[00:00:00] Speaker A: There are three things that you have to accept when you come to work for us. The first thing is you have to check your ego at the door. The second one is, don't come here for a job. I want you to be all in. And third one is that disagreements are acceptable, but conflict is not.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Our guest today is an entrepreneur with 30 years of experience in the rubber and industrial products industry. He launched and built GCP industrial products into a successful multimillion dollar international business in Canada, the United States and in China. He's led the industry in ways of doing business, new ways of doing business with suppliers in China. Really incredible. And he has coached thousands of executives through the strategic coach program. Welcome to the show. Gary Motorshead.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Richard, great to be with you. Thanks. Thanks for this opportunity.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Now, I'm excited to talk about some of your journey. I had the pleasure to get to know you through the coach program, you being, uh, the coach for me for the first number of incredible years. And, uh, of course, I want to make sure before we get too far, to celebrate that you've just launched a brand new book. Uh, in the background, you can see it there. Nimble future. So for any of our viewers, if you want an incredible read, make sure you go and find a copy of nimble future. Um, eye opening, incredible content. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about your amazing journey as an entrepreneur. Now, Gary, um, I think people will learn a great deal from your story because we all have experiences where sometimes we've been having progress and then it feels like we're literally going backwards. I know I've had that in my own life. You experience something similar, and it happened at a point in time in your life when, you know, a lot of people feel like they're really established in their career path. So walk us through what transpired for you and how did you overcome this setback.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Yeah, you know what? I mentioned one beforehand, which I will talk about, but I think maybe in the first one was when I was working with Dupont and I was on a good track to move on, and I realized that while working there that I just didn't see myself in that future anymore now, but I had two children, weren't just born, and I had to decide what I was going to do. And I decided I had an offer to go work for a company and Peter Press, vice president of the company, would just step up from where I was and I said, no, I can't do it. So. But I walked away from the business. I walked away from my job. My wife is pregnant with the second child. Well, she's in the hospital and mom's in the hospital. Cancer. I got a sister in the hospital, too. And I walked away from all of it and said, okay, I'm going to start over. I'm going to start with something. And that was maybe that's an interesting one, because the biggest challenge that happened, I started the tire cycling business in 1989. And when people won't remember that, but here in southern Ontario, there's a major fire called me in tires. When that fire just outside Hamilton and I got this facility, partners, I didn't know we're going to put this together. I had this dream. I wanted to do something that somebody else hadn't done before. So there I go up and do that, not worried about what the money was going to be like, had to throw some money into it. And I'm not working. My wife's not working because she's not on maternity, and jump into this thing. And as we get started, there's a big fire. The government comes along and says, any place with over 100,000 tires on a shutdown, we had over 100,000 tires. So we were totally shut down, couldn't start. Not only that, we had to have a guard 24 hours a day, seven days a week that we had to pay for. That was my start as an entrepreneur off from that point. How do you get out of the straight jacket that they put you into? Spending money, which you couldn't and you couldn't earn money. And then we were given a time to get out, to get this finished and get done and get tires cleaned off site. Well, anyway, real scramble, probably one of the most difficult things I ever did in my life for eight years is to put that tire recycling business together, recovery technologies. And we sold our units around the world at that point in time. So I'd been some interaction, but so that was the start as an entrepreneur. And so somebody says, well, you know, the, the camera's not working or your hand's not running or something's not happening, you go, what the hell is that? That's not because you just think of all the challenges you went through, but the one you're referring to is that when I had finished with recovery technologies, and again, I got out of it with my shirt, even though I sold it up my shirt and put everything else back together again, and I had to decide what I was going to do.
And I'm 45 years old, and so I was actually having to start a war. And. But my wife was, why don't you go get a job? I said, I can get a job, and I'm no good. I can't work for anybody. You know, no one's gonna wanna hire me now. I'm a bit corrupted being an entrepreneur, if you wanna call it parker lot. So from there, I said, all right, I gotta decide on what we do. And I actually, to get started, I actually rented an office, hired a full time assistant, bought all the furniture, took my wife and kids and my mother in law on vacation to the Dominican Republic. Brenda, who was working with me at the time, I said, brenda, the furniture is going to be delivered. My father just passed away, so my furniture is going to be delivered. While we're gone, Val is going to come in and hook up the phone and backsliding. That's how technically savvy we were because of all those, the cell phones and Internet and anything else back in time. And I said, I'll be back in a week. And I said, when I come back, I'll figure it out. And so when I came back, I asked some friends, and they got me a job with the president of the company for about six months, which gave me a few thousand dollars a month income. And I just started working at it. And so at age 45, I think it was at that time, I had to go and put something together, because at that point in time, I didn't have a pension. I hadn't worked long for anybody who had a pension. I didnt really have any money built up.
My son is not too far away from getting to go to college, and ive got a young daughter a number of years apart. And so I said, somethings gotta work. And so I really sat down and said, you know, what? What do I do to make this work? So I understand what it is to bootstrap what it means to get the first $20,000 order and turn it into a 2020, $5 million a year business. And been there from the beginning, but that is probably the biggest challenge. But now, looking back on this now, 25 years later, August of 2024 was our 25th year. I look at it and say, wow, what a ride that's been on. People have done more, built the businesses faster, whatever it was. But it was built to be able to provide my wife and I with an income in future years. We call it that point of retirement. We'll use it so much in coaching more, but it's done that, and it's done more than that. And now I see it has a future, not only for me, but the next generation. My son and a number of other young people are all involved in this business 15 to 20 years into the business, and so it's time to create something for that. That was one of the biggest. In an overview, that's one of the biggest challenges I've had.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Building something from nothing, from scratch, committing to the process before you knew what you were going to do. There's a little bit of a ready fire, aim aspect there.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: You got it. Well, you know, the thing about it was, I'd never been in the business before either.
It's not a business that I knew.
So it's just like, okay, I guess people approached me for a couple of years. I said, would you sell this product, rubber sheet from China? And I said, I never. I always sold raw materials, so I was with Dell. Raw material I never sold in China. Well, after a couple of years of bugging me, I figured I got to do something. I figured, how do I need to sell it now, the interesting thing, Richard, was three years in the business. I decided to ask my customers, why did you buy from me?
Basically, the message that came back was, well, we believed you can do it.
I had never done it before. I wasn't sure I could do it. But somehow we convinced other people that were able to do this, and I think that's one of the real powers of an I, to be able to have so much commitment, as you talked about, and then passion for that.
And failure wasn't an option. I mean, what was I going to do if it didn't work? It was. It's not something that I can walk away from and say, well, I gave it. I gave it the call. Let's try. No, it had to work.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: And what an incredible lesson about setting a vision and being able to convey that vision to other people, clients and customers, so that they can see what's transpiring as well. And at the time that you started bridging the gap from Canada to the. To China, there really wasn't anyone doing it to the degree that you were. You really were a trailblazer in that environment.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, I'm glad. I'm glad you brought that up, because I was thinking as I was listening to you, and there were. There were some things that were really very important that we decided to. Was that because I had some international deals before, and I was advised before I first went to China that your first visit was a social visit?
I'm going halfway around the world. They don't really have any money, why is it a social visit? Because he said, they know why you're there.
If they want to bring up business, they'll bring up business, but they want to know who you are because they may not trust their police and their government, but they need to be able to trust you.
And so that really, really made a big impression upon me because we keep thinking of all these people, or different cultures are really different, but they're not.
We have a little saying in our company called mutually beneficial long term relationships. Unless it's going to be a long term relationship, unless it's going to be mutually beneficial, then there's no point getting into it. And so if that's what it took of going over there and rather than take me around wherever he wanted to, drinking with them, whatever wanted to, whatever social things they needed to do, irresistible, and let that happen. And as a result, I've got a 27 year relationship with people who've been awesome to meet. We have no contracts, by the way, there's no contractual agreements out there. It's all been handshakes, if you want to call it that. All been built on the personal relationships. Because I learned, and particularly for entrepreneurs, we all speak the same language, regardless. It's Mandarin, French or Spanish or general Italian, whatever it might be, because we all have to rely on other people to help us and support each other. And so that made the huge difference for me is that I said, okay, I'm going to trust you. And they had to trust me because when I first went to them, I said, you know, I'll help sell your product for you, but I can't, I can't afford to pay you.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: Sounds like a great sales technique.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: Yes, I can't afford to pay, but once I get paid, I'll pay you.
And so that's the way we've operated for 27 years with this one particular fact. And normally it's money upfront, letters of credit, everything else. And I just said, I need you to trust me. I'll trust you. And if there's a problem, and it's a quality problem, you've got to take, you've got to take responsibility for it. So when I think back over it, we did, we did a lot of trailblazing in that sense, because nobody made the progress that we needed to have made. We had to get them to change what they were doing in order to get it made, and so we just had to.
I guess I was so I was stubborn, pigheaded about it, that this just had to work anyway. It did. And it worked out that the gentleman and tiger who I deal with, both of us have said when we talk to each other, we changed each other lives for the better. When we first met in November 1997 and then started doing business in 1999. So it. But that's just an.
Do you write a script for that? Richard? I think this is, you know, it just. It just the way. Because we were all committed to the same goal. And my goal was to make them to be into world class suppliers at a real clear bowl. What I want our suppliers, instead of just being a domestic supplier, I wanted them to be world, and that's what they want. So, okay, then we need to work together. If you want the us market, which was a prime market, get you. And they had to. They had to trust me. I'm a Canadian working outside of Toronto and saying, hey, I'm going to get you into the us market. So I don't know how this story ever could have got ridden before, Richard. I really don't.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Confidence creates clarity, I believe is how it goes. Gary.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: Something like that, yeah, absolutely.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: And we'll hear more about the confidence Gary has when we come back after these messages. Are you looking for a great book to read? Turns out I have one for you. It's called cash follows the leader. It's available anywhere books are sold. But if you want to get a free copy and you can download it right to your inbox, you can go to coachcanfield.com cashfollows.
We are back with Gary here, hearing about his incredible journey on creating an international business, really from handshake deals, the importance of relationships. Now, Gary, something that came up for me as you were sharing this incredible story is that you've been in business 25 years. Congratulations. And you've built something really incredible, employing lots of people, really making the economic machine churn in more than one country, in three, three different countries. So there's a ripple effect of that activity. But what's curious, you mentioned these handshake deals and working with core suppliers and building those relationships, but people shift and change over time. They move on to different parts of the job. They move on to other companies. How have you been able to maintain the consistency of your, of your, of your business flow and the relationships that you have? What's been the cause of that filter down effect from those original handshake conversations? I'm very curious about that.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, it's.
It's been really. It's interesting to think back over that timeframe, because one of the people that I've been dealing with for 27 years has stayed insane. He was a young man and got started, so he's still there now. He worked for bigger organization at the time and he since gone out onto his own.
And I watched that organization change. But what really happened was establishing the relationships again. So the people we had good relationships with, when we could see that the organization was going to change, wed get back in and talk about those relationships again. Stay there, be with them. I did go to China twice a year for a long time. Ive been 30 plus times to China, and that made a big difference.
And the other thing is that the real commonality in all of this is that the majority of the people that we deal with are entrepreneurs.
And so a lot of the companies and the owners, and so there's a lot of continuity with the owners. And now we're seeing the transition to the owners children, sons and daughters that are there. But then we've gotten to know them all as we transitioning our business the same way. So, Richard, as I, we've been very fortunate. We've been blessed that that's there. But the biggest part of it is, is that we have people who think the same way that we do. And they wanted, we all want, we all want stability, we all want to see growth, we all want to have opportunity, and we don't want to have a lot of problems in our world. And so, you know, as much as all the turmoil that's happening, like, we like this consistency, clarity, as you talked about, we like to see that. And the people we're working with are the same way. So if they believe you are trying to work not only on your behalf, but on their behalf, then they'll go along with you. If it's a once, if they can sense it's a one sided story.
And that's what I think we found. Just I had to be who I was and my concern was to help them. They knew clearly if I was helping them, it was going to help me. And just put all three of us, I should say that the customers and ourselves and the vendors in a kind of long partnership basis, totally transparent. They knew who we were selling to and they knew we were buying Tron, so that they wanted to go around us, which had happened, by the way. And that was another biggest challenges. But then it's worked surprisingly so. Actually, the only people that got around me had been toleration North America. Chinese never did, actually.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: That's interesting. That's very interesting. And I think it's a real testament because you mentioned that even for yourself, your kids to some degree are moving into roles and positions within your organization, and you're seeing a generational shift happen. 25 years is a long period of time, but you're also seeing that same thing happen in your suppliers in China. I really think that that's quite incredible. So you're aggregately growing generational businesses across the globe. I mean, that's fascinating.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: It is. And those aren't things you think about when you start. You're only thinking about survival and making sure you get the next order and you get paid. But now we're seeing, I mean, one gentleman who I worked with for 27 years, he might have been married, but no children. Now his children are growing up. And I probably getting ready to, went through college, getting ready to become in the business. And thats kind of a crazy thing. My son, when was 17, when we first went over, hes now 40. Hes been with me for 17 years. Our daughter has her own business, but we work closely together with her.
And you know what? I think I will say this about businesses, too. If you are not looking after your future, I think thats really, really critical factor, because we're seeing a lot of people, and now you see this in your world, Richard, but we're seeing a lot of people whose businesses, they haven't built the next generation. They haven't built what's coming next. They haven't turned it over. And in GCP, the person who's next closest to me in age is 18 years younger, and they go to 40 years younger than I am. And so the business has been built to be able to carry on. The challenge for me is how do I create, how do we create it big enough so that there's enough for that next generation, as ive had the opportunity. But thats our challenge now. But if youre not thinking about the future, youre thinking about yourself, then its not going to survive that long. It needs to be thought about in a much longer.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: Well, and in the midst of this, theres a global supply chain, and you are highly interconnected to that. And so I know for a lot of typical businesses, they don't see the impact of the supply chain and how it directly connects to them until there's a problem. Like, as an example, at the time of this recording, there's a major hurricane happening down in Florida. That'll probably disrupt some supply chain issues, um, as well as, you know, hopefully everyone's doing okay down in those areas. You know, we're wishing them the best, but major, uh, issues, you know, natural disasters, a lot of geopolitical type things get in the way and disrupt the flow of products that are coming specifically from people who are retailers in some way, and theyre buying manufactured goods in another country. What are some examples of how thats shown up for you guys in your business practice?
[00:19:05] Speaker A: Well, if we take it back just a couple of years, because youre absolutely wrong, but we think about just a couple of years were in the height of the pandemic. I remember one specific incident where we were selling some product into the Chicago area, and this product, that's big conveyor belt type of material, and it's going to end up in the agricultural business. And we're having trouble getting containers. So a 40 foot container at that point would go for 3000, $3,500.
Well, Melanie looks after things for us. Was got a quote for 30,000 wells, 18, not 330 thousand. But wouldn't, was no guarantee, only a slight percentage increase. Yeah, just order, order right into ten.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: That wouldn't impact your margins at all.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: No, no. Except considering sometimes that, you know, we were working at 5%, you know, maybe 10% for the product, we got over 50% for transportation instead of the small numbers anyway. But she couldn't even get a delivery. Well, she finally got something secured at $27,000. I went back to the customers. Oh, great. Thank you very much. So you just think we've gone, the whole pendulum swung that way.
And since that point in time, I think more and more people are beginning to see it. There's not the same amount of product on the shelves. It's not. The costs are certainly meaning to rise. People seeing that much more significantly, because there's just that total flow through, whether it's been international shipping lines, transocean shipping, or railways. A strike in Canada, there was just a strike in the US. There have been lockdowns at ports, and all those things filter through. Trucking changes, fuel oil changes, all of those things affect the supply chain. And in fact, also, the other problem with supply chain is people.
Theyre not the people that want to go into the trucking business.
The longshoremen in the US are really striking against automation. Well, problem with, if we don't automate, we're on the people that operate those things. And so we're just in a real, we're really at a crossroads right now, and it's creating a lot of great deal of uncertainty. One particular example, whatever reason we've never figured out, because we ship 500 containers a year, we have one container that got off the boat in Los Angeles and got put in this pile and it sat there for seven weeks.
We've never had any more than four weeks.
And you could basically go and see it, but couldn't get out of the yard. And so you go, why would this happen? And so if you're planning on product, we used to be able to deliver in eight weeks from order to production and shipping, and this thing sacked after production, after shipping across the ocean, seven weeks, and you kind of go, how do you plan for all of that? And so that's. I'd say you want challenges? That's the biggest challenge we have right now, and I think this is. But anytime there's a challenge, Richard, there's always an opportunity. So we have to figure out how to gather that information in order to help companies be more predictable, what they need to order, when they need to order it, why they need to order it, but they have to look much further up and, you know, the further out you look, crystal ball becomes a lot cloudy. So we're working our way through that. But I think that's where the next level is a challenge right now, but the next level of opportunity to bring more of that certainty and dealing with all the variables that have been levels.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: Yeah, very interesting. And your take on looking at it, I think, is a key takeaway for our listeners is that I don't know any entrepreneur that would exist if it wasn't for some great challenge.
Every great challenge presented is the tackling fuel for the future that we're trying to create. And it's the thing that inspires people to get into business usually in the first place. I think I can solve this problem that I have because other people probably have it, too.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: That's exactly what we do. We got a problem to solve it. That's how GCP got started. People couldn't get supply and we went out and said, well, we can get a choice. And I remember Nathan, who's still with me, calling people and saying, well, I can get it for you. It's gonna be 30% cheaper. And he said, where's it coming from, China? And they hang up the phone on them, you know, so now. But then when they couldn't get supplier, the supply chains were real restricted, who the major suppliers were selling to, and then their costs were going up. Now the door opened up. So we have an opportunity because other people have problems. Jared, amazing.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Well, im so glad that youre here on the forefront of that and youre really creating massive opportunities, not just for the people and the customers. Youre serve, but also for the supply chain vendors and for all the incredible people that work for them. So you really think about the impact, Gary, its an aggregate basis, and I think thats one of the glorious things about entrepreneurship. You dont know exactly how youre impacting everyone, but you recognize that if I do this and I help these people, we create some jobs here. Jobs get created up the line and down the line, typically in all that circumstance. And that is one of the glorious things about the entrepreneurial journey. So thank you for being a part of it. And with that in mind, we're going to talk about some of the incredible innovations that you're working on when we come back after these messages.
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we are back with Gary, and we're looking back on 25 years of incredible history and growing an unbelievable business. Over those 25 years, there's a massive amount of innovation that took place in order to obtain the success of even making it 25 years. So many businesses fail in the first five, and, and you're, you're five times that amount. So, Gary, recently you were able to celebrate this with your team. Uh, very recently, you had this 25 year look back on everything. And during the break, you were sharing something with me about how you were able to recognize all the firsts that you've accomplished. So walk our listeners a little bit through how you reflected on that 25 year journey, and you started to pick out these isolated instances of how you really changed the game.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Yeah, well, when we got started, I'd been in the retire cycle world. I think I talked about that beginning. I started recovery technologies back in 1989 and out of that in the mid nineties. So I'd been involved around recycling tires, and that was a passion of mine. I wanted to make sure, because you could recycle a lot of other products, but Paris was not something that we made the rubber industry never liked it was inferior and so they never wanted to see anything, see it. So anyway, when I was dealing with China, we were all using all recycled material. So now I had to bring in product into the commercial world, into the United States and make it recycle. But I couldnt tell anybody it was recycled because they didnt want it.
I also couldnt make it to the same specifications that the industry was supposedly selling it. So just for the sake of a terminology, 1000 psi pals per square inch was better than 500 psi per spur. I couldn't make any more than 500 psi. But I said nobody needs 1000 because it's all under pressure, they don't need that, they don't need to have this great tension. So I said I'm going to sell it as 500 psi.
Well we sold recycled material and have been doing so for 25 years without failures.
Using 500 psi and we verify, certify everything and forced all the industry to now say the stuff you're selling at 607 hundred and calling it 1000 really wasn't that we forced the industry to become clean and come through on that.
And then the other thing we had was they always wanted to sell by the pound, they wanted to sell product by. Well in rubber business the way you make it cheaper is you put in a filler and the filler is heavier than the polymer. The polymer is the good part, the filler is the cheap part. So they put it in. So they want to sell by the pound. Well because I use recycled material, I couldn't put filler into it. So my product was always lighter. So I didn't want to sell by the pound because I would lose money. So I said how does everybody use it? They use it by the square foot. We're going to sell them by the square foot.
Industry entirely sells by the square foot by square measures, because that's how people use it. But if you looked at your own perspective, we can now compete with a product that they considered was inferior. We changed the specs so that it became that way and we changed the industry to be able to be much more practical from a customer perspective because it wasn't sold by the pound. I lost a couple of people early on because they all wanted to deal with that by the pound. But those are companies mostly in New York that were dealing with the governments and they weren't willing to change. But all that has changed. You know when we look back over, we actually changed how the product was packaged, how it looked, how it smelled, I mean all sorts of things that needed to be done to me, they'll make it look wild. But I did it because I needed to.
I think a lot of us had made changes partially because we need to, but also a recognition of where the industry really needed to go and need to be much more transparent on that basis. And so it was fascinating. One time our guys were out there, and one of the bigger companies whom sold to was saying, yeah, well, they dropped all their distributors, just were picking up their distributors to come work with us. And they said, well, this company used to sells everything by the pound. Nathan Bosnia. Laughs yeah. You know why they sell it by the, sell it by the square foot now is because we taught them how to sell it by the square foot.
But they all become industry norm by the time it came back to us. So it's kind of interesting how the world turns around. Wow.
You know, there's a story I do want to tell you, too. We talked about innovations, and I, in about 2005, and I'd been coaching narrow for about eight or nine years at strategic coaching, I began to look at a call one day from a friend of mine, and I had some less spark was a coaching company. GCP is a rubber company. And she said, which Persona, gary, am I talking to today? And she was kind of being funny. I go, but I didn't laugh. I said, oh, do I really have that? Two different Personas? I'm like, I didn't really like that idea. So I had to go back and think about that. And I said, well, who am I? Because the people in the rubber business never saw me as a coach, and the people coaching couldn't see me as a technical person. So I clearly had two Personas, and I didn't like that, because now you're always conflicted. What are you thinking about? What are you working on? So I sat back and said, what do I want to do? I said, I want to be the coach.
So, well, that's. That's a nice thing to say, but you think about it in Chupalo. Football or hockey, Richard, normal sport, you follow?
[00:30:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm more of a hockey guy.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: So, hockey, where's the coach?
[00:30:33] Speaker B: On the bench.
[00:30:34] Speaker A: On the bench? He's not on the ice, right?
[00:30:36] Speaker B: You can't go make the plays. He can't put the puck in the back of the net.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: There you go. So what meant for me was I was the guy that visited everybody went out and saw everybody let all those things up. And I said, I'm going to be the coach. I have to come up. I have to come up be it.
And now I have to coach someone. So I started then to be able to build a team around me so that I could do what I did best and give up being a star player because actually Wayne Gretzky, unfortunately, great star player, that didn't make a great coach, but I felt I'd make a better coach than a player. So that's what's happened. So lower than us, 19 years or so, I moved myself off of the ice and behind the bench and coached my team, but that made fundamental changes. And you also had to get used to the fact that you weren't going to be the guy on call, you weren't going to be this star player all. And for a lot of entrepreneurs, that's hard on their equal. They want to be the man. They want to be the man in center and up their d. And it dont get me wrong, I still like I get to be the center of attention when I go to coach. I get to stand up and be the center of attention. So I dont shy away from that part. But what the challenge was, I said, if youre going to build the business thats going to be able to operate without you and have some value, you have to do it so it doesnt demand your attention.
And I think thats the biggest change an entrepreneur can make to get them into that spot.
So I think that's something that's, yeah.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: The innovation of recognizing that you can out think the way that you work in your business.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so you've got to get yourself in a position where you're valuable, only valuable in a certain way that's important to you.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Amazing. Well, and that's a big part of the coach system and, you know, being coaching. You've been coaching now for 30 years, I think with, with coach a lot.
[00:32:29] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: Pretty close. I mean, that's incredible on its own. And I really recognize and resonate with your, the concept of the two different Gary's. You know, I definitely feel like I had that at one point in time in my life, and it probably still does show up from time to time. But the idea of merging, you know, what you do. So there's more consistency there, I think makes a lot of sense and that's probably very valuable advice for a lot of our listeners.
[00:32:52] Speaker A: Well, I think we, as an entrepreneur, we always have different parts of our life and so, but whenever we do that, we also have conflict, an internal conflict and maybe your home or it's your own or to your businesses and that you have multiple businesses which some people do.
To me, it's really important you decide the role that you're going to play, because you are the same person. You're all in your own body, you're all in your own brain, so you really want to be one with yourself as much as possible. And so what happens is, if you're going to be talking about innovation, if you're going to be innovative, I believe there's three things that you require. You need to have time, be able to think about things. You need space, and I call mental space. And you need the energy, so you can't be tired. You can't be totally busy, busy all the time, and you can't be totally tied up in your mind. So you need the time and space and the energy. And if you're. If you're a conflict, that takes more energy and it takes more space in your brain to do that. So the more you can simplify that. Darren, clarify, then the easier, the more innovative you can become, because innovation is really just connecting things together, and. And you connect things from the past. As I'm seeing what's going on at strategic coach, what, what you need to do to connect them. But if you don't, if you can't think about it, you don't see the connections, you don't see how to put those together.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's so tremendously important. I was thinking about your story and recognizing even something that came up today with my team, we deal with insurance and underwriting, and there's underwriting challenges, people's health, and some of those challenges are more consistent than others, you know, and as the modern days progress, as an example, behavioral related issues seem to be a big topic of conversationally, especially in children, and they can have an impact on insurance. And so why is it that we don't have proper templates and details together when that happens and seeing the trend line of those so we can communicate that effectively to parents, to clients, the people that we're trying to serve. And so that's now something that we're looking to implement so that we have that available on an ongoing basis.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: There's always. There's always something more to innovate. Now, we recognize in our world, too, that we could see that talking about your situation, letting it to ours, we could see we have the same problems all over again. And so one of the biggest issues that everyone was having with products from China was quality. So at strategic coach, well, talk about dos danger, opportunities and strengths. So we gave everybody a danger. The first danger was quality. And then their second danger was quality, and then their third danger was quality. So I asked them for one more, and they said, communication. So we put together a process that we call the risk resupply solution, and it really totally dealt with how you communicate. And one of the best things we ever did was institute, probably 1012 years ago Friday, weekly order update. And Melanie puts together where their orders are, where they are in production, when it's shipping, when they expect it to be shipped, when they expect it to be delivered. And that has been the single most important document. None of our competitors have ever copied it. Because you have to be able to communicate and have the transparency through your organization and right through the supply chain. And so why? It seems to us to be pretty simple, but when we did it, it's cut the number of phone calls and messages to our office in half, because now people know what to expect and.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: Probably save thousands of man hours.
[00:36:23] Speaker A: Everybody looks for sometimes really great, huge things to innovate on, but service is one of the most important ones to be innovative on. And can you be respected for being the best responsive service? We have this expression with ours and probably been around a while, and bad news does not get better with age. So get it out there as fast as you can and get it there and deal with it. And so that's when, when you do those things, how you handle those issues that you talked about makes a big difference. So a lot of the innovation that we look at is just how do we get better, at making sure we communicate externally, for sure, but also internal and processes. Everybody's got to have processes, the better. You can do those things together. So how we deal with HR, I have a, you know, we have all our core values, but one of the innovations I really, really like for us is I say there are three things that you have to accept when you come to work for us, is the first thing is you have to check your ego at the door.
My ego can't come in? Your ego can't come in. Stays outside. You can pick it up and leave at the end of the day, and the ego doesn't come in. The second one is, don't come here for a job.
I want you to be all in. I'm all in. Everybody's got to be all in. If you want a job, there's other places to go and get a job. And third one is that disagreements are acceptable, but conflict is nothing because we can disagree, which means we have open communication policy. We can talk about it. It's not just a top down scenario. But if we have conflict, that means there's disrespect, and I won't have that in an organization. So I think every organization should really develop their own key criteria for where they're going to operate. And we can talk about technical innovations with next segment. But just sometimes the people innovations can be really, really important because they're the core. They're the core and the key to your success and your future goal.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: Amazing. And with that in mind, we'll be right back after these important messages.
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That thing was this incredible book, becoming your own banker. It was written by my mentor, an amazing friend of mine, R. Nelson Nash. It completely revolutionized and changed my entire life.
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Well, we've heard some incredible things about different types of innovation, 25 years worth, actually, from Gary and his business and the importance of having the right people on the bus and how to innovate, even just in the people zone. But so many more things can happen on the technological front. And, you know, you talked about these important weekly meetings and how that's saved a ton of time. But youre also innovating in the technological space, implementing some AI and implementing some supply chain mechanisms that are going to really help establish probably even some new precedents, I would think, in your industry. And maybe even that can be drop shipped into other industries that deal with supply chain models. So walk us through where this came from, Gary, and how did you develop this idea?
[00:39:51] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it really came from the fact that our worlds are becoming more complex, Richard, and as well, we as humans don't really deal with complexity very well. We think we'll say they do everything else, but reality is, I don't think they deal with it very well. And so I came across an expression a couple of years back, which I've got written on a white poor, hey, my emotion destroys intellect.
And so when we, and coincidentally enough, I've also always had a little expression that we use that if someone comes, if someone comes at me with a lot of emotion about how things are working, I go back to them with facts. But if some come back to me with facts, I don't go escalate it, I go back to them with emotion. So I always like to counter emotion with facts or facts with emotion. So in this expression, emotion destroys intellect came up. I got, okay, well, what happens to us when we cannot make a clear picture of things?
We let our emotions take over. We don't let the rationality take over. And that's sort of normal, because we're human beings, and the human part is the emotional part, and the being part is the intellectual part and human beings. So the emotional part always comes first. So it's not natural to allow the intellectual part and the rational part to take over, as much as we say that. And entrepreneurs are the worst, because they're all emotional being. They're all really emotional about things. We'll always remember the one thing that went wrong, as opposed to the nine or ten things that went right. So always have to come back and gather data. Well, interestingly enough, while we're doing the investigation on how we can utilize AI to help gather the data and be more predictive about what people needed to order, we came across something that's very important. And no matter our business or any other business, there were three elements to making artificial intelligence or machine learning to be successful for you. One is you have to know what you want to get done, because then filter everything through what you want to get done. What's the goal you're looking for? The third one, the second piece is you have to know where the data is coming from, because for artificial AI things requires lots of data. The more data it has, the more it can learn. But like us as humans, although we come to conclusions a lot faster. And the third one is, you have to have processes, and the processes have to be articulated clearly. Without those three things, your AI will not work, will not give you, because then you get garbage in. Garbage in. So you've got to make sure you know what you want to accomplish, where the data is coming from, and then what the process is that it's going to go through. So, because it doesn't really innovate so much better, helps you crunch all those numbers. So when we look at the complexities of the supply chain, from the production times to getting it on the. On the. On the boat to the port, on the boat, from the boat, off the boat, under a train, under trucks, whatever it might be, or multiple molds, and then getting it delivered, you now start saying, well, what are all the factors that can get in there? Well, there's a ton of weather can be effective. Wars have been affected, drought in the Panama Canal. There are strikes in their oil prices because they might slow the ships up or speed them, slow them down or speed them up on what the cost of fuel is, and what's the overall amount of transportation globally is we're seeing more and more they come blank sailing, which means those ships are not going even though they're scheduled. It's like being booked out of plane. Plane doesn't go until they on the next plane area mit. So there's even a lot of that going on. So I said, how could we get to the point where we could now begin to manage some of that data? Not to answer the cool question, but could we do, could we do 80% of the heavy? We do 80, could we do the data? And then could we compare that with what's happening in an industry, what's happening in the agricultural industry?
They may be really emotional saying, you know what, we're not going to make any more tractors for a while. You're going to go, well, people are still going to eat, why aren't you going to make tractors? Well, because they feel a recession coming in. So they might slow that down, but their business might not slow down. In the meanwhile, if they haven't built the stock, as you pointed out in one of our breaks, there may be one piece that's missing and they can't chip the tractor, or they can't ship out an automobile, whatever it might be, or they can't operate machinery because they don't have the seal, the gaskets. And so to me, the complexity even becomes greater once we go beyond it. So we're looking to make a system whereby we can not only use past data, but we can also gather import data and other historical data that's going on around the industries. Bring that together with the challenges that we now see. It's a much bigger project than I had thought about, Richard. I cut into it. I thought it'd be pretty simple, but what's the process? And then marry that with what we think the future indices are. And that to me is really important because there's some companies who look at the forecasts and they don't take it emotionally, they don't take it fine political ways, and they bring those company called ITR economics, actually, Hampshire we looked at, they do that and they do those forecasts, and we look at bringing all those pieces together, put into your hands if you were a customer. Here are some scenarios, Richard, here are the things that we see. Here are two or three scenarios about what you might need to order and prepare for in your business. And we aren't seeing anybody that's gone beyond their own ecosystem to gather data.
All AI's has been working. They take their own data and manipulate it put together. We want to bring in data from outside sources and multiple sources to be able to get them a much broader picture of what's loan. And that to me has turned out to be a big challenge. But the more and more we go down, I hear two years ago, what do I want to be predictive for? And now they're telling us, well, we don't know what to buy right now, so how can you help us? So even in a two year period of time, people have changed their minds about what information they need to have, but they don't know how to gather it. Right.
We're seeing that as an opportunity, I think, not only for us but for others. But again, you need to know what is it you want to accomplish, where your data is coming from and having your processes laid out so you can actually treat the algorithms that will make sense.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: There's so many ripple effects to what you're building.
I can see a myriad of possibilities on how it could help, not just the ordering process, but even just the, the forecasting thought process around how you might look at growing your business or how you might make a strategic move today based on some of the trends that you might have again. You know, the, the past informs the future, doesn't create the future. People say that history repeats itself. I think it's more that history, once forgotten, tends to repeat itself. It'd be a better way of looking at it.
[00:46:55] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: And so you're taking these pieces, these various pieces, and you're putting together in such a way where, where really any industry will be able to start to see a bit more of a forecast, progressive view on things that have a high probability of impacting them in some degree. Even if youre again a retailer and maybe youre not ordering from, say, overseas, youre not maybe affected by maybe the trade routes of the Sioux canal, but you might be affected by the oil price pretty drastically and you might be affected by, your main supplier is in a different part of the country. And they have a major, again, like we talked about as example, down in Florida, major hurricane, maybe they're impacted by that and that's going to delay the ability for you to receive inventory.
[00:47:41] Speaker A: Well, I think because of the intricacies of the supply chain, we don't really know how much is spending on overseas. And as much as we talk about manufacturing coming back to the United States, some of it will, theres a lot of it that wont. Just no ones going to want to make the investments in our business in particular, no ones gotten more investing necessary to eliminate imports. And people have been trading for more than 5000 years so I dont see that stopping. So when you begin to, its hard enough to go back and say, well, why that box of crayons that we bought? Where did all those materials come from? You know it might seem pretty simple for your children or grandchildren in this case, but even into the inks where they all come from, I don't know. You know, so if you went back through all the supply chain, I'm not time we're going into that kind of depth, but it's not necessary. But we all are going to be impacted by the supply chain disruptions and there's a lot of it in domestic supply chain disruptions too. So you're absolutely right in that game.
[00:48:47] Speaker B: Well, and this reminds me of Gary, I think about Larry Reed, who wrote, was the founder of the foundation for Economic Education and he wrote hundreds of thousands of essays and one of them that's my favorite, is called eye pencil. And it's that no single human being knows how to make a pencil.
All the components which creates a pencil come from all over the globe and it requires people working in this magical thing, this chaos, but yet this order within chaos to create an eventual pencil. And it's through that supply chain economic component. And so you need the graphite, you need someone's got to go mine it. The wood. The wood's got to come from somewhere, the ink, the eraser, all these different components. And then eventually they need to be assembled. But if you can't get the things to the factory, you can't have the pencil. So that whole idea environment is a living construct of your current business fundamentally, and so many others. And what youre building has the capacity to really help them think differently. And if we can think differently at the business level, we can make a lot of powerful changes in how we run that organization. For the end result that were looking.
[00:49:57] Speaker A: To achieve, well, you know, we have to think differently, right?
The world had been changing for a long time. I looked at the years between 1975 and 2025 as an economic revolution, an economic war I actually called it, because that was when the digital, the first computers were started. So the digital world began around 1970, 419 75, and will become much more digital outright, as we clearly see this by 2025. So that 50 years has really changed from the analog world and scarcity to a world of a lot more abundance. But the thing is accelerated even more so in the last five years, and Denver happened in early 2020. So we're not going back.
It's not going to get less complex. It's not going to go back. But we as humans aren't always ready to accept it, so we have to, if we can get some help. This is where I think computers and AI and all these things can help us because we can think of what it is we want. Let them do all, let those machines do all the crunching, let them do all the work, puts it together, because then that helps us get smarter about what's going on. And as I had a wise man told me one time, all forecasts are wrong. So all predictions are wrong. So which ones do you want to choose and get the options that allow you to pick the ones that make sense, but utilize the data that's out there to be able to do that. So that's the direction of our team.
[00:51:22] Speaker B: Amazing. Gary, thank you so much for being with us today, sharing your journey. For those of you watching, make sure to tune into next week's episode as we continue to unpack all the ways that the entrepreneurs of today are moving things forward into a better, brighter future.
