our. You know our territory at 80-20. You know, maybe it should be 95-5, maybe it should be 65-35. I don't care, but it ain't 80-20. It isn't but it ain't 80-20. It isn't. That's a pyramid. Remember Poisson Metz versus normal distribution. Poisson is everything skewed to the left of the smaller activity. Normal is the same on both sides.
Speaker 2:When you say Poisson, I think about the Little Mermaid and that chef. Yeah, that's right, Right away. I'm totally distracted. I'm singing the song inside my head it's a small world.
Speaker 1:Right, we have, we. We have the data. How the hell you know, stephanie? That'd be a mess both. That'd be a good source for a blog for both of you.
Speaker 2:The triggers we came up with a new. We came up with a new title for our blog series which is based on that montel jordan song called this is how we do it and we're just gonna show you how we do it. You just gotta go do it. You know, one of stephanie's old colleagues was very blunt about that. People used to ask him all the time like how do you get such good traffic to your site, how do you get such high rankings? How do you do this? And his answer was I'll tell you exactly how I do it, because you still got to do it and it takes time and you got to keep tuning it. That's fine, I'll tell you exactly how to do it and feel quite the same way. I'll tell you exactly how to do it. You know, or how something works. Why hide it behind three web pages and a contact form and request a meeting to tell me you know a little bit more so that I'll get you down the pipe. Like I'll just show you how to do it, because it's still work.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, yeah, it's still work. And so at the end of the day, you have to decide whether or not you're going to put the heart and the hustle into it. And it's funny because people say aren't you worried about, like, sharing all of these marketing secrets that you're sharing? And I'm really not, because it's whether or not you're going to actually invest the time to do it.
Speaker 1:Stephanie, one of the interesting things people typically don't want to share. So if you've got a piece of knowledge, people are really suspicious of you if you'll openly tell them what it is like what Metz just went through as a teacher most teachers teach the subject matter. When I was teaching at university and I was teaching people how to teach, my message to them was your job is to teach the student how to teach themselves to put you out of a job, and you know we don't. So today, with data and how we can look at these things with triggers, there's a whole bunch of people that should be working to put themselves out of a job, and only by doing so. Like that's what I did and I got changed back at Hewitt I don't know how many times. Cute little side story.
Speaker 1:One job I had I was at the point of like three or four hours in the day. I was done. So I went to my boss and I need more work and he said well, I'm finished by noon, so I'll tell you what. I'll give you a week. What do you want? Two, because if you don't give me more work, I'm going to start going home at lunch. He didn't give me more work. And I did. Took him two or three days before I got the phone call. So what? So, while I'm going home, he said you can't do that. The job goes till five o'clock.
Speaker 1:I said well, I told you I was running out of work. You have to give me more work. He says, ok, come in tomorrow and I'll give you more work. He loaded me up. I did it again. He didn't know what to do with me. If every employee had the opportunity to do the same damn thing, I'll tell you what. Everybody be happier. Sure, I'm going to be home by lunch. Well, you know, that's why it works. A four letter word from my perspective, I think.
Speaker 2:If there's one thing we've learned is this idea of protectionismism, of not teaching people, not giving them information. You know that that's going to improve your business. It it's the opposite. You know it's. We used to have sell material handlers and if you go and show your customer how to use that material handler more effectively, to load faster, be more efficient in every way, it doesn't kill your material handler sales. You're the one they're going to come by all the material handlers for because you bring that value. So why are we so protective of training information, how to use information, information in general? Like oh no, that's you. You know that's in our system.
Speaker 1:You can't have that like it's just going to make you more valuable yeah, I want people to be able to pick up the phone and call me because they have a problem that they know that I'll give it a serious shot at it and I might have an answer. It's, you know, the the only musician this is my illustration all the time the only musician that doesn't pay any attention to the audience is the conductor. And the conductor is only good if the individual sections of the orchestra are good, so his concentration is on the people delivering the service. The president of the company better be paying attention to the people that touch the customers. They're the heroes, they bond the relationship.
Speaker 2:Most of them spend their time going out and seeing customers.
Speaker 1:That was like trying to pull chicken's teeth to get people from the counter one half a day a week to go out with a salesman to see the customer. It's powerful as hell when you do that. In Quebec, one of the paper companies that was run by a guy who wanted to separate from Canada. His name was Ray L I won't give you the last name. He's about five foot six and I'm English speaking French, but he wasn't happy with my French. So he complained to the owner and the owner blessing sent him back to me, complained to the owner and the owner sent him back to me and he said I guess that solved your problem right.
Speaker 1:And so we had a company dinner in his store area. He's there and I'm in those days reasonably fit. And here's this guy. He doesn't even come up to my chest, and so I just hung my chest over top of him and asked him if he had a problem. He became very quiet really quickly. But how do we get people to open? I need help. Employees don't want to stick their hand up saying they need help because they're going to get criticized. That's true.
Speaker 2:You think that's true. I don't know, is it out of fear of criticism or is it out of feeling like they don't get answered anyway?
Speaker 1:That's a good question. Probably both ways, but one of it is most of the bosses tell them what to do. That's true. They don't want you to have any creativity. Just do what I tell you to do, and that's it.
Speaker 2:Go, go ahead. It's one of the problems in information systems. Like most people at the top of their information systems organization don't understand half of what's going on in shadow. It aka excel or what the challenges are, because the people who are having challenges eventually just shut up. This is super inefficient to do my accounts payable processing. But you know what? I just keep my head down. I get as much as I get out and everyone just thinks it takes three days to get everything done for a month, instead of listening to say well, this is why it's slow, apply the change and now it takes half a day to close the month.
Speaker 1:That's where you know we end up with a system. The people that are creating and managing and developing the systems don't understand the business trying to serve and, as a result of that, the product that they deliver to the people that are serving the customers, the employees, continue to do what they've always done because that's how they know how to do it and what was delivered to them was bad.
Speaker 3:Well, that goes back to something you just said about the airline industry and something that we've talked a lot about with Amazon. Right, like people, people don't like to get pulled out of their comfort zone, and people are conditioned to do things, whether they like it or not. They're also conditioned in a lot of different ways, and so one reason why people aren't complaining about what happened with the airline industry is we have been conditioned to accept it. Right, like that that happens. We are conditioned in a lot of different ways. Like that happens, we're conditioned in a lot of different ways. We are also conditioned by Amazon to expect a more succinct and convenient buying opportunity.
Speaker 1:And it's interesting. I agree with you 100%. Stephanie. A friend of mine is at the top tier of two different airlines. He travels internationally all the time. I was on the same kind of situation and it's really nice not having to travel like that anymore. But the good guys, the top 1%, they get everything Up to first class for nothing. Have as many bags as you want and all the rest of the nonsense class for nothing. Have as many bags as you want and all the rest of the nonsense.
Speaker 1:There used to be a category at Delta called the flying colonel, which was a status that was recognizing your standing in the business community, and they stopped doing that somewhere in the early 2000s. And I'm on a Delta flight I don't know 2010,. Call it just to and the pilot comes back. I'm in first class. He sits down beside me. He says shakes my hand. He said we don't know 2010,. Call it just to and the pilot comes back. I'm in first class. He sits down beside me. He says shakes my hand. He said we don't see many of you guys anymore. I said what's that? Flying colonels? I said well, you discontinued it. You took away all our perks. He started laughing. He says there weren't enough of you. There's market segmentation, right segmentation right Exactly what?
Speaker 1:you're saying, stephanie, you know so.
Speaker 1:Amazon and Walmart bless them are now running pretty much neck and neck and we got a different model like what Metz brought us. Best Buy, costco there's a lot of really good illustrations. The automotive industry is kind of interesting, the light industrial equipment industry is interesting, and every single one of them is a different market. Every single one of them is a different segmentation issue. Every single one of them is a different intellectual challenge. And then I keep going back to delivery systems, telephone social media, face-to-face, etc. Delivery systems, telephone, social media, face-to-face, et cetera. And whether it's a dashboard or a session, stephanie says you know, we have these metrics, these measures, that for every single person in the company, right, janitor, somebody in the warehouse sweeping the floor, I don't care what it is You're, you're important to me, so start building them, yeah.
Speaker 2:Start developing them, start building that information.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And insist on being able to get access to it.
Speaker 1:Isn't it interesting the term API? That's the most outdated baloney that I've seen. What APIs I should be able to go right into your machine and figure out how to extract it the way I want to extract it. Don't tell me how to do it.
Speaker 2:Explain that one.
Speaker 1:That's called privacy. Nobody's going to open up their data to me. You know we do APIs with schools where we've got about 400 products. So the school has to put the 400 products into their curricula, into their syllabus. You've got to link it over to our learning management software and then the transcript. The score has got to go back and go into the transcript. It is a booby pain. Sincerely, it's a pain. It is a booby pain.
Speaker 2:Sincerely, it's a pain Some of them are a pain, but it also lends itself to all kinds of really connected integrations. You know, like when someone says, oh, I have this, but I love HubSpot. It takes a bit of work but you can synchronize everything back and forth. You don't have to do it manually through uploads and stuff. Um, you know, salesforce has them, everyone has them, or they should have them, some people don't, um, so you know it lets you move, you know how we do it now how do you do it now?
Speaker 1:websites to help with it. You do what you link the websites to help with it. You do what we link the websites. I'm on their website. They're on my website. Then you know if somebody comes into a school of 50,000 students, they want to see an online course. Click what department. Click what kind of job, click End of story. You're over with me. They register, they're back to them.
Speaker 2:So that's an example of a bad API. Pardon, that's an example of a bad API. That's not an API at all. Well, if they called it one, then it's a bad one.
Speaker 1:No, but that's an illustration, because we're pulling data, all kinds of people. Target pulls data out of the system. They can pull it out of the emphasis in a different manner than CTK and a different manner than Infor, than a different manner of SAP. They're all after the same thing. Why don't I just do a data dictionary type of thing Where's your part number, where's your machine price, where's your inventory on hand?
Speaker 1:And that's all you you're you're talking about like standardized interfaces oh my, what a crazy idea instead of having sensors that are cat, kamatsu, deer, etc. Everybody's different, do it all the same way as automotive, where we shared the same stuff.
Speaker 2:Let the best that takes pressure, like aemp pulled that off on telematics data. It took years. Now it's ISO standardized endpoint, you know um definitely a lot of value in similar things and other areas of the business so AEM, yeah, sell their equipment like EDA did data because because that gets me all brands.
Speaker 1:Then my data analytics. Then back to Stephanie for marketing. Now I can segment my market to the people that buy competitive machine specific. A guy doesn't buy the right ratio of labor from me with my brand of equipment. That's another trigger. He's going to leave me soon. It's not just buying habit changes, it's business interactions, right?
Speaker 2:Or he's parked the machine. You don't know about it. I had this conversation with Stephanie in our previous role and the value, especially if you're breaking into markets, of understanding the value of telematics and understanding whether or not you got that sale because someone was trying to make a point to their other vendor or because they're truly interested. But if you don't know if that machine is being used, then they may have bought one machine and you think great, we got a new customer and like it's parked, but you never follow it up in three years.
Speaker 1:And that's the point you got to communicate. Yeah, and you know, our first discussion, primarily on marketing, was how we look at the marketplace and how we cover it and how we manage that and the various approaches. Now we're looking at data. We give all this data to people. The machine, the engine hours it's been idling half a day for the last three weeks. Nobody's calling to find out what the hell's going on. That's a trigger.
Speaker 2:It is a trigger. Yeah, it's simple.
Speaker 1:And the other side of that is why the hell do I need to be in the office if I'm going to follow up on triggers?
Speaker 3:So if you really want to dive into this, you have to think about what are the pain points of the customers, and customers have literally told me to my face. One of the biggest pain points that they have is I don't want to have to worry about whether or not my machine is going to fail tomorrow. I don't want to worry about whether or not it's as productive as it's supposed to be. I've got 50 job sites that are going on right now. Give me some way to understand whether or not it. Give me peace of mind is what they're asking for, and that's what data can provide, and that's also what technology can provide.
Speaker 1:I'm in the process of creating a thing called STX, the virtual garage, and it's selling subscription services that do exactly what you're talking about. That machine is overheating. That operator is turning right all the time. That operator's going backward when he should be going forward. He's idling three hours every day. What the hell's going on? And get those alerts going back to the guy. Okay, we'll sit down with the customer and say, okay, what's your pain points, what keeps you up at night? And we'll respond to those. And oh, by the way, it's two bucks a month yeah you know it's a stupid price, right.
Speaker 1:So it's all of this stuff now we're talking about, not yesterday anymore yeah I think, it's.
Speaker 2:I think it's super interesting you know like to to work on that and at the same time we're having the conversation that we see our dealer friends struggle to even implement the basic application of some data past a sales report. You know, and and I ran the customer support center we had big. We didn't even have big screens. They didn't have big flat screens. Back then we had projectors on the wall that showed product link data and stuff like that, and that was the model. You know. We're going to sit and watch your machine and tell you when we were getting fault goes, and yet we were the one of only two cat dealers that had a product link feed into DBS that we could actually do this, you know, and so that's changed a lot.
Speaker 1:Talk to Joseph Albright. I mentioned his name to you before. Yeah, you should reach out to him because he's an interesting dude. All of this stuff, though, it's marketing, it's customer relationships, it's customer retention, it's market share All of these things lead to profitability, but it's also requiring employee development in a style and manner that's never really been done. We had eight guys running the counter mitts in Montreal, and I remember a Friday afternoon you might have heard me say this.
Speaker 1:A guy comes in the front door a customer. It's about 3.30 in the afternoon. He looks at the counter. There's people there, the phones are ringing, everything's going crazy. He turns around and walks to and my cubicle was right in front of the door. He turns to his left and he walks and he sits down beside the receptionist, picks up the courtesy phone. She answers the phone. He asks for the parts department. The phone rings in the parts department. One of the guys at the counter serving a customer leaves, said excuse me, sir, I have to go get that phone and takes the call, takes the order, asks where he wants it to ship. The customer stands up. He says I'll pick it up. I'm over here. True story. We trained our customers not to come in. I could kill to get them to come in. Today we're merchandising, stephanie. I mean, there's so many things here.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I don't know where to start. There's so much right.
Speaker 3:There are so many things here and it feels like we're you know, throwing stones at our friends in the industry feels like we're we're you know, throwing stones at our friends in the industry. I think it comes back to just understanding that there's so much change that is happening in our worlds, around us and people. So much of marketing is psychology, right, people want to be comfortable in their surroundings, and so much of what we're talking about makes people uncomfortable, and it's change, and change is hard, and so I think, honestly, the people that are going to win are the people that care the most about what's actually going on with their customer and how they can service their customer better than anybody else, and whether that's through marketing or whether that's through technology or whether that's just through real-time information and how you make it accessible for others. Yes, you've got a responsibility as a business owner to educate and empower your employees, but you also need to be educating and empowering your customers as well, and you can do that through information.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you're right to put a caution flag up. I don't view this as being critical of people, and the people that need to care is everybody in the company that touches the customer, and I don't think there's enough of the leadership in the company that understand that. Whoever answers that, janitor at NASA, that's a perfect, perfect illustration. That's wonderful communication by leadership, isn't it?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did you see the movie Hidden Figures?
Speaker 3:I haven't seen that.
Speaker 1:No, it's about three black women that were instrumental in NASA and how even washrooms were an issue in that era. So you know you should watch that one.
Speaker 2:They were called calculators. It's a wonderful movie.
Speaker 1:And I think one of the ladies has still got a building named after her. She was a math genius and she got the Medal of Freedom. There's a lot of talented people in this country and as technology becomes more sophisticated bad word as it becomes more useful, we have to get. People like my grandchildren are a hell of a lot more familiar with systems now than I was at that time. That's for darn sure. But everything today it's amazing what we can do.
Speaker 3:So I'd also like to give this caveat right, like we just talked a lot about how people want to be comfortable, right, and people don't like change, because change is hard. What you just said, ron, is technology can also make you comfortable.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:If you utilize technology and you utilize information in the right capacity, there's comfort in knowing that your systems are operating to their fullest capacity, your machines are operating to their fullest capacity, your employees are operating to their fullest capacity, as well as your customers are operating at its fullest capacity, and so sometimes you have to be willing to be a little uncomfortable up front in order to get comfortable with something new.
Speaker 1:The number of people that would be uncomfortable in my experience is small compared to the people that are made comfortable, most of the people doing the work. Nobody asks them what's the thing that's the biggest pain for you, and then that person goes away. Once they get the answer, figures it out, comes back and gives them an answer, a solution to that problem. That employee is going to think you're a hero and they're going to feel grateful for that help.
Speaker 3:And they're going to stay.
Speaker 1:Well, that's true, but we don't do that enough, stephanie.
Speaker 3:That's the part that I'm trying to get out there. Sure, I will say that I had a very unique experience at a dealership where people did care, and when people care, people stay. People feel valued, they feel heard, they feel like they're contributing to something bigger than themselves. And in today's day and age, I'll tell you that the Gen Zs that are rolling in right now, that's what they want. They want purpose and they want to understand how their piece of the puzzle is helping to drive things forward.
Speaker 1:They want what I call worthwhile work. You know it's anonymity, irrelevance and immeasurability. The irrelevance is that employees typically don't see how their particular job function fits.
Speaker 3:Which means we have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to educate and share what we know, whether it is something that may, quote unquote, threaten our businesses because we're oversharing. People need to understand what has happened in the past and that helps shape the future.
Speaker 1:It's about communication. You know, my story is I got fired five times by the same guy. Once I got home and the phone was ringing and he was so passionate about everything he did. If he was still alive and the phone rang saying he was in trouble, I'd just ask where he was and I'd be gone. Those types of people are out there but we're not developing them. It's a really. You know, everybody's busy, but a lot of the busy is busy work. You know, I try and get people to read books and Indistractable is one of the ones that I recommend to people. It's by a behavioral scientist who teaches at Harvard and it's about how you organize your work, how you get things done, and I don't know. It's about a year ago. I read the book and I changed something for the first time that you know how I do my job that I've been doing for 50 years, for goodness sake.
Speaker 2:And it works a hell of a lot better.
Speaker 1:You know there's people and examples like that Metz is talking about. You know, get the data. You look at that report. What do you do with it? Oh, okay. Well, let me get you a quote. A Stephanie board, you know, and we don't need to have the paper. It won't print it anymore. I got into data processing. We had 150 different forms. More than 50 of them had not been used in a year. What the hell? We still got them for it. That's everywhere.
Speaker 2:So are you an access to information person? Yes, I would define myself as like. I worry very little about people having access to information because it helps them solve problems. But I find other people are the opposite. They're like oh no, only certain people can have information, so which one?
Speaker 1:are you. If it has anything to do with your job, I'm going to give you anything you want or need. Period. Anything to do with your job, I'm going to give you anything you want or need. Period. In 1971, a guy by the name of Ian Sharp had a company called IP Sharp Associates and we were online. We were on the internet, we had access to the World Bank, to OECD, all of these things. Very few people were on there. There were some people in Texas. Three of us were asked to quote on putting the legal system of Columbia on the computer. So, as part of our proposal, I pulled data down on all of the cabinet ministers of the Colombian government and included it in the proposal. Two of the guys that were with me were in Texas. They got a phone call almost instantly when?
Speaker 1:the hell did you get that information? I'm a guy that wants to have anybody who has need for information have that information, without any conditions, without any filters, nothing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think people are as dark state when you give them access to lots of information in any dealer software that they're going to go digging around. I mean, most people are so busy day to day anyway that even if a parts guy had access to you know the sales system and top line sales he's not going to spend his time digging around, he's not going to dig into every customer's profile and try and figure out stuff. You know it. And yet the benefits when they could access something when they really need it or understand where the organization is going, the benefit is huge and yet you know I think that
Speaker 1:information mindset, yeah, yeah to Stephanie's point about Gen Z and leaving by restricting access, what does that say about your trust of that employee? And you don't trust me? To hell with you, I'm out of here. Yeah, have been published in the last couple of weeks about the first quarter of 25 being a job quitting period of Gen Z's. Between 20 and 25% of them are going to change jobs in the first quarter of 2025. Companies haven't realized the asset that they lose when employees leave. I call it walking around assets. It's between your ears. You know. They know how things work, they know where to find things, they know where the bathrooms are, all that stuff.
Speaker 3:Well, and there's a cost associated with that too. It's not just the cost to replace them, it's also the cost in the in-between.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's HR statistics on that. It's something like five to seven times the salary. It's just like defections of customers. A dissatisfied customer tells five people that. Those five people tell another 11, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:All of this stuff is interrelated and we're getting smarter because we know this, but we're not doing much about it right I think, yeah, I think that's that, that's the information mindset, yeah, that that switch that either you're you're going to work off a couple of reports or from gut or whatever, and you know, younger generations or I think, culturally just generally changing towards an information driven mindset and wanting to have more access and people coming into your organization that want to use information. I think one of the things that I find and we've talked about this in the past too is that our industry needs to figure out how to foster and develop people who are proactive. And yet so much of our business is reactive. Service is reactive, parts is reactive, a large part of sales is reactive. We need to understand that if we bring proactive people into the organization and they don't find access to information or an ability to work in a proactive way, we're going to lose proactive people.
Speaker 3:We're supported yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we need to support that, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I would submit to you.
Speaker 2:We've already lost the vast majority of them. Oh, I totally agree. I started the management training program, you know, and lots of business and engineering people would come in and those that, those of us that liked you know the service life or something similar, you know, would stick around and continue. But a lot of the really proactive forward thinking, you know people would eventually just get bored, you know, or not find something that satisfy them. You know they would play on some friend, like six Sigma had a bunch of people go in that direction. But again, unless they find an organization fosters proactive activities and working in that way, they're eventually, you know, they go do an MBA and never come back.
Speaker 1:To Stephanie's point, though we almost have a half life on things. There's a birth and there's a death, and we get bored, or it doesn't live up to its hype, or whatever. Cqi is one, six Sigma is one, 5s is one. Here we go. I used to tease people. All we did is repackaged and renamed things and increased the price. You know, here's COVID. Look at all the changes that society has accepted service charges, credit card charges, et cetera, in the retail world and they're doing it under the guise that, well, we lost so much money during COVID. They didn't lose a penny during COVID. It was paid for, we paid for it. But so this, you know, the proactive people. That's a good way of putting it. Metz, we need to encourage companies to hire some young whippersnappers, men and women that are geometric thinkers, that are curious as hell and they're impatient as hell, and let them go Go find something.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I'd also say that there's a lot of curious people that aren't young whippersnappers and there's people that are shut out. There are people that are shut out every single day because they think differently and they challenge the status quo. And I think that especially I mean I can speak about it from my business that I love it when I bring in an outsider to kind of challenge the way that I'm thinking about my business or how I'm servicing my clients, because it makes the business better and it makes me better, and the only way you do that is by accepting that somebody else has a different opinion.
Speaker 1:We call that lifelong learning and very few people ascribe to that. You're one. You know. You and Mets are lucky because you like what you're doing, You're good at what you're doing, You're not going to get bored not a chance and the number of people that are lucky like that or fortunate like that, or whatever the term, is very few Half the people in the country. In this country, I guess, the number was 62%, the last one I saw they just go to work every day. Imagine what that's like. I couldn't do it.
Speaker 2:You're also talking to two people that left you know corporate organizations and started our own thing. It's a particular subset of people who quit and then start their own thing in order to find happiness.
Speaker 1:subset of people who quit and then start their own thing in order to find happiness. When I finished school in 68, everybody told me take your time. It was a really tough job market. Then take your time because you're going to be there for the rest of your life. And then my daughter, who's, uh, 20 years, 30 years, younger than me, she, she's had, I think, nine, maybe 10 jobs now. And every generation goes through that kind of thing. And I, you know the Gen Z's. You're talking about Stephanie. They, I really am jealous of them because they have recognized much earlier. My generation never did. We just got up, went to school, left school, got a job, got married, had kids, bought a house, blah, blah. Here we go, you know the other end of that little dash on the tombstone that represents your 70 years or whatever the hell. It is the Gen Zs today, my granddaughter and grandson, they are totally independent, don't know what they're going to do. They will make whatever it is that they choose to do. Good.
Speaker 2:You have a lot more artists in this generation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my grandson, who's taking nuclear engineering, wants to be a chef. He's only going to that school because it's free. So this marketing thing thing, data analytics not using the right word there the stephanie board um, all of these things are subject to a great amount of change that really is going to be beneficial to employees, opening up the line of communication to every employee that the company cares about them. That janitor illustration is one I'm going to use in the future. That's perfect. I wish every employee could be looking at their job that way. How do you want to wrap up this little session?
Speaker 3:How do you want to wrap up this little session, Matt? You want to put a bow on it.
Speaker 1:Put a bow on it, matt, you got to put a bow on it.
Speaker 2:No pressure. I think one theme that I'm hearing is one we need a lot of. This stuff is fairly new and it's constantly changing. I had a conversation with a dealer on information departments in general and I said you have to have some, but recognize that without outside training or someone to come in and have them rethink how things are done, an obvious one is a current change from on-premises having your servers to doing everything in cloud environments. It's a lot of learning it takes, and so you have to bring people in for ideas.
Speaker 2:I've always thought that ideas are really one of the most important things in an organization, but not everyone, or very few people, can come up with unique ideas with no influence from outside, and so, either bringing people in that have seen other things you know, something that stephanie and I both are lucky to get to do we see dozens and dozens of different dealers and see what works and what doesn't and can share ideas or take your people out to places. I took my parts guys out to a Worth warehouse once to look at how Worth sets up their warehouse completely different than how we did it and when they'd seen some ideas and how that worked. Now we had new ideas coming into parts and how to run a warehouse, and so I think, in these fast changing areas, where there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of missed opportunity, you know working, bringing people in to train, but also that are familiar with what the little training of what it means or what it does and people sign up for anywhere from a hundred bucks a month, a thousand dollar a month to keep your SEO. But SEO is constantly.
Speaker 2:It needs to be understood by people and it needs to change, you know. So I think that's one of the big themes. I think that's one of the big themes and for the rest, it's to continue to build. To execute any of these ideas, you need to take steps and build them into them, to build and not just trust that it's going to get spoon fed to them in the way they need it. Dealers need to understand their own business and build their own understanding of their markets and their customers. So Stephanie.
Speaker 3:I would encourage people to get comfortable with the uncomfortable and then figure out ways to be comfortable with the new norms. What Matt said about continuous building like that is not going away. That will forever be a part of what we've got going on in our world, and the rate in which change is happening is exponential every single day. Keep building.
Speaker 1:It's a history of the country. You know the pioneers and the settlers. It's the same thing, it's just a different flavor now, and technology makes it happen that much quicker. Thank you both. I think this is probably one of the fastest hours you've gone through, and I thank everybody who's listening to this and look forward to having you attend another conversation in the near future. Mahalo.
