SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome to the Toilet Paper Salesman Podcast. My name is Mike Murarki. I'm your host. And today I am very honored to have Jeff Heron as our special guest. Jeff Heron is currently the Senior Vice President of Sales for RJ Schinner, working in the National Accounts Arena. Jeff is gracious enough to join us today. He has a tremendous amount of experience. Jeff is my mentor and has a large role, and we go back a long way. So I'm very, very happy to introduce you to Jeff Heron.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Hey, Mike. It's nice to be on this podcast with you, with a person of your experience.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

So, Jeff, why don't we um start? Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, where you grew up, where you went to school, and kind of how you've got into the business.

Family Roots in Jan-San

Leaving Palmer, Joining RJ Schinner

SPEAKER_01 1:06

All right, Mike, this goes back a long way. I reflected on the fact that this will be my 50th year in the industry in a full-time job. So, what does that mean? That means I started right out of college. In fact, during college, I took a position mixing chemicals for a distributor. Now, I had a connection to that distributor because my grandfather had bought it from the original founder. So the company name originally was Palmer Fixer, founded in 1907. John Frederick Palmer moved from Indiana as a 27-year-old and started a manufacturing business in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin. He was a brilliant guy. He had different patents for globe pump dispensers as well as toilet tissue dispensers, and had a manufacturing facility that at that time, in the early aughts and the teens of the 1900s, was primarily sweeping compound brooms and brushes and things of that nature. He proceeded to build the business both on the manufacturing side as well as brokers in the Midwest. And my grandfather started working for that company as an accountant in the 30s and bought it in 1942 from him. At that time, it had some penal royalties, and he decided to sell out of the fixture side of the business. And that became Palmer Fixture by itself. And Palmer Company, the distributor, was the business that he maintained. He held that ownership position into the 60s and then sold it to an uncle of mine and another gentleman by the name of Russ Saz, who coincidentally I ended up meeting for the first time when I was having lung surgery at the age of 18. He was dying of cancer. We were in the same hospital room separated by a curtain. Subsequent to that death, my grandfather came back in the business and lasted two more years before he died of lung cancer. And that was in 1972. In 73, I started working mixing chemicals in the back. I had worked road construction prior to that, but there was a lot of rain. And with the rain, you don't get paid. So I got offered a job to mix chemicals and started to learn the business, figuring there was a roof over my head and they were matching my pay. That was going to help me pay for college. So that's 1973. I started working there. And from that point forward, really immersed myself in the business. Had the opportunity to talk to leaders in the industry for a Jansan business. And the business marketplace for Palmer at that point was primarily Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. Coming out of college, I became a street sales rep in northern Illinois and western Wisconsin. Grew the business as well as bought out my mother and my aunt, got to a 35% ownership position. That went along pretty swimmingly. We grew to five locations across the Midwest from Peoria up through uh the Fox Valley in 1999 separated, and I won't go into great detail, but um 35% wasn't ownership, it was a less than majority ownership position. So we had a parting of the ways, and I had known Jim Shinner. And I called Jim and I said, I'm no longer with Palmer Company. He said, Come on over, we'll figure out something. And one of the strengths of a company uh like RJ Schinner is the vision of someone like Jim. And Jim and I had known our known each other for probably 10 years prior to that. We played tennis weekly and got to know each other relatively well. So Jim's philosophy is put people in a position to succeed. Don't try to make them do stuff they can't. And that was the start of uh a relationship. We started on a consulting basis, and a couple of years later, I came on full-time.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

So, did you Palmer buy from RJ Shinner? Uh, very little. You and Jim just happened to develop this relationship outside of you doing business together.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

That's correct. And to this day, he kind of takes it personally that RJ uh didn't sell Palmer Company more stuff, but we're all like that, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:34

That's right. So you start at RJ Shinner officially. What year was that, Jim?

SPEAKER_01 5:40

October of 1999 as a consultant.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

At 1999, what did RJ Shinner look like at that point? Is how big was it? What kind of footprint did it have?

SPEAKER_01 5:50

So we had just opened our third location. Jim had a thought process of putting us in a place to compete with others in the industry, and he put us into Minnesota near the Twin Cities, and the third location headquarters is uh was New Berlin, Wisconsin at that point. And the third location was Columbus, Ohio, very close to the mega center for Softfeld.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

So then when you start on full-time, uh, what's your role?

Early RJ Strategy and Footprint

SPEAKER_01 6:19

So my responsibilities at in 2001, 2002 were to build the Janssen category, create a marketing department for the company, and develop accounts on the street. Primarily at that point, it would have been local distribution that we hadn't previously done business with. Our focus as a company had been more food service and grocery, where my experience had been janitorial supply. So we expanded that portfolio at RJ. And then I spent time with a group of affiliations that um I had previously had legacy experience with.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

When I met you, it was probably in 2006, 2005, somewhere in there. And interestingly enough, you were doing marketing at that time, correct? Correct. As I met you and started to see the type of marketing that you guys were doing. Josie, who now works for the company and myself, Josie worked for Hub Paper and I did as well at that time. We were very active on the RJ website, pulling off materials and copying to what you were doing. So you were very innovative in your marketing ability. And a lot of what we have today is because of the work that you did.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

I had an influence there for sure. There is a need for um communication tools. We talk in terms of touches to the customer. It can be personal field sales, it can be customer service, it can be point of sale, it can be a website. The more ways you can touch customers, the better. And different customers digest information in different ways. We customized materials so that a distributor felt that they had their own marketing materials, not some manufacturer's product with a stamp on it. And that has been our kind of our legacy of really individualized customized marketing.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

RJ is sitting at uh four locations. I think then they added uh Michigan.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Yep, they did that in about 2004.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

2004. So then what flips the switch for Jim Shinner to decide to go national?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

That's a really good question. His philosophy has always been to get to a point in sales volume that you had influence. And at that point in time, we were probably doing in the neighborhood of 50 million, and we with an aspiration to get to 100 million. So if we get to 100 million, his thought was now we're going to be able to command some influence in the marketplace from a pricing perspective, from a volume perspective. But at the same time we had that vision of getting to 100 million, there were also different influences going on in the marketplace that were to our benefit. The consolidation that went on with the independent wholesalers, RDA was a 13-member across the United States entity. And many of them were purchased either by a company that at that time known as Legaz, as well as Bunzel R3. And that consolidation gave us openings in different marketplaces to come in as an independent. Separately from that, he just had an aggressive stance that he was going to continue to grow, forward invest in the business, and ran the business like a Swiss Army knife from a receivables and an inventory perspective. And then on the sales side, we we kept adding staff as different competitors were eliminating positions, consolidating out field sellers or leadership. And then at that point in time, Ken Schinner was the national sales manager and was continuing to hire pretty high quality people across our footprint and expanding when the opportunity presented itself.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

I think the first purchase was Clark Food Service, right? That got us down into Missouri. That's correct. Yes. And then we decided to expand to Texas.

Expansion Missteps and Texas Lessons

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Well, we have to back it up a little bit. So the uh first acquisition was Mill Products in St. Louis. It was a small operation that intended to have all product be picked up. And our model was different. We had much broader offering with a delivery to the customer on 53-foot semis. So when we came into that market, Mill Products realized that it was going to be probably a little short-lived for their success. So they sold to us. And subsequent to that, a couple of years later, the opportunity presented as Clark Food Service was having financial troubles for Jim to purchase the redistribution business. And the distribution side of that business was handed off to local customers of ours. Then came the Dallas investment, and Paul Schinner came back in the business. He had been actually with Bunzel for going on maybe 15 years, a lot of experience, but um was looking for a new path in his life, and he opened that up. And interestingly enough, it was probably one of the poorest strategy moves on my part because what I thought we would do was come into the market without any forewarning, just open the facility and say we're here. And that ticked off everybody. It ticked off the vendor community, it ticked off our competitors, and it surprised the customers. My second gap, and we never did that again. The other gap with that one was that we had a marketing support guy that was a Texas Longhorn graduate, and he thought it'd be great if we utilized a leather portfolio to hand out to customers, it was burnt orange. Unbeknownst to me, if you were a Texas Aggie fan or a TCU fan or an Oklahoma fan, you didn't want anything to do with that burnt orange. We had thousands of leather folios that went to Atlanta for Gordon Eans to distribute in later years.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

That's funny. Out of the Texas, you say that there's gas and everything. So when you go down into Texas and all of a sudden we don't have vendor support because they were a bit surprised about our move and weren't expecting us to be there, what was the strategy that we had to employ in order to compete against that? And then how does that create our branding strategy, which we have today?

SPEAKER_01 12:50

That's roughly 2010. In 2002, we were just a brown box in our own brand, not anything labeled. And that evolved to the RDA brand, which was vintage. And because people like, well, the national brands, I won't mention them, but national brands were not embracing us to support them because they already had distribution. They had even distribution in Wisconsin by a um company called AD Shinner. And AD and RJ were actually, I think, uncle and and nephew. And RJ broke away from them, but we were the stepchild at that point, and we couldn't get brands. So we had to build our own. That just took the same strategy down to Texas. Paul Schinner had to figure out what was available to him in that marketplace, including our brands.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Wasn't that the market that launched our brands into a different stratosphere? Or would you say it was something else?

SPEAKER_01 13:50

I think the evolution of our brands was strong. And at that point, we were just looking for price fighters in that market, more so than our brands. Without so the strategy of our brands had pretty much evolved to um the program that was initiated by RDA. Our own branding strategy didn't really develop until um 2012 to 2014.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

Now I'm with Huff at RDA at the same time when you guys developed Empress, which was the first brand, correct?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

That was our first brand, yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Tell us how Empress comes about and uh the strategy behind that. And then, of course, when it was introduced, being on the other side of things, we could see that this was going to be a challenge for RDA because RJ Shinner now has the Empress brand that they're going and running with and not the vintage brand. And what the result of that for RDA was they lost some leverage volume size.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Yes, you're reminding me of some of the dates, so I may have them a little bit off, but uh you're correct. Empress was developed primarily for food service talent tissue because our lack of national brands in the talent tissue category, as well as um gaps from the vendor community on the food service side. So we could buy from mills of origin, we had enough volume. If we chose to um utilize our branding strategy, that gave more flexibility to the manufacturers and giving us accurate and competitive pricing, and we absorbed all the marketing costs. So that is true. That evolved probably in the aughts, and I'd have to look at it. We trademarked the names and uh had a very good run, and it continues to this day.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

The brands now have become a major part of what we do and go out to market. I think that all was all born out of the necessity. No doubt. You then moved from marketing to into a national accounts role. When did that actually happen?

Empress Brand: Why and How

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Well, I always was developing relationships um, primarily on the group side with our major group affiliations. And we had an opportunity from a company by the name of Clorox to support one of their customers that felt that um Clorox felt it was too small for them to deal with. And that that evolved into a national opportunity, but we didn't have any national initiatives. We didn't understand how to do national accounts. So this was our first foray into that. Our intent was to support them as best we could. But the challenge that we had is we had no infrastructure. From that day, which was 2013, as the contract was signed, until this day, we still have the same leadership people on a monthly call dealing with what we need to do to support national initiatives.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

So that started the national initiative. At that point, is that when the realization is, hey, we need to be across the country here? Is it was that thought always there, or was that thought born out of picking up this customer and seeing that there's some tremendous opportunity if we had a national footprint?

SPEAKER_01 17:10

So the opportunity for national distribution was probably always in the minds of Ken and Jim Schinner. The opportunities presented themselves in different ways. So this initial national account allowed us to build a template for supporting national business. And the people on the op side, the people on the customer service side, they're still there today, you know, 12 years later. So they operate like a Swiss clock. The build-out then evolved when we added a national sales manager for national accounts. And that individual brought in Nikki Salustio and Todd Lohman. Both of those people had vertical experience, one in med surge and the other in MRO. So that business quickly picked up, and that allowed us to support a broader footprint and allow us to do things like open in Bethlehem with you. It was kind of an evolution that continued to go forward.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Before we got to Bethlehem, though, there was the Southeast expansion. I don't know exactly how that went. I'm sure you do. And then there was some right around the same time that I came on board, which was a year before Bethlehem opened, there was some Western expansion as well.

Building National Accounts Infrastructure

SPEAKER_01 18:28

You know, the disruptions in the industry have always been pretty consistently surprising. And Expedix decided to jettison Softfeld, and that opportunity presented itself after we had opened Dallas and Nashville, Tennessee, under Paul Schinner. When they decided to make changes at Expedex with Softfeld, Gordon Eans and a team were made available, and Gordon shepherded that transition for Atlanta. And that opened up the Southeast. As far as the Southwest, that was an acquisition of an Advantage member in Phoenix, Arizona, that allowed us to get over the Rockies and expand a little bit farther. The big initiative was in the Southeast with Atlanta and then moving into Tampa and subsequently into North Carolina.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

I joined in 2017. We opened up Bethlehem in 18 uh in August. And it was really from my perspective, it's interesting because coming from redistribution, I spent over 30 years in redistribution. Coming over to RJ, it was always interesting to me. I it was hard for me to understand what the difference was. You know, why is RJ growing so dramatically at that point? And why company I was with wasn't growing quite as fast. What was the difference? And so when I went to headquarters and did my training, I'm hearing all the language and it's the same, and everything seems the same. And then we had, as I started to get into the market, I had a customer who made a request, and it was a challenging request. It wasn't something that was simple. And I remember coming to you and saying, hey, this customer is asking for this. And you said, Well, why don't you go down to finance and see what they can do with it? So I go down to finance and they start ping-ponging it back and forth for 15 minutes or so, and they figured it out. And they're like, Okay, we can do it. This is how we're going to do it. And to me, that was like, wow, I was eye-opening to me because what RJ wanted to do is to find a way to do it so that we can launch forward into this customer. And it's exactly what happened. Once we were able to present this to the customer and say, yes, we can do this, it opened up a whole world of new business opportunities for us. So I think it was the difference between saying no and finding a way to say yes. Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 21:02

There's no question. We're always looking for solutions and ways to say yes that are mutually beneficial. If you don't have win-win relationships in the market, you're not going to be long-term. You can't disadvantage either your customer or your vendor or your employees. All stakeholders need to win in this. You know, the shareholder has to win. If you're looking at that component of it, the employee has to win, the customer has to win, the vendor has to win. So it's really a four-legged stool that allows you to have stability and to grow. Otherwise, it's going to break down. I think the other thing that is kind of unique with RJ, and it came on early with my initial conversations with Jim was he likes to have a lot of transparency in the business model so the people can make decisions without Captain May up the food chain too much. And that allows in his mind and our mind philosophically to be able to pivot, make educated decisions. And if there is a mistake made, you can pivot back. But the more information you have, the more transparent you are, the quicker decisions can be made. And that has been a big, big component of our success. A lot of autonomy, a lot of visibility to information, and a willingness to take risks.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

And I think hiring people who have an entrepreneurial spirit who take and run the business like it's their own, who care about it like it's their own, and have the information and the intelligence to be able to make good decisions and be accountable for them, like you said.

Southeast and West Growth Moves

SPEAKER_01 22:37

You cannot replace entrepreneurial spirit or a sense of ownership. You can't replace it. If someone's punching nine to five and not thinking about it at 501, that is not the person you want inside of RJ Schinner. You want a person that is thinking the business morning, noon, and night, not necessarily stressing over it, but being engaged in it and letting the subconscious percolate on what we can do to make something work. And that ownership and that entrepreneurial spirit needs flexibility, it needs oxygen, and it needs room to expand.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

The flatness of our organization is uh unparalleled for a company our size. And I think that's another key as well. Like you said, you don't have to ask permission to make key decisions. The key decision makers are put in place to make decisions, not to ask permission.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

Yeah, the hierarchy is definitely flat. It hasn't really um layered up, which has been refreshing.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

One of the reasons why I came to RJ is because of you, actually, and your mentorship through the years when I got to know you uh from what 2006 to 2017, almost 10 years from the time that I met you until the time I came on board at RJ. And I know that I'm not alone in the people that you have been influenced. Why don't you talk about that a little bit and your philosophy on mentorship and the importance of it?

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Well, if you're not willing to share, you're probably not gonna receive either, right? I'd probably go back to my early days, still in college, mixing chemicals in the back of a small janitorial supply, having a chance to talk to owners and sales managers of manufacturers, and their willingness to share information. We would talk for hours about industry stuff, hours. And that you know, it could include a dinner, it could maintain for an hour or two after that, having a cocktail, writing notes down on napkins. The concept of nine to five was just not part of learning the industry. At that time, it was cultural, it was very cultural, very relationship-driven. And I've hoped to be able to, over the years, maintain that philosophy of someone is interested in the business to be able to share, you know, 50 years of experience.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

Did you have a mentor?

SPEAKER_01 25:12

I do, and he's still alive. His name is Bill Stanley, and uh Bill is now in his 90s, and we first met in 1981 at the Montreal ISSA, and he put on a presentation there that I was able fortunate enough to have watched and experienced, and we've been friends ever since, and he's definitely been my mentor in the industry.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

So, Bill was a sales trainer?

Say Yes Culture and Flat Hierarchy

SPEAKER_01 25:40

So, Bill at that time had dual hats on. He worked for a company that time known as Hysan, as a field sales rep that covered uh the southwest, primarily Texas, but Oklahoma and Louisiana as well. And along with that, he had always been involved with and had a need to understand personal development. So his experience in the selling chemicals transferred over to putting presentations on motivational training, sales training, personal development materials. And that went on for 30, 40 years.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

The training aspect of it, I know it's part of what I loved and did prior to coming on to RJ and continued with RJ, the ability to help other people to to be able to impart the knowledge that you've learned throughout the years, whether it's the mistakes that you've made or whether it's successes that you've had, you obviously learn more from the mistakes you've made than successes. But to be able to take all of that and share it and be able to help younger people to have an easier time than we had, or to avoid some of the pitfalls that we ran into, I think is really valuable. And one of the things that is my passion, and I believe it is yours as well, is trying to get younger people into our industry. If you want to just talk about that a little bit and how you feel, maybe we can do that better, or is there a way? And I know at RJ, we now have a good amount of young people coming into the business as we have older sales reps. And in our industry, we have a lot of older sales reps who are getting ready to retire. And I guess the question is for our customers and even for us, how do we replace those seasoned sales reps who've been in the industry for a long time with younger people who can come in and do the job?

Mentorship and Industry Knowledge

SPEAKER_01 27:35

And that's a good question. If an individual is interested in a career, the career path has a lot of influences, right? Product that's being presented, is it sexy enough for today's individual? For personal development, is there upward mobility? Is there challenge in the current situation that they'd have? Is there longevity to the business? With all the complexities that we face today in distribution, supply chain, manufacturing, world competition, there is a safe harbor to some level in our industry. There is a need for our products, the product demand is not going to go down. The distribution of it, the production of it, the design of it will and does evolve. And it allows smart people that are hardworking to evolve with it and have a career. Once you're in this industry, the chance of you leaving the industry is probably very, very low just because it is such a robust industry with a lot of avenues for personal growth. Now you talk about it from a perspective of young individuals. I don't think that there's a reason that we can't have young individuals join our organization as long as there's a vision that's provided to them of where they can go in the business. The industry is definitely graying, but the reality is it's always been graying. I'm now the grayest one here. But there was a time I was the young buck. So the perception that it's an aging industry is probably no different than it's ever been. If you take pictures from the last 75 years of the ISSA, there was no young people there in those pictures. They were always of age, of middle age or older. But that doesn't mean there weren't new influencers coming in and young people that are willing to work. That opportunity is still there. And it's probably better today than it has been in the past, simply because of the ability to leverage. And obviously, you have to be with the right horse. If you're not on the right horse, forget everything I've said. But you get on the right horse with the right technology in the right situation. The opportunities are really, really strong yet for anybody that joins our business. And that doesn't mean it's a sales rep, it means they're part of a business that's evolving. And it could they could have multiple hats to be successful going forward.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

So, what would you say? Say when people say today, and you hear it a lot. The young people today, they don't want to work. They're challenging to deal with. What do you say to the people who say that?

SPEAKER_01 30:29

I don't really respond to that because if you're looking for people, you'll find them. We've added some really talented younger people in our business. And there's younger people in other companies that we interact with that are of the same ilk. Now, may they in some instances look for a few years of experience and move on. There's always that component. But the flip side of that is legacy knowledge and growing inside of a business has tremendous benefit because there's specialized knowledge that can't be replaced by jumping from job to job. So I don't think that it's any more challenging than it's ever been. You may have to communicate a little different than you have in the past because of the nature of today's technologies and society. But we still have hardworking people out there looking for a career path.

SPEAKER_00 31:23

I couldn't agree more. And we've proven it. I mean, we've gotten some really, really strong young people now in our organization, and they're among the hardest working people that I know. It's refreshing to see that they when they come into the industry, their eyes are open to understand the opportunity that is here, not just necessarily with RJ, but throughout the industry. And I'll often say to someone who's young coming in that if you work hard, if you really learn the business and you're diligent, you can have an incredible career to be in this industry and really do very, very well. There are a lot of people in our industry who have done very, very well throughout the years and have grown a career that is as good as any other career or even better.

SPEAKER_01 32:11

And the stability of the industry is fabulous. So I'm not saying that uh companies are stable. There is a lot of change and flux and influences, but the industry is a bedrock for our um society from sanitation of food packaging to um everyday consumables.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

Let's talk about the future. Continue to see amazing consolidation in our industry. We continue to see supply chain challenges since 2020. I think it's been uh more challenging on the supply chain side. We see tremendous consolidation since 2020 with distributors. Not that that has been hasn't been always going on, but really I think there's an acceleration there. And then you've got the technology component, which is now starting to take over. So look down the road five years. What do you see?

Attracting and Growing Young Talent

SPEAKER_01 33:05

I think if you look five years from now, an organization that is committed to investing in the future will have strengthened themselves significantly. If a company is looking for cashing out or minimally investing, they're going to be treading water or going to be gone through some sort of next action. The industry unto itself has a lot of tentacles. You've got medical supply, you've got food service, you've got janitorial, you've got paper houses, you've got MRO. Our onshoring that's going on is real. So there is going to be a need for consumables, and there's going to be a need for us to continue to be viable. The efficiencies will continue to improve because they have to. To be in a competitive world, you have to continue to maintain your efficiencies or improve on them. I see the consolidation swinging back the other way with offshoots of that consolidation. You know, apples that have fallen from the trees, so to speak, and been picked up by another company or individuals that start new businesses to fill in the gaps. I don't see the consolidation continuing to provide less and less opportunities. I see more opportunities going forward.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

I agree with that completely. I think independent distributors will always thrive. You know, you're going to have, like you said, you'll have people falling off the tree and then either joining smaller organizations and helping them to grow larger or starting their own organizations. The independent business, I believe, will continue to thrive because there's always a need underneath the larger organization for service, for the customers, for a different model of distribution that the larger distributors can't accommodate.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

You'll never not have innovation, also. And where does innovation normally come from? It doesn't normally come from a hierarchical organization. It comes from entrepreneurials.

SPEAKER_00 35:12

Is there anything else you'd like to add, Jeff?

SPEAKER_01 35:14

I I appreciate the opportunity to share the last few years with you, Mike. And prior to that, sharing our information that you used at Huff United. So both both of those are near and dear to my heart. I look forward to seeing you continue to prosper in this business as this is my last few months in the industry, and I'm retiring at the end of the year. So thanks for having the chance to share some thoughts here and wish you well and your family. Well, Grandpa.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

I appreciate you so much through the years and have nothing but utmost respect. And I know the industry as a whole has nothing but the utmost respect for you and for what you've accomplished throughout your career. It's an honor to be able to have you on the podcast and to be able to have you share your wisdom with us because, you know, one of my goals for the podcast is to be able to take wisdom and share it and help future generations to be able to access that information. I appreciate that you're willing to share with us and be able to have this out there forever. Again, thank you so much. Appreciate uh you joining the podcast. And uh best wishes on your retirement. We won't talk too much about that, but I know you'll have a very good retirement. You'll always be an influencer in this industry for as long as you're here.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

Thanks, Mike.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

So, with that, we'll end the podcast. Who says selling toilet paper isn't glamorous? Thanks a lot. Have a great day.