Did "Neutron" Jack Welch Nuke GE?

26:09Apparently, from Thanksgiving on, like people, managers of the company worked furiously to try and either generate profits or bring forward profits or move losses. Like that contract that's probably going to be signed in January. You do whatever you can to get it signed in December. There are stories of people working on New Year's Eve to try and get the money. And this was the strength of GE. And this is what, frankly, investors wanted to see because a lot of the investors are, you know, retirees who want the dividend or, you know, big corporate pension funds. They just want GE to reliably make money.

26:46And by the way, this is the whole point for investors of GE. You were not investing in GE for a moonshot where you're going to 10x your investment. You invested in GE so you get your 5-10 % every single year. So Jack is doing this between the divisions. But as he is liquidating certain divisions, moving things around, it becomes a little bit more difficult. But he has a secret weapon. It is a financial services part of GE. Initially, Jack called it the popcorn stand. There's always money in the popcorn stand? There was money in the popcorn stand. It became known to the world as GE Capital. So GE Capital started in the 1930s as a financing arm that gave people loans to buy GE products.

27:31Like we talked about in the GM show with General Motors Acceptance Corporation, GMAC. It's basically you give them the loan so they can buy your product without having to go to the bank. Yeah, it's great. And it helps move product. But that's only the beginning of what you can do with finance. And Jack realized early on that GE could borrow massive amounts of money from Wall Street because it was GE. AAA rating. As trusted as the U.S. government. Anyone is going to lend money to GE. And then it could lend out that money again at higher interest rates, not just to its customers, but to anyone who needed the money.

28:10Sounds like a bank. Sounds like a bank. Borrowing low and lending high, having that net interest margin. That is the fundamental business model of a bank. And people would flock to GE for these loans. Leverage buyout people who wanted to, like, take over companies could get loans from GE. franchises, real estate. It was just an easy way to get money. And you're dealing with GE, so there weren't as many regulations if you had to go to a bank. It's the kind of regulatory arbitrage. They're doing what a bank does, but they're not regulated as strictly as a bank. In his book, Power Failure, Bill Cohen quotes Jack as saying about GE capital.

28:49Why don't you give me your best Jack Welch? I thought it was easier than bending metal. Fooling with money, you get bright people, find an edge. It was easier to make money. It was a home run. And it became the fastest growing part of GE, as it does because it's so easy. You didn't have to have a factory. You didn't have to blow up anything. So this is striking to me, right? So what are we, like 80s getting into the 90s here? This is when this is happening? Yeah. It is really remarkable to think about GE as emblematic of American business, of the American economy, right? This company that rose with the industrialization and innovation in the 1800s and became this kind of boring corporate behemoth in the mid-20th century.

29:34And now what's happening in the American economy? Go, go, go. Go, go, go. And a shift from being an industrial economy, being an economy that sells things like jet engines, to finance, right? The great financialization of the late 20th century. It's happening at GE. It's perfect. And this money-making machine allows them to do things they couldn't do before. So, of course, they built aircraft engines. But they think, well, we have all this money. We can borrow at such low rates. Why don't we buy the whole plane, put GE engines on them, and then lease those planes to the airlines? Because presumably, GE can borrow money more cheaply to buy a plane than an airline can.

30:16Do not lend money to an airline. Right. They are going to go bankrupt. This is the 90s. We talked about this in the Southwest show, right? They're all going to go bankrupt. Don't lend them money. But GE, they're not going anywhere. So this is another arbitrage, basically. Yeah. And of course, GE could then use depreciation on the planes to offset their tax bill. Everybody loves depreciation come tax time. Yeah. So GE Capital also had this added benefit for Jack Welch himself. So he always prided himself on being able to go to analysts and say, oh, here's what the company is going to make, the expectations, and then beat those expectations.

30:53He just loved to do it. He loved to be like, oh, you know, I'm going to meet 5 % earnings growth and then hit 10%. And this is still in financial news, in just bread and butter commodity day-to-day financial news. Earnings reports of public companies are maybe the classic financial news story. And there is always the question, did they beat? Did they beat expectations? And there is this whole backstory of the CEOs of the companies kind of massaging the expectations, massaging earnings. And G was so big and so good at it, there weren't even questions. This just happened every quarter. But if they're always beating expectations, something weird is going on.

31:34The problem then is with the expectations, right? In a well-structured world, it would be random whether they beat or miss expectations. Look, it is a game. Nobody is looking closely at this point because the economy is growing. GE is growing. So now we're in the 90s. This is the go-go 90s. Yeah, absolutely. And whenever Jack needed a little extra money, he had GE Capital because GE Capital, which is growing and growing in the company, owns all these very liquid assets, loans and investments. And so Jack could say to them, I need an extra billion dollars in profit. And they could do it overnight.

32:12There's always money in the popcorn stand. So now you had the split in the company, old metal bending, expensive, rusting industrial products and shiny new financial manipulation. And the part of the company that nobody really understood, that ends up taking over the company. Financialization, baby. It's worth mentioning at this point a couple of other things that cemented Jack's reputation as the greatest CEO of the century. Trademark. One was he bought the TV network NBC. And buying a TV network never made sense to me. It doesn't seem like it goes on his three napkin circles of success. I think he had an arrow to a second napkin that said NBC.

33:02But I read about his reasoning, and it does actually make sense. He was worried about competition from the Japanese. 1980s? Yeah. This is a 1980s movie. Yeah, because they were competing in small appliances and TV sets and all of this. And he thinks there is something that foreign companies are not allowed to own by law, and that is TV networks. So he thinks, well, if I have a TV network, that's kind of my moat. That's the one thing the Japanese cannot take over. Clever. I mean, I guess it is interesting to think about the big Japanese conglomerates, right, like Mitsubishi and Mitsui as a kind of counterpart to GE, right?

33:43Presumably, he's thinking of them as his rivals. They're big and innovative at this time. And they're trying to be GE. What can I do that they can't do? Yeah. So he has NBC. It allows him to develop what will become his dear pet, CNBC, the business channel. He loved to show up on CNBC and just be Jack. Yeah. In fact, he just, even after he left as CEO, he was on it dozens of times. Ladies and gentlemen, Jack. So he had his own business channel. And we were talking about this. There is a strange thing. After Jack Welch left, a show came on NBC called 30 Rock. A show called 30 Rock. Yes, I know.

34:28I know of the show called 30 Rock. And it was a parody of GE itself. And one of the lead characters played by Alec Baldwin was named Jack Donaghy, who was the head of East Coast Television and microwave programming. Beautiful writing. So the idea is you have this GE executive microwave person who comes in to run a TV network. Hilarity ensues. Comedy ensues, yeah. And then there were a few facts about the Alec Baldwin character. He grew up outside of Boston in a suburb called Sad Chester. Genius. So he had the working class roots, and he started in the GE Poisons division. Very funny. In the very first show, Jack Donahue talks about how he invented the Trivection Oven.

35:19The third heat. The third heat, which was heat, convection, and microwaves. And the punchline? This was an actual product that GE made. The Trivection Oven was a GE product. They just took it right from the catalog and... Ripped from the headlines. Okay. Enough 30 Rock. The other thing that Jack Welch, the real man, started was something called Six Sigma, which sounds like it's a comedy joke, but is an actual thing. People were obsessed with Six Sigma in their aughts, right? In the aughts, was that when everybody was talking about Six Sigma? Should I show you my Six Sigma tattoo? You have like a bell curve.

36:03So Six Sigma is a statistical measure of how many defects are in a product. You take a normal distribution, one sigma is one standard deviation, all the way out to six standard deviations, six sigma. It boils down to if you make a million products, you can have defects in 3.4 of them. Tiny, tiny fraction. It's just, you know, manufacturing excellence. If this show were going by six sigma principles. God forbid. The length of every show would vary by one one hundredth of a second. Look slightly faster. And then massage the earnings. So Six Sigma... We need expectations. Six Sigma did help the company.

36:47They did improve their operating margins. But it was more of a brand for Jack. Everyone had to go through Six Sigma training. He took the best people from every division to go to Six Sigma school, you know, up in Crotonville. And, you know, a lot of people at the time referred to it as management mumbo jumbo. Did people really say mumbo jumbo? I feel like no one actually says that. No one ever talked about seven sigma. Impossible. But look, it worked. It saved some money for the company. They increased operating margins, whatever, whatever, whatever. But it seemed to me it was more like a PR move for Jack.

37:22So when people said to him, how do you keep beating expectations with your earnings? He could be like, sir, six. Have you counted my sigmas, young man? So many sigmas. Try three vections. Three heats and six sigma. It's 18. The product of my heats and my sigmas is 18, sir. It is easy to mock and to nitpick at this point. But in the mid-1990s, GE becomes the most valuable company in the world. In the year 2000, it reached its peak, just as Jack was about to turn 65 and retire. It was a perfect CEO run. He increased GE's earnings eightfold over the 20 years. Stock increased by a factor of 40, 40X for an industrial company, right, right, right?

38:08And then Welch picks his own successor, Jeffrey Immelt, the best salesman in the company. And he hands the best salesman in the company, the best company in the world. What could go wrong? Whatever evil was hiding in GE, and there was a lot of it, was about to be the problem for the next guy. in a minute. Gonna have an ad break. Unless you've signed up for Pushkin Plus. And if you don't want to hear the ads, go right now to pushkin.fm slash plus.

38:48Jack Welch:When it comes to advancing your education, you have more options than you think. At Rasmussen University, we find ways to remove barriers, not build them. Like a new laptop if you're eligible and enroll in select online or on-campus programs. That means flexible and engaging online courses and resources, tuition savings options if you qualify, exceptional student support, and much more. Online nationally or check out their 20 campuses across six states. Start when you're ready and get the support you need. Visit rasmussen.edu. Picture this. You're on the beach with the whole family. The sun is shining, the water is warm, and your kids are finally getting along, this is when it hits you, that Myrtle moment.

39:31It's the second everything clicks. When you realize Myrtle Beach is more than a getaway, it's right where you belong. Don't just daydream about it. Find your own Myrtle moment at visitmyrtlebeach.com. Do you ever feel like you're drinking from a firehouse? PayCore's intelligent HR solution empowers leaders to turn down the pressure. Their unified platform includes payroll, talent management, compliance software, and a lot more, connecting you to the people, data, and expertise you need to drive long-term business results. Visit paycore.com slash leaders and go from workflow to workflow. That's paycore.com slash leaders.

40:26We're back from the break. You know who's not back? Jack Welch. He's off enjoying his retirement. And finally, Jeffrey Immelt becomes CEO. Jack leaves on a Friday. Jeff starts on the Monday. There's a pep rally, an actual engineered pep rally for Jeff Immelt. Yay, you're our next Jack. And it's broadcast to all the different offices. Has a great time. Jeff Immelt had been at GE for decades. Like Jack, he worked his way up through the various divisions. But unlike Jack, he is not an engineer, a nuts and bolts guy. Jeff is an Ivy Leaguer. He can golf, but mostly he was the captain of the Dartmouth football team, Harvard MBA.

41:10He's a glad hander, back slapper. Everyone likes Jeff Immelt, best salesman in the company. Later, Jeff would say that he had only one good day in his job. That first day, Monday, September 10th, 2001. Oof. I know. The next morning, two planes hit the World Trade Center, and the financial repercussions, you may remember, were massive. They were immediate. So GE, as we've talked about, was in the aircraft business. GE was also in the insurance business, had insurance policies that were involved in that day. And as Jeff later put it, why don't you read this quote? On my second day, a plane I lease, running on engines I built, crashed into a building I insure, and it was covered by a network I own.

42:01Diversification had gotten GE through basically everything that happened in the 20th century. But in this case, September 11th was so big, it hit at all parts of the company at once. And the biggest problem for GE wasn't necessarily that they took a hit. A lot of companies did. But it was that GE investors were surprised by the ways in which September 11th hit the company. Jeff Immelt remembers getting a phone call from one of his largest investors who said, We're in the reinsurance business? I had no idea we were in the reinsurance business. I feel like that's on the investor. Like, it's not like GE was hiding that.

42:44No, I'm sure it was in the annual report on page 87 or something like that. All of a sudden, though, people started to ask questions. What else is in this company? And diversity becomes a weakness at this point. And investors stop saying, wow, GE does everything. And they start saying, wait, what exactly does GE do? And how are we going to get out of this? When the markets opened, it was a few days later. A few days later, yeah. GE's stock was hit especially hard, 25 % down, both for the business impact and also because people just needed liquidity. They were selling the most basic stuff they had, which was GE.

43:23And this might have been the chance for Jeff Immelt, it's his first week, to really reset the company. And everyone was expecting this. They were expecting him to say, well, we're going to have to make some tough decisions, maybe not give dividends. Maybe we won't meet earnings. Maybe we'll reform the way the company does business. Instead, Jeff Immelt decides he wants to be like his predecessor, like Jack Welch. He wants to show profits. And even though Jet Engines and NBC had lost money that year in 2001, Immelt promised a 10 % boost in earnings. Jack level. and he met his goal. Like, it's a miracle.

44:07And GE met their expectations by leaning even heavier on GE Capital and its financial deals. But something had changed about people's perception of GE at this point. And maybe it's that Jack Welch has left. Maybe it's that we're no longer in the go-go 90s. Or maybe it's the mood of the country. This is the age where we're starting to get into Enron and Tyco accounting scandals. And people start to ask some hard questions. Like, how exactly are you exceeding expectations every quarter, every year? At this point, GE is getting more than 40 % of its profits from GE Capital, from its financial arm.

44:5040 % of its profits. It was a bank we've talked about, but more than that, it was around the seventh largest bank in the U.S., If you look at their assets, but not regulated like a bank, it's a bank dressed up in a factory costume and it's borrowing money at rates usually given to large, steady industrial companies and then funnels that money to the Wall Street guys. And then someone says something. They hold an investor meeting and they notice that a really big company is not there. PIMCO, which was the largest bond company at the time. They're like bond investors. It's basically a bond investment company.

45:33They buy bonds. Yeah, and the guy who runs it is Bill Gross, known as the Bond King. And he announces that not only is he not going to show up to this meeting, but he is going to unload a billion dollars worth of GE bonds, money that he had lent to GE. He's like, I don't want to be in the GE business anymore. And if you know Bill Gross, you'll know that he did not do this quietly in a memo, in a polite way. Bill Gross goes to war with the company. He publishes this scathing article. He points out that not only is GE a bank company borrowing a ton of money, but it's running on commercial paper.

46:14Huh. So commercial paper is a certain kind of loan. It's basically a short-term loan in the market, sometimes for just months. Never longer than months, right? The longest commercial paper loan is something like nine months or something. Yeah. So usually companies use this for short-term needs to meet payroll or they're trying to build something new, right? But Bill Gross pointed out the GE had borrowed$127 billion worth of short-term loans. I'm going to say it again. $127 billion worth of short-term loans. Yeah. that, of course, like their plan was they would roll those loans over, they would get money, they would pay them off, get new loans to pay those loans.

46:58Like, that's the plan. But what if, Bill Gross says, the market says, no, no, thank you? Well, I mean, let's talk about that for a minute more, right? Because it seems central to risk, I think, in a way that's underappreciated. So they're doing this other bank-like thing here. They're not just borrowing at a low interest rate. and lending at a higher interest rate. If you borrow money for five years and lend it out for five years and you have this interest margin, great. That is relatively safe. If the people you're lending to don't go pay you back, that's maybe trouble. But this borrowing short-term and lending long-term, that is the fundamental reason why banks are so risky.

47:39You know, we put our money in the checking account in a basic model of a bank. We can take it out tomorrow. The bank turns around and lends it to people for 30 years to buy a house. And if everybody all of a sudden decides to take their money out of the bank, the bank is not going to have their money, even if the bank is healthy. And this is why banks are so highly regulated, because they're a fundamentally dangerous business, not because they're borrowing and lending, but because of this, they call it maturity transformation, this maturity mismatch of borrowing short and lending long. And I suppose this is what we're walking up to.

48:12This ends up being the core problem in the 2008 financial crisis. I mean, we hear about housing and the housing bubble. That's like the surface of it. But the underneath part of it is these companies that are not banks doing this maturity transformation that is wildly dangerous and that is going to blow up the economy. It becomes, I don't want to say a full bank run or even a slow motion bank run, but definitely Bill Gross is first in line to take his money out of the company. And he starts to question the very honesty of GE, asking, well, how do they get these consistent earnings? He called it a conglomerate financed by a money machine, which was accurate.

48:52And inside GE, executives start turning on each other. There's yelling in meetings. People start to leak bad news about the new CEO, Jeff Immelt, that he doesn't listen. He takes nobody's advice. He's acting like the captain of the football team. Not a friendly golf buddy. They say he's afraid of Wall Street, that he basically will write the press release first and then backwards engineer how he gets things into the press release. Jeff responds by changing the company's marketing. I know, I know, I know. He decides it is a good time to change the slogan. You remember the slogan of GE? We bring good things to life.

49:32We bring good things to life. It is burned in my brain because it was their slogan for decades and decades. And they go to their advertising firm and say, we want to change the slogan. And, you know, advertising firms love this moment to make money. But even the advertising firm is like, dude, this is one of the most famous slogans in the world. It's up there with Coke, the real thing. Gee, we bring good things to life. You don't want to do this. And Jeff's like, we want to do it. And they come up with their new slogan, imagination at work. which is fine, whatever. But people hate it, especially in an era when people are starting to question your accounting.

50:10You don't want to like lean on the imagination part. Why are you imagining those earnings, Immelt? Okay, we might as well get to the lowest point. We could go on all day. Housing bubble starts to burst in 2006. G Capital is, of course, up to its ears in real estate of various sorts. In 2008, Jeff Immelt tells an investor call, It's going to be okay. 10 % growth is in the bag. In the bag. In the bag. Just like always, 10%. Just like Jack used to do. But remember, GE Capital can't come to the rescue this time. They're having trouble unloading the investments that they have. They are in trouble. They're bleeding money.

50:53And less than a month after he says it was in the bag, GE announces that they will miss their numbers. No. Inconceivable. GE does not miss its numbers. The stock plunges 13%. And this is the saddest part of this very sad story, Jacob. It's not sadder than 10 ,000 people getting fired? This one made me sad. Okay, fair enough. The great Jack Welch goes on CNBC that day. Remember, the network that's owned by GE. Jack Welch comes out of retirement, sits down in the chair, turns to the anchor, and he rips into his successor, into Jeff Immelt. He basically is addressing Jeff through the camera, and he says, Here's the screw-up.

51:41Meaner! Here's the screw-up. You made a promise that you'd deliver this, and you missed three weeks later. Jeff has a credibility issue. He's getting his ass kicked. I'd get a gun out and shoot him if he doesn't make what he promised now. Just deliver the earnings. What a jerk. What a jerk. Also, he picked Immelt. Like a key central job of a CEO is helping to choose the successor. And Jack starts saying, it was my worst mistake I made. I picked a loser. Jeff calls his former boss, calls Jack and says, you are dead to me. Sure. And then, can you take another blow? It's like a horror movie in here.

52:23Give it to me. I don't feel sorry for Jeff Immelt. I'll be honest with you. All right. The commercial paper market starts to freeze up. All those billions in loans that GE took out, they start to hear that, like, they can't really roll them over. You know, people give them money for one night, one day. But no one knows if GE is going to be around in 90 days. This is the financial crisis. This is the same thing that's happening to Bear Stearns. It's happening to Lehman Brothers. It got bad. At one point, Immelt tells the Treasury Secretary in secret that they might need a bankruptcy plan. Again, if you're a big industrial company and you go bankrupt, that is extremely bad.

53:02If you're a bank and you go bankrupt, it is much worse because you are tied through these credit and debt relationships to everybody in the economy. Somebody bought that$127 billion in commercial paper. And the market doesn't know who owns GE paper. If GE were to declare bankruptcy, it would be absolute panic. It would be the worst. The U.S. government knows this about banks in general. And so they're in the process of coming up with these facilities to help bail out the banks. But remember, in a cruel twist, GE never wanted to be called a bank. There's not bank in the name. This was their trick.

53:43Well, lots of companies were doing this around this time. There were lots of non-banks that had become, actually another PIMCO guy called them shadow banks. He described this phenomenon that had arisen, which was all these companies that were not banks, that were not regulated like banks, had become banks. And now there was a shadow run on the shadow banks. Yeah, and GE and these other companies were like, well, remember when we said we weren't a bank? and it occurred to them that every other bank in the country now had a federal guarantee, essentially, on their loans, could borrow all this money, and GE did not.

54:19No one would ever lend money to GE when you could lend it to a bank backed by the U.S. government. So they groveled. They groveled. They pulled politicians into this. Eventually, eventually GE gets covered by a federal loan guarantee for some of these things. And GE ends up being one of the largest users of this facility, just sucking in money, trying to keep things going. Jeff Immel, to his credit, tries a bunch of things to revive the company. He promises that he's going to reduce the size of GE Capital. He tries to make some industrial acquisitions to try and get that, you know, metal bending mojo back to return the company to former glory.

54:59But nothing seems to work. At one point, Jeff Immel clearly is tired of trying to be Jack. And he blows his top and he tells a bunch of analysts, you want to give this a read? In the 1990s, anyone could have run GE. His dog could have run GE. A German shepherd could have run GE. It wasn't Jack Weld, he's saying. It was the 90s doing the lifting. And, I mean, he had a great point. The great debate in business circles is whether Immelt ever stood a chance. If he were a better CEO, better golfer, could he have rescued the company? You know, could he have made some changes here and there? I firmly believe that Jack Welch planted a financial time bomb.

55:42He used it to enhance his glory, CEO of the century, and then he left it to the next guy to fix. I blame Jack Welch. You know, it's interesting. We were talking about this show, this story, yesterday, and our editor, Ryan Dilley, made this point that I thought was really interesting. He called back to the show we did about General Motors, about GM. And in that show, I talked about Alfred Sloan coming along in the 20s, 30s, and kind of creating the model of the manager, the manager for the 20th century. Before that, it had been a lot of entrepreneurial cowboys starting up companies in this era of industrialization.

56:20And then things kind of settled down. And Sloan was more boring and into organization. And that became the model for the rest of the 20th century. And you can see Jack Welch as the bookend to that. He's sort of the last of the managers who come in to run a company that was started long before. Who could do it with inspiration and vision and everyone pulling together. Because after that, once you get into the 21st century, we are now back into the cowboy entrepreneur era. You know, the biggest companies now, unlike GE at the turn of the century, are for the most part companies that were started 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, almost entirely by people who are still alive, in many cases by people who are still running them.

57:06So in that way, Welch is the end of an era. Yeah. And you don't see many of these new entrepreneurs who are leading companies playing golf. There's no time. They work around the clock. And then they got to sleep. They got to do their workouts. So the official end of the story, Jeff Immelt pushed out of GE by the board in 2017. And there was one final indignity that Jeff Immelt had to face. After he left, the Wall Street Journal published a story about Jeff and his private planes. Planes, plural. So, of course, as CEO of GE, he flew all around the world constantly on his private plane, his GE jet, specially painted.

57:48as a GE plane. But what no one knew, and the journal revealed, is that there was a second plane, an empty plane owned by GE that followed that first plane anywhere Jeff Immelt went, landed right next to it, and was there just in case something went wrong with the first plane. There was a backup plane flying around the world. I remember when that story came out, and it really landed, if you will. I mean, it was emblematic of the like grotesque corporate excess, but it's so visual. I think it's such a good story because you can see it. And the notion of, sure, you've gotten used to the CEO flying on a private plane.

58:31Okay, we've accepted that. But a second empty plane is a slap in the face. Too much of it. As the nation's recovering from the Great Recession, it was terrible. The new CEO of GE, John Flannery, he announced that from there on out, they would fly commercial. I mean, first class. Yeah. I mean, come on. Maybe buy a second seat. Sure. Just a little room. It was actually on a commercial flight to Salt Lake City when John Flannery typed into his laptop Operation Eisenhower. It was a code name because there was someone sitting next to him. He didn't want them to see. And Operation Eisenhower was the outlines of a plan to break up GE, to get rid of GE capital and then form three separate companies that would take the parts of GE.

59:17And his plan finally happened in 2024. GE is now GE Aerospace, company number one, GE Healthcare, company number two, and company number three, GE Vernova. The other two were very clear. And then you're going to drop Vernova on me? What is Vernova? Nobody knows. Yeah, it's... Surely you know, you know. I mean, what is it? It's the energy stuff. Oh, it's the Edison. It goes back to Edison. And GE Vernova actually is doing remarkably well. It's had this huge stock increase. Everyone's talking about it. It's the next GE, but smaller. For now. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and engineered by Sarah Bruguer.

1:00:03Our video editor is Matt Nielsen. Yes, we have videos on YouTube. Our showrunner and editor is Ryan Dilley. I'm Jacob Goldstein. I'm Robert Smith. Thanks for listening.

1:00:16Jack Welch:When it comes to advancing your education, you have more options than you think. At Rasmussen University, we find ways to remove barriers, not build them. Like a new laptop if you're eligible and enroll in select online or on-campus programs. That means flexible and engaging online courses and resources, tuition savings options if you qualify, exceptional student support, and much more. Online nationally or check out their 20 campuses across six states. Start when you're ready and get the support you need. Visit rasmussen.edu. Picture this. You're on the boardwalk with your best friends. The waves are rolling.

1:00:52The band is playing. And doom scrolling feels like a distant memory. This is when it hits you, that Myrtle moment. It's the second everything clicks when you realize Myrtle Beach is more than a getaway. It's right where you belong. Don't just daydream about it. Find your own Myrtle moment at visitmyrtlebeach.com.

1:01:21Do you ever feel like you're drinking from a firehouse? PayCore's intelligent HR solution empowers leaders to turn down the pressure. Their unified platform includes payroll, talent management, compliance software, and a lot more, connecting you to the people, data, and expertise you need to drive long-term business results. Visit PayCore.com slash leaders and go from workflow to workflow. That's PayCore.com slash leaders.