Mastering M&A Integration Through Leadership Development and Cultural Alignment

22:43I'm ever leaving. The productivity of that team member versus the one that's like, if I find another job that pays better, I would move. Let's get to it. Give me a playbook on how to do that. On how to execute? Yeah. First off, you have to have resources dedicated to that adventure. It takes a lot of work and energy and you can't do it with the existing people that are there, whether it's the manufacturing managers, the supervisors. I mean, you need a team of people that can go in and do that. And here, we've got a culture and leadership team. So we've got leadership coaches, we've got personal development coaches, we've got chaplains, we've got community impact team members that help our plants and especially our acquired businesses that have never really done serving and force in their history.

23:22We come in and we do a lot of teaching and coaching. That's a big part of the playbook, helping people understand why we're doing what we're doing, why we focus on these core values, why we focus on leadership values. Reducing turnover is important to the business. Nobody likes to train people every other day because people leave. Nobody likes to deal with the quality problems because new people on the line, they mess up, they're going to. If we can reduce turnover through just having great culture, then we can impact quality, safety, efficiency, and innovation all in a positive way. And having a culture team is part of how we'd execute for one.

23:51And then having really great manufacturing leaders that own those businesses that we acquire because we don't let them just sit off on their own and throw them a few resources and say, good luck. We'll just report in every month and see how you're doing. We're in their business. So our best manufacturing leaders and execs are in those businesses that we acquire, making sure that culture integration is happening. We're taking advantage of synergies in the business, whether it's purchasing or manufacturing synergies, whatever those synergies might be. So the resource dedication on the manufacturing side and leadership side, and then the culture and leadership side, just on the front lines of the business are the most important ways we execute, but you got to dedicate resources.

24:27Yeah, it makes sense. I have a culture team. And this could be a variety of different coaches, depending on your more detailed approach. And then the way your leaderships are involved in these companies. And every leader is getting coaching in the business. So if you're a first level supervisor, that's where we're putting most of the emphasis on because most first level supervisors up from the front lines of manufacturing, they have the least amount of leadership training in their respective careers. They just don't get it. Executive level people, they get all these training resources all the time around leadership, but frontline team members that are busy running manufacturing cells on the front lines of the business, they, at least to my experience, haven't received a whole lot.

25:05So that's where we spend probably 80 % of our time up front with respect to leadership training and culture training is with those frontline leaders, because those men and women are leading in essence, the entire factory. And if those leaders don't understand what culture and leadership needs to look like, then how are their work cells and the people in those work cells supposed to understand? You sent me an excerpt from your book. I actually read it. Oh, did you? Yeah. Awesome. There's a part in there about how you want every employee to have both a personal and professional growth plan. Yeah.

25:32Tell me more about that. That's like the biggest part of my life right now is making sure that that's actually happening in the business. Cause again, I watched men and women. I was at a listening session yesterday. I got to listen. I take part of that listening session. Just tell me about what's on your LAPs, what's on your leadership action plans. What are your personal goals? I care about the business related goals. But I know if these men and women in our business are growing personally and their personal lives are flourishing and getting better because they're setting goals and accomplishing goals and the team members around them are celebrating with them, I know that they're going to show up better to work every day.

26:06If they show up better to work every day, there's probably a good chance that they're going to be more productive, that they're going to add value to the teams that they're on, that the business is going to do better. So I just believe that's a great place to spend your time. And if you had to run a business with 15 ,000 people, I'd rather every single one of them be flourishing and growing and developing as human beings because they're chasing after their goals personally. I'm bringing it up because it sounds like a pretty practical thing. And I was curious, does this get implemented? You got the culture team, but you've got newly acquired employees coming in.

26:36Is this part of it? It is. My take with our culture and leadership team is don't push people. This isn't a box check. This isn't a race. Just introduce the idea, get them taking steps, and eventually they'll realize how good this is for their own personal life, the lives of the people around them at work. Because if they're being impacted positively, they're probably impacting the people around them positively. And then they're impacting the people, whoever they go home to. It might be friends, might be family, spouses and kids. If they're improving their personal lives, they're going to be impacting everybody that they spend time around outside of work positively.

27:05That's true. We do that in our company and I feel like it gives you a better connection with your team members. You sort of know what their goals are and what they're working towards and you feel something greater when we're all working towards. Developing great relationships. If you want to develop a great relationship, you can't do it all surface. You got to go deep a little. It's not my goal. It's our goal. And you know what that means to each person that's different. What does that entail? And I'm curious, just when you talk about putting this as a professional and a personal growth plan, are there some just key elements that go into it?

27:36We keep it very simple. It's on like a five by seven card, a little bit bigger than that. So there's enough room for you to write a few personal goals and a few career related goals. and we don't push anybody to do a certain amount. We just say, look, even if you have one personal goal, let's write the actions down. That's one of the things our leadership coaches help our leaders do is help them drive some of the actions. It's not good enough just to put a goal down. We also inspire them to get an accountability partner too. So if you write the goals down, have an action plan behind it and have an accountability partner, there's a higher likelihood if you have all three of those things that you're going to start improving your life.

28:10And that's all we're trying to drive. I think we've got close to 65 % of our 15 ,000 team members that have leadership action plans today. We started this process three years ago, but the stories I get back from people and the best ones are, hey, I'm a better mom. I'm a better dad at home because I'm doing these things. Being a better dad and spending time with my kids or having our kids all sit around the dinner table at night without their phones and eat dinner together. That's one of my goals. And so when I hear that kind of stuff, it just melts you. It makes you feel like, man, there's a much greater purpose for us as leaders at work, making sure the people that we're responsible for and that we have the privilege to lead go home in a positive way.

28:46And we can help do that by driving that into them at work, not just about being good at productivity or whatever it is that your job is, but it's also how do we help them be better human beings so they can impact the people at home better? Our world needs it. How else do you apply that tactically? I like the idea of having this plan that's something you introduce and show a level of commitment to the new team members that you bring in. You got this team. What else are they doing to foster? I'm looking at the opposite of this is what's going on in my head. I'm thinking of if you don't do this right and you create a poor employee experience, people quit.

29:19They get frustrated and they quit. There's a lot of things that you can easily do to screw that up. You just don't talk to them. Don't communicate what's going on. They hear through the whispers of a deal happening, the concerned job and whatnot. But It's very different to just communicate that, but then even take a step further of how do we really introduce you to the culture and what you're committing to? There's all sorts of responses to whether it's a leadership action plan that we're trying to roll out to our team members and explain to them why it's important. We get eye rolls. We get, you know, I've never done this in a business before.

29:51Why are we doing this here? Why are we talking about this? Can I just put my head down and do my job and go home and earn my paycheck? The answer is no, not here. We want people to grow and develop. And the hard things in life, generally what I found through my 30 years of being out of school is that in life experiences is that you need a little bit of push sometimes through the hard stuff. So that's what we're here to do for our team members. There's a lot of people that say, I don't want to do that right now. That's not for me. And we say, look, just try it. We're kind and we're thoughtful and respectful about the process.

30:20We're not like, hey, do this or you're fired. We don't say that to anybody. We know that once they start tasting growth and development, all of us, we're like, okay, what's next? And we just know we just need to push them to get them to that point. On the flip side, we've had people absolutely leave. Say, I'm not doing this. This isn't for me. I don't need to do this. That's okay too. It just means they're not ready to jump into personal growth and development. You and I both know people that are the same person today they were 20 years ago. Exactly. To me, that doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

30:47Doesn't sound like a good way to live your life. We've experienced better. I watched the transformation of people from just taping baby steps to complete transformation where people have had several people say that they were so depressed, they were thinking about suicide. Matter of fact, I had a woman the other day in a listening session say, one of my best friends committed suicide because her boss was so miserable to her over the five years that she worked there. She couldn't take it anymore. She was so fragile and she took her own life. And so that's the impact that bad leadership can have.

31:16So why not tilt the needle toward all the good stuff? Let's help people grow and develop. I think there's a lot less chance people will be, whether it's depressed or have anxiety or all sorts. I think it helps people mentally to be able to work on their own personal professional growth and have the space and time and freedom to do that at work. and leaders at work that care about that kind of stuff versus put your head down and just get your stuff done. I don't want to hear about your personal baggage or anything. Just put your head down and get your work done and go home. How do you communicate this to incoming employees?

31:42You call a big town hall and give them a big speech. And what do you do? We made this big culture pivot in 2013 as we probably talked last time. So we've had 10 years of taking steps and it's permeated so much through our company. Our turnover is very low today because we have people that are choosing to stay. They want this. They've worked at other places. They don't want to go back to that, even in some cases where they maybe not make as much money as they would be able to go in someplace else. But they're happy. They're feeling cared about. They're able to work on their own personal and professional lives.

32:11They just feel fulfilled. I want to get like a reenactment. Here's like new team members joining and just giving them that ease that, hey, this isn't going to be a bad thing. We're coming to rip out your company and pieces and this and that. But there's something that we can, an opportunity to grow better together. So specifically on an M &A opportunity, the people that are going in there have already gone through the leadership action plans. They've been around our company and our culture. They can explain it well. And when you get enough people around you that are saying, oh yeah, that's true.

32:40Yeah, this is what we do. It works really well. We're going to spoon feed you. We're not going to shove it all down your throat. There's power. And once those relationships are developed with our people and the company we acquire, the relationships start to develop. You watch people's integrity or are they doing what they say they're going to do? And then once the relationships are developed, if I tell you that, hey, I've done this, LAP. It's really good. It's something we do in the business. And here's how it goes. Here's my LAP. I'm going to share it with you. And then they do one. And then the next thing you know, they're taking it to their team members and they're talking about it.

33:09It doesn't all happen fast. The point is that you just got to start that process and not be the opposite where companies just say, we're not going to do that. And then it never gets any legs because it never starts. You have metrics of success around how well somebody's doing post acquisition? That could be a separate podcast because we have a whole packet of leadership metrics that we look at everything from how many people are filling out leadership action plans. So what are some of the wins people have had in their accomplishing goals? And we've had like people will put marriage goals. They'll put better relationships with their kids.

33:38We measure all those things that people put down because they'll tell us. I go into some of our plans today and they put all their LAPs, copies of all their LAPs in the break room. So the leadership action plan contains the personal goals. Yes. Yes. The leadership action plan is both personal and professional. Okay. And again, I really think there's more power in the personal goals than anything else because Because if they're, look, we both care about our job, but we care about our personal lives. I think that's true for anybody that's in the workforce. So have them focus on the business goals first or the career goals first.

34:08It's not what's most important to them. What's most important to them is themselves, their family, everything around them once they leave work. I prefer that they start setting goals there because if A, they know the company supports that, that's a good thing. And B, if they start setting goals and accomplishing goals, it's having meaningful impact. And they're coming to work saying, I've never worked at a place that's really cared about me enough to allow me time and space to set personal goals and encourage me to go after them. And by the way, when I go after them, I accomplish goals. I feel good.

34:34I'm coming to the business in a good headspace. And I'm able to be more productive for my team and for the business. Other metrics. So you have metrics of just folks adopting this element of your culture. Anything else? Yeah. People typically. So another big metric we follow as a company is just our community service hours. anybody that served in one or more community service events in our business we track that because we think there's a direct correlation between serving and being a great team member i think 78 of our people at last glance had participated in at least one serving event that the companies put on we did 125 000 hours last year of community service we've been doing this for seven years now and we've averaged over 100 000 community service hours every year so we basically ask all of our 100 plus facilities to do a few serving events every year.

35:23We have a team, resources set up to make all these community connections with the charitable partners. They set up the events and then call our leader at one of our facilities and say, hey, look, we've got these three or four options in the next month and a half. Which one do you want to take? Okay, we want to go to the Boys and Girls Club or we want to go to help with hospice or elderly care or go clean up a park. They have choices and then all they have to do is pick one and then invite their team members to come, a lot of people start serving for the first time. Community service and community impact is something we measure pretty significantly.

35:53So interesting. These success metrics are correlated around cultural behaviors that you're trying to I think it's directly related to retention. What other metrics? We got a lot. I'm just using HR. They just, how many people churned this month? That's all we want to know. Yeah. And again, what I tell you is if you don't have a culture and leadership department and resources dedicated to that, this stuff's never going to get done in a way that's meaningful and impactful because HR is too busy. All the stuff that we're talking about, I guess you could hire an army of people in HR, but then they get focused on compliance and some of the black and white nature of and regulatory nature of HR and not, hey, look, what is our culture?

36:29This team just focus on what drives good culture and what drives our leadership improvement and training. This is all in-house. I know there's a lot of leadership consultants you can get out there, but this is a team you have in-house. What are their backgrounds? What are you looking for? I got everything from sports coaches to teachers to pastors and the people that have been in the leadership coaching profession. We've got about 27 people in that department. And I would encourage any company out there that's listening, I don't care if you're 50 people or 100 or 1 ,000, hire one. We started this whole venture.

37:01We had probably 6 ,000 team members when we hired our first leadership coach. And we just hired one. And then we saw the benefit and the transformation and how people were learning about leadership. We're like, we need to do this more. And I didn't want to do consulting. A, it's costly. And B, we needed somebody full time. So just go out and find the right people to do this kind of work. Do you ever use your culture approach with courting the CEOs, convincing them to sell their company? Oh, yeah, for sure. How do you do that? Teach me. I explain a lot of the things you and I have talked about.

37:32And what they realize is we've been doing it pretty good. But man, partnering up with somebody that's been there, done that, and has different ideas. Now we have this great opportunity to collaborate. It's almost like having an in-house consultant and they get paid because they're selling their business. They get to stay on and make a wage. That's good. Is that part of it that, hey, there's a career for me after selling that I can grow with this company. I still get incentivized pretty well public so I can sell my shares when I need to. Yeah. Less risk, right? Running the business. And yeah, it's all of that.

38:03And I would say 90 plus percent of our businesses that we acquire, the leaders that are running the business and we buy it stay on for some period of time. Not six months, but a longer period of time. And who better to stay in the business and help run it than the ones that started it or really were successful running it? They feel a level of confidence, what they learn. They probably have a reputation in the market. I think so. I don't want to be so bold to say that we've got a great reputation. But what I can say is that one of our parts of our culture department is an external arm that does nothing but field calls and questions from businesses that are trying to figure culture and leadership models out that are more healthy and effective than what they're doing today.

38:43And a lot of that's because they've seen us on social media. They know somebody that knows us. They heard a story. They listened to a podcast. We have that arm of our business here. We had 13 businesses in two weeks ago, and they do a day and a half in the business. They go to plants. They talk to our leaders. They see what the front line looks like in manufacturing. You let people steal all your ideas for free. I do. It's really nice of you. I think it's a way to impact the world in a positive way. And somebody was nice enough to share it with me. That's how we really, one of the ways that we really pivoted was seeing a better model.

39:13And somebody that was willing to, Bob Chapman was willing to sit down and share his ideas and share his successes. And hey, this is what I learned. And that's the best way to be able to learn and then ultimately execute. Yeah, that's true. I think it's important that you got that kind of role model and guidance. That's great for you to give it back as well. And I've watched companies transform. My best days are when I hear that a company we've helped coach hires their own culture and leadership head, VP, or chief culture officer or something. That's the start is having one person that can actually, because you know, the CEO or the owner of the company is going to be connected and starting to drive initiatives outside of HR to some respects so that culture actually has its own.

39:54And I think it sends a great message to the team members. Hey, look, we care enough about culture and leadership development that we're making its own department and putting resources there. I think that says a lot to the team members versus who runs culture in your business, HR. That doesn't make me too confident as a team member that HR is going to be handling culture. Yeah, you split it up, make it its own group, and then you're doing these acquisitions. They're going to have a lot more attention and focus on making those changes. Right. The culture, you have metrics around how they're adopting to culture with the leadership plan, community hours.

40:28Do you correlate that then to financial performance? One of my favorite things to do is look at turnover, look at the plant's culture index and engagement scores, and then their financial performance. And the financial performance, generally, they've seen a lift in the culture index engagement scores and low turnover. Pretty correlated. It's pretty correlated. And if there's a plant where we've got really high turnover, I can't even think of an instance where we've got great financial performance where there's high turnover. It just doesn't happen. You cannot be efficient running a manufacturing business when people are leaving all the time.

41:03And so then what really stops us to say, look, that's one of the plans we have to work on to make sure that we're really assessing leadership. And usually there's opportunities there where we've got performance improvement plans in place. We're trying to work with people and coach people. But then at some point in time, you got to say, look, we got to make a change. And if you go through this, you're probably going to find people that are just not engaged. Yeah. They have a different understanding of what engagement is or what our values are. They're just not engaged to the level that we'd like to see them as a leader.

41:30It's hard to give people a change. Yeah, it's really hard. And there's people that will tell you they're open to change and that won't. And there's people that will tell you they're not open to change and they won't. Then what do you do? You move out of the business? If they're not willing to change at all, then you have to move them out. Unless you're willing to suffer with mediocre results or poor results. We know too much these days about how we can impact people and change things performance-wise for the better just by changing to better leadership. But as you know, great leaders that understand culture and understand what we're driving towards, it's just not overflowing out there with those types of leaders.

42:02Anything else you want to share around this approach of this proactive culture development with incoming employees that I could apply when I buy a company? really define who's doing the hiring and the business, who's doing the team member evaluations. When you hire people into a business, a lot of times HR might be the only gate. I think that's not good. I think that HR is important to be a gatekeeper there and evaluate that potential team member. But I like to get other people, other leaders around the business to evaluate who's coming in because it's family here. We don't want to mess it up.

42:40If we let somebody in, that's going to be toxic, you know, in the worst case, that's going to drive some of our best people away if we don't deal with it quick. And I just don't want to take that chance. I would rather look at the person a hundred different ways and have multiple people evaluate that person because maybe there's something one person sees that another person doesn't have multiple conversations and interviews versus just hire people in quickly. That's a good point. That's just one of the things we do when we're looking at acquiring businesses, taking on new team members that aren't familiar with us that we've acquired, we really look at that closely when we evaluate every leader very closely because you really can't evaluate the leadership until you watch how they lead.

43:17You can't sit in a room with us and talk to a leader and know all you need to know about the leader. You need to see how the leader acts in action. You need to see some kind of engagement survey from the plan on what do they think about the leadership. They'll rate them. Our engagement surveys are extremely important in how we determine the health of each individual facility in our business. And that includes new businesses that are newly acquired. What's your intuition in identifying a good leader, especially early diligence? That's the thing. You want to know quickly if you're wasting your time or not.

43:47Because you could have a whole of the companies, I could tell. No way this is going to work out. Yeah. I mean, certainly we've had those instances, but again, unless it's the... What is it? Is it like a gut feel or is it just something you can ask that... I think you got to witness. I think I've got a pretty good gut, but I've learned over the years not to just, every time my gut tells me to do something, to do it. Because when it comes to people, you're not always going to see things in one conversation or a couple of conversations. And that's why I say you got to watch how they act. And their actions generally give way to how they deal with people, how they deal with issues, how quick do they lose their cool.

44:25As a leader, you got to serve your team members. And if you're not a servant leader, that shows up. It's pretty evident in a short period of time if you're watching people. It's tricky though. That's why business is hard. That's why a lot of businesses aren't successful. They miss that part. There's like the art of the deal that you can't deny. That part is really takes some experience to do. Yeah. And it's tough to write a playbook to standardize it. You got to buy the right companies. You got to buy them at the right time for the right price. And then once you get them, you got to make sure that it doesn't start going a different direction.

44:54How's the market been for you? You've seen the whole COVID cycle happen. and then post-COVID, we had a huge run-up on, I feel like, every industry around 21, 22. And now things have tapered down, really slowed in a lot of industries. What's that cycle been like for you? Because you were incidentally in the industry that benefited the most from the COVID period. We're a cyclical business, the RV side of our business. So that's one of our six business categories. But RV ran up really high. We had a record production year for the industry and for our business in 22. And then in 23, our revenue slid about a billion and a half dollars.

45:32So when a cyclical business cycles way up to a new peak, it's going to cycle way down to a new low and it'll probably stay there longer. We've been there since the very beginning of 2023, the latter part of 22. And I think we've done a really good job managing through it. And a cyclical business, sometimes the job is just make it through with good cash flows and healthy balance sheet and knowing that you made it through a cycle and then there's an upswing coming. How do you just prepare for that? I feel like you just got to have strong cash flow. Is there anything? Is there certain cash reserves you want to maintain?

46:02That's tough. You want to take some good bets and make returns, but at the same time, how do you have defense in case there is a big downturn? Yeah. Strong faith is a big component of it too for me, but I would say with respect to cash flows, look, I've been running this business with my team for 30 years now and we know how to manage through a cycle. Flexibility is really important, being flexible and making decisions quickly around cost centers and consolidating business units to be able to have effective cash flows when you're going through an unknown period where we didn't know it was going to slide a billion and a half when it started to slide.

46:35But you're making those cuts all the way down until you see the market kind of bottom out. And that's kind of where we've been the last six to eight months. We kind of been bouncing along the bottom and our industry hasn't really gotten any worse, but we haven't seen the recovery yet. We've been healthy. We've managed through it way better than we did 2008. And this one felt worse to me than 08 because we were only 08. We might've been$700 million or$800 million, something like that. So we had very little, I say little compared to what we have today to manage. When things slid in the latter part of 22 or$5 billion, had a lot of people, a lot of plants, and that's a lot of things that start shaken apart versus when you're only a few hundred million.

47:14So it felt way worse, but we fared way better because I think we're just more prepared. We've got tenure leadership and we just know what to do when it comes to being flexible and tough times. What's your day-to-day like as a CEO of publicly traded company in terms of time you're spending on M &A versus just internal operational stuff with a lot of community and just good face of your internal team and external? What does it look like on average? If I can just cut out some of the nuggets that I know I spend consistently, it's a few hours a week in terms of listening sessions with our facilities.

47:44So whether it's a virtual listening session with one of our team member leadership groups, and these are leaders at the frontline level. So I have in those listening sessions, I have the frontline leaders of the business, men and women that are directing traffic on the front lines of the business for manufacturing parts. They present the business to me, our five pillars. So that's really cool for me to get to hear from them. A lot of them, it's their first time presenting in front of a group and in front of me. And I get to hear how they think about the business and the plant leadership. They kind of sit there and they just kind of be mediators.

48:16They're not doing the presenting, which is really cool. I spend time with some vision casting during that period for 20 or 30 minutes. And then I just take questions for 30 minutes. So that's kind of how those listening sessions go. So I do that for a few hours every week. I probably spend an hour or two, depending on thinking about M &A every week and going through lists. And again, we don't go to investment bankers and ask for lists of companies that are for sale. We're thinking about, okay, strategically, if we're going to buy anybody in any of our industries, which ones would be most appealing?

48:44And have we had a conversation with them? Is it time to have a conversation with them? So I spent some time thinking about M &A. This season lately, we're really reformulating our next few-year plan. Strategic planning is always part of what I'm thinking about. I spend time with my leadership team. I spend time with our customers on a pretty regular basis. It's really important for me to know, are we helping get them where they want to go? Are we innovating and providing the value they expect as a valued partner in the industry of the business? Keeping up those customer relationships, hearing what they're thinking about and where they're going is really important to me as well.

49:18But those are some of the bigger chunks of my time, I'd say. What about the overhead of just being a publicly traded company? All the investor relations, earning calls, stuff like that. Doesn't that get a little more taxing than being a private company? Yeah, it does. There's a lot of work there. I mean, you look at all the regulatory stuff that we have to do that other companies typically don't. We're thinking about things. But again, I've got resources for that. We've got a sustainability leader, which most businesses don't have. Our finance department does a great job handling a lot of the public company stuff and our CFO leads that.

49:49It's not that bad. For me, it's a lot of work. It is an enormous amount of work. I think today to be a public company versus I remember when we were public before Sarbanes Oxley came out and the level of workload there, both for the company, the board of directors and the investor work and all the other things that come along with it. It's a different ball game today. I like it. Listening sessions. It's good because you're hearing from your frontline team members, the ones that really make a difference. And I get to usually see the business. I'll take a tour. I'll go out and see product being made and spend time with the plant more than just the listening session.

50:21But yeah, that's a big part of it. M &A strategy and then strategic planning sounds like it's a mix of your internal leaders and your customers. Yeah. Are we staying to plan? Are we doing what we said we were going to do the last period, whether it's a new business, innovation, all that kind of stuff? I appreciate it. I wanted to curious what the day-to-day life is like. That's the fun part of my job is, then there's the emergencies. There's the stuff that pops up that I got to drop everything that I'm doing. A lot of people have their jobs and it's okay. We got to focus on this for the next few hours or few days.

50:51Is this something we want to talk about? Is AI and automation as key areas for future investment? Yeah, I think every company is, especially manufacturing for automation. I think every company has got to really consider those two things. With respect to automation for us, we're in manufacturing and there's multiple reasons to consider automation. And most people just think, oh, you can build it quicker and you don't need people to come in every day. Yeah, that's part of it. It does solve some labor issues. It's the consistency of production when you're manufacturing parts or pieces of parts that you have with automation that's really helpful.

51:24So quality generally is one of the biggest improvement opportunities when you automate a work cell or a process for us. And then the safety piece of it too. We've put a lot of automation in just to help make jobs more safe where they're not lifting ungodly loads of steel parts and things like that, or in a certain position where they're welding or doing some kind of assembly. And over time, you do that assembly or job for 40 hours a week. You can start causing issues and things like that with your health. I think automating for safety, automating for quality, and automating for efficiency, those are the projects that we really look at to drive.

52:01are we going to spend a couple million dollars and automate this? Or is there a bigger priority for the capital? Are these all driven by vendors that come to you inbound? Or are you proactively going outbound looking for solutions? Mostly internally. We've got enough automation in our business today where our general managers or our plant leaders will say, okay, we need to look at how we can automate that process. Then we'll bring in our automation people. We have somebody in-house that focuses on automation. Oh, wow. Who is there? Proactive. Yeah, so we'll bring that person in, maybe bring some outside consultants in that would look at and say, okay, here's what we think.

52:35Let's put a plan together. And then if it makes sense and we look at the returns on those investments, we either do or we don't do them. And then on the AI side, that's all newly developing, but we're really looking at it around our call center where we take a hundred thousand phone calls a month. We get 60 ,000 emails a month where it's repair and replacement and service type things. A lot of consumers calling and asking questions about how does this part work? I can't get that to work. So we have this volume of data that just comes into our call center every day, again, to the tune of 100 ,000 calls a month, tens of thousands of emails a month, about 10 ,000 chats a month.

53:12And all that gets dumped along with all of our technical publications and technical videos and documents. And we're starting to develop some AI around assisting our agents that are handling all the calls with these complex, Think about the training it can solve, getting to the resolution quicker, solving cases quicker, which all leads to a better customer experience. We're definitely a lot of companies, I think, working on that angle. Jason, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you taking the time, helping me become a better M &A scientist. Oh, hey, I love that you're passionate about becoming an M &A scientist.

53:45I love the term. I'm going to do this. I don't want to use the word weaponized culture. Strategic advantage. Yeah. Using Cultures to the Advantage, it's something that's definitely resonated with me in this conversation. Awesome. I hope more people feel the same because I do feel that if you really believe you can change somebody's life in that 40 hours a week, every week, you've got people. And I don't think many people would argue that you couldn't do that if you were intentional. If you feel you can do that, then I think you get more productive team members and people that are more passionate about your business and care about the things you care about as a business leader versus a person that doesn't.

54:20Care about your people. Yeah. Sounds simple, but it's more difficult to execute consistently. Get reactive in so many other things. It's being very proactive about it. It's a big takeaway. You got to have team members that are focused on doing that. The M &A scientists, you've made it this far. I appreciate you listening. Always welcome feedback, criticism, so I can get better at doing this. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Until next time, here's to the deal.

54:58Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of M &A with our podcast. We love hearing feedback. Tag us on a LinkedIn post, add a review on Apple Podcasts. We'd love to hear from you. If you need help standing up an M &A function or optimizing one that you already have, we're here to help. And if we can't help you, we probably know someone that can. You can reach out to me by email, Kisan, K-I-S-O-N, at mascience.com, or you can text me directly at 312-857-3711. If you just want to keep learning at your own pace, visit mascience.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter.

55:43Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal. Thank you.