Combating Crime and Loss in Pharmacies | Russ Hawkins, Agilence Inc.

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

[00:00:12] Mike Koelzer, Host: Russ, for those that haven't come across you online, introduce yourself and tell our listeners what we're talking about today.

[00:00:20] Russ Hawkins: My name is Russ Hawkins and I'm the CEO of Agilence. is a contraction of the words [00:00:27] Agile and Intelligence. So that comes together, Agile Intelligence. And we're a data analytics firm. We help our customers in the pharmacy industry and in some other industries, retailers and restaurants how [00:00:42] to manage their data and how to essentially democratize the data. Make the data available to the managers and the employees of the organization so they can make better decisions on a day to day basis in the performance of their jobs.[00:00:57] 

[00:00:57] Mike Koelzer, Host: Russ, one of those big decisions for customers as I look at your stuff, it seems to be lost. And there's a million ways to call it. In the old days, what they called " don't know, shrinkage, [00:01:12] pilferage, all that kind of stuff. It seems like they never wanted to call it stealing, but now, I'm picturing robots going out and tackling all these people that are clearing the shells at the chain pharmacies, causing them to shut their doors forever. But [00:01:27] I imagine we're not to that level yet.

[00:01:29] Russ Hawkins: No, we're not. I mean, I think recently there's been a lot of news about organized retail crime and especially as it relates to pharmacies. San Francisco has figured prominently in those [00:01:42] discussions. But I think some of that is kind of sensational at this

point.

I mean, if you look at the overall kind of, balanced out trends. I don't think it's a significant spike in stealing. Typically it runs in the [00:01:57] low percentage points, two or 3%. And it's been pretty consistent for a long time. The difference today is that stories get told more quickly and get disseminated more quickly over

social media and in the news media and, as we are more and [00:02:12] more disaggregated in terms of the way the information flows.

So it kind of feels like right now that there's a spike in this so-called organized retail crime, but I'm not a believer yet. I haven't seen data and I'm very data driven.

I [00:02:27] mean, it's all about, facts are our friends here and innuendo has no place. 

[00:02:31] Mike Koelzer, Host: I was told one time, when things stop becoming news, that's when you have to worry. So, for example, it's more [00:02:42] newsworthy to show a bus going off a cliff and Killing the senior citizens that were going to the casino or something than it is to talk about the Thousands of people that died from smoking [00:02:57] today and that kind of stuff and so it's when it no longer makes the news is When you kind of said, oh Darn, that's so prevalent.

People aren't even talking about it anymore

[00:03:07] Russ Hawkins: A, absolutely no question about it. You become in your, to it, you [00:03:12] become numb to it, and it doesn't have the excitement of being some new information. Bad news is better for ratings than good news,

Right, 

 , so

[00:03:20] Russ Hawkins: there tends to be concentration there.

[00:03:21] Mike Koelzer, Host: All right, Russ. So when we're looking at those things of a football team's worth of people [00:03:27] going in and clearing out the shelves, you haven't gone through all the data yet, but those are very visual things if you look at all of the different retail stores and things like that, it's a relatively small number.

[00:03:41] Russ Hawkins: [00:03:42] It is a relatively small number. And, what what we're focused on is understanding all of the areas of loss that

happen inside companies, in the pharmacy industry, there's two different businesses, right? There, there's the front end of the business, which is a lot like a [00:03:57] grocery store, increasingly a lot like a grocery store, like a convenience store.

And then there's the, then there's the pharmacy business itself, which has its own unique. Kind of problems and I guess opportunities for loss and what's been interesting to me [00:04:12] and in my personal journey here and in, in running the company has been how much of loss comes from people, the people inside the company, not, it's not people coming in and shoplifting.

It's a lot of times the pharmacist or the technician or the front end people that are [00:04:27] working there that, understand the systems and they understand what they can get away with within

certain parameters. And they take advantage of it. Unfortunately I always call myself a little bit of a Pollyanna because I can't believe sometimes that people do the things that they do,

biting the hand that [00:04:42] feeds them, so to speak.

Which isn't to say that, that the theft, external theft isn't an issue. It absolutely is an issue. And, of course, in the pharmacy business, you've got other issues. A lot of it around compliance,

That you can be threatened by not having[00:04:57] making use of the data that you have.

One of the biggest issues we have in the pharmacy business is that different pharmacies, different organizations handle things differently. There is a major pharma company in the United States, for example, that would prefer to just hire [00:05:12] more lawyers and solve their problems after the fact, rather than trying to use the data that they have in their hands.

To reduce the problem, in advance. And

so, we see different kinds of, different kinds of perspectives on people. As far as our company, we did start [00:05:27] in, in the so called loss prevention area, and total retail loss management, and those kinds of things. But, there's really not a huge amount of difference between looking at theft and bad stuff and just total operations.

I mean, [00:05:42] operational losses can be huge. Distribution having stuff, having material and merchandise stuck in your distribution centers and not getting out into the stores in a timely manner could cause more losses than any external thief could ever think about causing.[00:05:57] 

So looking at processes and procedures have become a significant part of our business. 

[00:06:03] Mike: The best thieves are the wolves and sheep's clothing. Unfortunately, nobody comes out. I used to say that Russ, I used [00:06:12] to say, nobody comes in and just says, we're robbing you. Now we were broken into three or four times. Six years ago by this group of, I'm going to say [00:06:27] six people that went around the whole Midwest, four or five different states and.

I wish somebody would just send me a text and say, Hey Mike in at uh, 4 0 6 AM [00:06:42] tonight. We're just going to take so much we'll try to make the opening in the glass that we break big enough for us, but not. So 

big that people will crawl into. So if you come in at I dunno, if you open at [00:06:57] nine, come in at 830 or so, there'll be a half hour's worth of stuff to clean up, but at least you'll get a good night's sleep, but unfortunately we don't get that.

[00:07:06] Russ Hawkins: No, you don't.

Although the data can identify patterns and can identify the way people operate. I mean,[00:07:12] 

In these ORC rings, I mean, very typically they'll, they will work down a major superhighway. So if

it's attacking one of the large Pharmacy chains they'll literally start and then in the north and stop at exit, [00:07:27] every exit, get off

at every exit on the highway and

Go to the nearest location of that chain.

And so there is some opportunity to predict where they'll come and where they'll go. And this area is is an important area, one

that gets us [00:07:42] closer to doing kind of real time prevention.

Most of what we do is looking at historic patterns and trying to provide our customers with tools so that those patterns can't be redone, can't be done [00:07:57] again in the same way. But today with the increase of bandwidth in these stores, with the the kind of immediacy of the information that we're getting if you start at the top of the interstate and start working your way down south, by the time you get to the south we're [00:08:12] actually in a position to be able to to let those stores know that they should be on the lookout for, a potential MO, a

potential, method of operation.

[00:08:21] Mike Koelzer, Host: You probably want to help people get to industry standards if they're above it, but I [00:08:27] imagine that one important thing is looking for those spikes we kind of know something's really uh, skew right now.

[00:08:34] Russ Hawkins: Sure, absolutely. I mean, the basic part of the business is what we call exception reporting.

Being able to, what is out of [00:08:42] whack? What is it that's happening that shouldn't be happening? Now you can look at this over time, but when, we deal with a lot of large chains. And so what you have is you have significant variance between individual stores compared to the [00:08:57] norm,

right?

And so what we in fact do is exactly what you described. We look for the stores that are kind of popping their head up, and they're not, they're not meeting the expectations. In certain areas, we look at three areas. We look at [00:09:12] operational areas related to sales and material moving out, whether it's at the front end or in the pharmacy, we look at what's happening in the transaction logs.

How are goods and merchandise and drugs moving out of the business? Who are they going to? Are there [00:09:27] patterns there that that makes sense to focus on, and then how are individual stores compared to the norm in those kinds of things? So that whole revenue generation and revenue recognition is one big area of what we look at. Then we also look at cost and [00:09:42] expenses, and of course shrink is a very

an important part of that and looking at how, on the front end of the business, promotions are being executed. Are there people inside the company being complicit on things?

And then a big thing in the pharmacy industry is compliance.

[00:09:57] We have to comply with lots of rules and regulations. There's lots of handling rules. There's many kinds of T's you have to cross and I's you have to dot. And so, making sure that you're equipped to comply with the state and federal [00:10:12] government regulations is important. In the pharmacy business. One of the things that we look at, obviously, the opioid pandemic is huge and has been with us for a long time. And, we've got subcultures that have developed there. We've got pill pushing [00:10:27] doctors

and doctor shopping patients and being able to track these folks to look at individual patients that have multiple doctors prescriptions that are filling the same opioid or.

And, other controlled [00:10:42] substances and real, really any, anything that's on a controlled substance, whether it's pseudoephedrine or even Viagra. There's a there's a theft problem

And these people are repeat people for the most part.

If you are in the business, that's your business. So if I'm diverting. [00:10:57] Opioids as a patient. Then I need to do it over and over and over again. And you fall into patterns and those patterns are recognisable, same thing with doctors, there are unfortunately bad doctors out there that see the opportunity to make an extra [00:11:12] profit. By prescribing a lot of controlled substances, opioids and such and therefore increase their business. They have become very popular.

and and so, it used to be that That you'd get a pass from the [00:11:27] federal government and from state organizations, it'd be a, oh shucks that's a bad situation, but increasingly over the last five to 10 years, the pharmacies are being held responsible for their own data, that they're expected to know what's happening [00:11:42] in their stores.

They have the data. Using tools like ours, they have the ability to analyze that data and to understand it and they can get dinged if they are not paying attention to the data. They can end up with lawsuits and the federal government coming after [00:11:57] for basically keeping their heads in the ground.

And so that's been a very important aspect of our business in the last 10 years.

[00:12:04] Mike Koelzer, Host: One area that is interesting to me, and maybe you've tackled this [00:12:12] issue and successfully tackled it four or five years ago, I wasn't around the store as much. I was sick of it, sick of losing money. I had enough staff, but I didn't want to fire them. And so I just Bury my head at home and [00:12:27] kind of worked from home, but I shouldn't have done it as much as I did, but I did.

And so with that said, I had to get a pharmacist in charge at the pharmacy. The problem is that, and I can be blamed for this by not [00:12:42] coinciding the business enough with the medical part of it, but the problem with the pharmacist in charge left to their own devices. inclinations is they begin to focus so much on the [00:12:57] legal side of things, not thinking about the business side and pretty soon things that should take one minute or take 5 percent of your energy [00:13:12] all of a sudden take 10 minutes and 50 percent of your energy, whether it's recounting something or redoing this because you don't want your license dinged or to be in trouble and so on.

and that can get dangerous for a [00:13:27] business where somebody is only looking at the medical side. And just like people who budget Budget's always have a negative connotation, but some people who budget, it's like, Hey my dear wife, you haven't spent enough [00:13:42] on jewelry this month.

We have it set up where you're supposed to spend X dollars on jewelry a month, because that makes you a happier and happier wife, a happy life kind of thing. Buy more jewelry. It seems with your [00:13:57] program that. pEople always think we need this program to put more clamps down on stuff.

But I imagine you almost have to budget and say, look, we've done enough. We have to think about the business side of it too, and not go overboard on [00:14:12] regulations.

[00:14:13] Russ Hawkins: No question, absolutely. I mean, you have to have a balance. And you mentioned going, having multiple stores. And so one of the things I like to say is that if I own one store, I can keep my hand on that pretty well, and

I can I can [00:14:27] by example... Teach people what that balance ought to be.

I can

say, well, you don't need to worry about that. Let's, we need to sell more. Let's

work on this and let's 

work on that. But if you have more than one store, you can only be in one place at a time. And

so, I like to say that if you have [00:14:42] at least two locations, then you need software like ours.

We have competitors, too, and there are plenty of opportunities to get others. I mean, of course, I think we're the best,

but, as soon as you have two locations, you can't be in both places. You can't [00:14:57] be necessarily setting the, being the role model for both locations simultaneously.

And so you need a way of gathering the data that your operations are producing and to be able to put it into [00:15:12] a form that allows you to quickly understand what's happening and to be able to make decisions based on that.

And so, quickly notice if people aren't paying attention to the business paying [00:15:27] more, too much attention on the regulation or vice versa, paying too much. attention to the business and not enough attention to the regulation and to

those things and so we'd like to think we're kind of an automated assistant in many ways to the owners of the business we keep track of [00:15:42] revenues.

We keep track of cost and expense. We keep track of compliance We keep track of people We help you manage your people better and make sure that they have the tools that they need to get their job done and to get it done well. Now, if you want to multiply that, you can, you can go to [00:15:57] some of our larger customers and we have two of the three largest in the United States and the largest in Canada today. These have thousands of stores. One of our customers has 15, 000 stores, and they're making the transition from being a pharmacy, [00:16:12] primarily pharmacy and, front end retail business, to being, you know, health care centers. So they're going through this huge transition.

They're hiring more people

And they need to be able to understand whether the standards that they're establishing are being [00:16:27] followed. In the stores, they need to be able to do that quickly and easily without having to have to be a data scientist themselves. Right.

They, it's got to be immediately accessible to you.

 And that's the void that we try to fill. So we believe that by helping our customers manage the [00:16:42] data, they have a huge amount of data that they're generating on a day to day basis. If you look at, every cash register across the chain is, you

Is busy and active.

You've got multiple people operating each of those cash registers on a day by day basis, as the shifts change [00:16:57] and so forth.

Typically, multiple pharmacists are certainly,

As you point out, maybe a pharmacist in charge and maybe technicians and, let's face it, human resources are uneven, right?

We're all. We're all different, unique people, and [00:17:12] we're all going to have different strengths and weaknesses, and

so being able to kind of calmly gather the facts, and to be able to objectively review the facts, and to look at outliers, whether they're true or false. Negative [00:17:27] outliers or, in some cases, positive outliers.

You may have somebody that's doing, great work,

and you want to replicate that in other places. And

so, the bigger you get, the more difficult that is, and the more likely it is that some kind of software assistance is going to be [00:17:42] beneficial to you.

[00:17:42] Mike Koelzer, Host: I imagine Ross is a big part of your stuff. It's the I don't know three legged stool you've got probably a couple things that are maybe easy to get the data on but There might [00:17:57] be a third part, like how many bottles are actually on the shelf? And are there actually three 100 bills in there?

Is that factual thing there, is that a difficult part of. [00:18:12] This setup?

[00:18:13] Russ Hawkins: Absolutely. And you're hitting on probably the most difficult part, which is to ensure that you have the right products at the right place at the right time and that you know what's where. So the whole inventory management aspect [00:18:27] of running an operation is critical. It's critical to maximizing revenue. It's also critical to avoid compliance issues and problems that you might have on the regular regulatory side.

So typically what [00:18:42] we do with our customers is we start out with half a dozen consistent data sets. The first one is the transaction log. So we want to be able to bring in. Every transaction that happened at every register throughout the [00:18:57] operating day in a very granular detail. I want to know, I want to know what's scanned. I want to know what's entered into the keyboard. I want to know what might be overridden by an employee or a manager. And so. Gathering, [00:19:12] gathering all that is important. So we bring that to the transaction log. If there's a, and it's not always the case in the pharmacy side of the business, but if there's a website or an e com aspect to your business where people are entering orders or using a third [00:19:27] party ordering and delivery system, we're seeing companies like Instacart now coming into the pharmacy area. We need to bring in that information. So, the so called buy online, pick up in store, or

Buying online and returning in store are [00:19:42] important aspects. We bring in the human resources file, so we know everybody that works for the enterprise or the software knows it. I say we, I'm anthropomorphizing it.

I'm

making it a personal thing, but it's really the software

[00:19:53] Mike Koelzer, Host: Absolutely. 

[00:19:53] Russ Hawkins: know where the people are,

[00:19:54] Mike Koelzer, Host: Russ. It's kind of like when I say to one [00:19:57] of my staff, it's Hey Sally, we need to get this back room cleaned up. We mean you. So

[00:20:03] Russ Hawkins: right. Exactly. That's exactly right. So yeah, no question

 So I talked about the transaction logs. I talked about human resources.[00:20:12] when customers have identified themselves and they've formalized their relationship. Maybe they're part of the loyalty program.

Maybe they're regular , regular visitor patients that visit the pharmacist. We want to make sure that information is available. We want to [00:20:27] make sure that we understand where the stores are. So this gets to the whole... We talked about driving down the interstate or being able to ring fence a location based on the number of scripts that are written by a particular doctor or something like that.

So we want to know the physical location of the [00:20:42] stores. Usually, most retailers will also have some kind of other identifiers in that. They'll have something about maybe the product mix or whether the store is, Inside of a target, let's say, or standalone or, wherever it might be. And then finally the [00:20:57] item, what we call the item master. So this is everything that the store sells. So on the front end, it's all of the SKUs that are sold. All of the health aids that are sold in the front, plus, increasingly in pharmacies where we're talking about mini marts, right?

They're [00:21:12] talking about food and

beverages and those kinds of things. And then, of course, in the back part of the business, the pharmacy side of the business, it's even more important to keep strict control over what's going on. So those six things are the things that we typically start with. But to get at the inventory [00:21:27] issues, it does require significantly more data. You've got to be able to understand really from order to sale, right? So from the people at headquarters that are ordering inventory its flow from the manufacturer through [00:21:42] distribution centers. We're increasingly having third party distribution centers now that are in the industry. And then how that gets allocated out to the stores and how that gets managed in the stores is very important. Now, typically physical inventories on [00:21:57] drugs are done more frequently than the front end of the store. 

so, being able to keep track of the ins and outs. And being, if not to get it exactly, to be able to estimate what you've got in the front part of the store and with more precision in the back is a [00:22:12] critical part, and it's a very difficult part, so you're absolutely right about that.

It's one of the most difficult things to do. And, in my opinion, it's one of the ways to guarantee success. As I mentioned earlier, having the right product in the right place at the right time. Is a [00:22:27] critical capability and requirement for any business. And you really cannot do that without some assistance with, without some automation in the management of the data that you've got.

[00:22:37] Mike Koelzer, Host: My brother in law owns a bowling alley slash bar [00:22:42] and this reminded me of that, that there's some stuff, whether it's a bottle of Promethazine with coding that a pharmacist takes a swig out of, or whether it's at the bar that as you're pouring [00:22:57] shots, you do a maybe a few extra for your friends, but they actually, and I don't know if he has it anymore, but they actually had their register system set up where every top of all the.

Alcohol had meters on it. And when you poured it, it would say, all [00:23:12] right, in ounce, whatever the, whatever the amount was has come out of that. And I don't know, I don't know if they still have it 

[00:23:18] Russ Hawkins: Yep. Now, some people use it. It's a little clumsy and it's a little hard

to use sometimes. So, I think there's been a lot of people that have tried those [00:23:27] drink regulatory

kind of, it's kind of a denial of benefit, right? They're trying to keep it and send a message to the bartenders that you don't trust them.

That's one thing,

[00:23:36] Mike Koelzer, Host: Well, there you go. There you go. Absolutely. 

[00:23:40] Russ Hawkins: I think there's been a lot of people that have tried [00:23:42] that and then decided that the

juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Yeah.

[00:23:45] Mike Koelzer, Host: I think that was his case. It's interesting. You talked about trust and so on, because I had a goal. Oh, I probably shouldn't say gal. I had a lady that worked [00:23:57] at the pharmacy and. it would really bother her on the financial side because she took care of the daily registers and so on.

So just as much as what my pharmacist in [00:24:12] charged was maybe spending too much time on the medical side, she would go around and, a nickel, Hey Mike, we don't have a nickel here. I'm maybe exaggerating, but it was small things. [00:24:27] And if someone forgot to close the register at night or something, she would have a fit the next day.

And I had to calm a lot of that down, but part of it I'm saying, Oh, I'm okay showing a little bit of this act because it lets the [00:24:42] team know without implicating anybody, like with a top on the vodka, it lets them know that we're looking for things as small as nickels. When in fact I didn't. Give a rat's ass about it.

But a lot of it is a very [00:24:57] visual thing and some people you might go negative visual and some people might be positive visual.

[00:25:03] Russ Hawkins: Absolutely, no question about it. I didn't actually mention that yet, but another aspect of what we do is we typically tie into [00:25:12] the local video system if the store has

a video system. Now, not all stores do. I would, my estimate would be that about, about two thirds of stores in the country have some kind of a video management and video system.

Many of [00:25:27] these stores have cameras up above the cash registers. You can suffer from having too much video, of course,

because, if I've got, hours and hours and hours and hours of video.

How do I determine what's what? And one of the things we're able to do [00:25:42] is to provide a synchronization between the point of sale system, the transaction log, and the video system.

And so we know what register things are happening at. We can access the [00:25:57] video through our application. And we can go directly to that moment when that key was depressed or the

the card was swiped or the item was scanned. And so we actually started out more of a video, as more of a video company back in the day than we did the data analytics.

[00:26:12] We've kind of evolved to, to, to being experts in the data analytics side. But the thing about video is that it, there's a, there's an awful high volume of video that's produced if you've got cameras over every,

store. And so one of the biggest problems that we solved when we initially [00:26:27] founded the company. Was being able to make it much more efficient and much more effective for analysts and analysts sitting at headquarters or somebody sitting, in like you at your home, maybe and being able to determine, what was something to worry [00:26:42] about and what was something that wasn't to worry about, one of the things that we found back to your same point about awareness, people being aware, typically when we go into a new organization [00:26:57] In the first six months, we'll find all kinds of people problems, people that have been gaming the system for years, very often to the chagrin and disappointment of the managers and the owners of the business.

[00:27:12] Because, a particular associate who's been with the company for 20 years is thought of as very highly and highly valued. And only to find out that, yeah, they're highly valued, and they understand the way the [00:27:27] operation operates so well

that they've been able to stay under the radar and so... It ends up being kind of a bittersweet thing for some of the owners that we, where they end up having to terminate people that were previously [00:27:42] thought of as being great employees

Great associates. And then what happens is After that six month period, we stop the volume a little bit, right?

We find fewer people that are violating the rules or that, as I like to say, are your silent partners, right? And [00:27:57] then the owners of the business start to think, well, am I getting value out of this system? And it's, it is, the value out of the system is just what you described.

When people come to me and they start complaining, well, we haven't found any bad guys lately, I say, congratulations.

You have [00:28:12] fewer bad guys.

You're, the system is working. Everybody knows that you have. This analytic capability and that you're able to identify things that you were never able to identify before.

And so, as a result your business is operating more efficiently and more [00:28:27] effectively. Your people understand that, that they can't game the system, that they're not going to be allowed to be silent partners in the business. And the net result is you're going to have a happier time.

They're going to be happier, you're going to be happier, the business is going to be happier. And it's a [00:28:42] great, long term benefit. It just looks like things have dropped off in contrast to the first six months when we came in, right? 

Heh.

[00:28:49] Mike Koelzer, Host: We do quite a bit of delivery with our pharmacy and we picked up a new program that we can basically [00:28:57] track the drivers. We see where they're going and so on. And that was a little bit of a difficult conversation. We didn't get it just for that reason. This also sends out texts and all that kind of stuff.

It's a little bit of [00:29:12] a tinder conversation at first, but. I think everybody is more happy. It's all of that thought of, let's say you have a perfect efficient driver. It's not healthy for [00:29:27] them to come in and Through some of the questions the boss is asking he kind of thinks I'm doing something out there, You know in a wasting way and then who thinks what in all this kind of stuff?[00:29:42] 

there's a beauty of Who was it? I don't know in the service or something, it's trust, but verify there's a beauty in that 

[00:29:51] Russ Hawkins: It was Ronald Reagan. 

[00:29:53] Mike Koelzer, Host: I was going to say Ronald Reagan, but you know, people always make these [00:29:57] quotes on things, yes. My dad would say it was Ronald Reagan who said trust, but verify, 

[00:30:02] Russ Hawkins: and 

he did, he said that to Gorbachev. That's who

He said it too. 

[00:30:05] Mike Koelzer, Host: There's a beauty in that because it just takes away all the stuff that somebody might be thinking and lets you relate [00:30:12] person to person better knowing that stuff's probably taken care of.

[00:30:15] Russ Hawkins: Absolutely. And I think you're, I think you're absolutely right. And that's the right kind of conversation to have. There's also an argument for improving their lives, right? You're talking about delivery drivers.

I mean, [00:30:27] you want the delivery operation to be as effective as possible. Now, of course, there is an opportunity to abuse this and to, try to wring the last bit of productivity out of

people as a result of tracking them. But if you have a [00:30:42] balanced business and you recognize that, the only way you're going to be successful is if your people are successful.

One of the things I like to say all the time is if you take care of your people, The people will take care of your customers. And if you take care of your customers, the customers will [00:30:57] take care of the shareholders, and then the shareholders will take care of the people. So it's

a virtuous cycle. 

It, it all works to each other and so positioning some of these, I mean, people often talk to me about, 1984 and, the eye and the sky and

the[00:31:12] there is some validity to that, that if it's misused, it can be a negative, but I like to think of the positives on it.

And in terms of delivery. Being able to map out routes better is important, right?

Being able to help your [00:31:27] customers are going to be happy. You're going to deliver things more efficiently. The employee isn't going to have to backtrack and go back to do things again. They're going to be able to systematically go through their route, deliver their material, and get their job done in an efficient way. [00:31:42] And while that might increase their ability to have them deliver more product, it's an efficiency and it's a benefit for them because again, we're taking care of customers taking care of shareholders taking care of the people. it all works.

[00:31:55] Mike Koelzer, Host: And for us [00:31:57] this example, one of our main delivery guys is also a basketball ref. So he's gotta leave at three o'clock during the day. But it's just beautiful because we know exactly down to two or three minutes how long his route's gonna [00:32:12] take. And take that stress away from him, knowing that we're not going to keep them till three 20, he's going to get done at two 57 or whatever.

And, it makes him happier. [00:32:27] And the whole thing just is better. Once you get over some of those humps of 

[00:32:34] Russ Hawkins: Right. Absolutely. Well, think of parenting. Think of being able to, you need to be home. Your kids are getting out of school. You need to be home. Same kind of thing. Having some [00:32:42] certainty. Certainty about what you're doing and when you're going to be done and to have that be replicated every day.

I think it ends up being a potential retention benefit, right? You can, and in today's world, given where we are with unemployment rates and all those kinds of [00:32:57] things, we need to spend time and energy on retaining the people that are doing our work for us.

I know in my business, retention is extremely important and we spend a lot of time. Trying to make sure we understand what, what are, what's motivating people and, what [00:33:12] might be demotivating them and and trying to develop our processes and systems in a way that demonstrates to them that they're valued and that they're valuable to the organization and that we want to work together.

 We're engaged in a group effort [00:33:27] here. we're trying to achieve goals together and the only way we can do that is being open and transparent about what our goals are and how we develop and manage our processes.

[00:33:36] Mike Koelzer, Host: Russ, when I think of your company, then I think of three pools. All right. You've got an employee [00:33:42] that's trying to do something nefarious. Then you've got someone in the middle who's just maybe not paying attention. They're not as tight as they need to be and so on. Then you've got somebody who maybe is using too much paper [00:33:57] towel or leaving the door open.

And so the heat gets out, just human nature kind of things. If you take that pool of things is 80 percent of it in the first two pools or is it split by thirds? Or where would you say, I [00:34:12] know you can do anything, but what's the human end point you're trying to tackle, let's say?

[00:34:20] Russ Hawkins: Well, I would say it's 80 percent number two and number three, which are

trainable So those are trainable, absolutely.

And the thing about it is that the [00:34:27] bad guys get all the press, as we've already

discussed. 

[00:34:29] Mike Koelzer, Host: as fun to 

[00:34:29] Russ Hawkins: Yeah, absolutely. And it's not as fun to talk about how, you're redoing training, rather than, tackling people in parking lots,

right?

Which, which I don't advise, by the

[00:34:42] way. Let them take the, let them take it, let them

take it, let them go. 

Just learn from that experience and don't let it happen again the next

time. But, yeah I, I as I think I mentioned when I first came into this business and now it's it's quite, quite a while ago, 2008,[00:34:57] I was at first blown away by How many bad people, how many bad guys there are out there inside the company. Inside.

the company. Forget about people that are coming in from outside the company.

People that are biting the hand that feeds them.

I was really kind of disappointed about it.

But over time, what I've learned is [00:35:12] that a lot of It's not intentional. It's not people trying to do things or trying to be your silent partner. It's people that don't understand that what they're doing is wrong. I mean, I look at promotions and discounts, for example, right, on the

front end of the business. [00:35:27] A lot of times you can have multiple promotions running at the same time. And there's an expectation for those marketing people that have created these promotions is an expectation for how that thing will happen at the point of sale. iF I use promotion A, I can't [00:35:42] use promotion B.

Or if I can use both of them, I apply one first and another one the second time, and not vice versa not the other way around, which

can lead to aberrations. And so... A tremendous amount of what we identify is [00:35:57] process changes or process problems

that need to be addressed, that once they're addressed, they can be endemic, they can be taught to everybody.

You can train people on a continuous basis about what went wrong. You can,

you know when that door was left open. And [00:36:12] in fact, the doors are actually becoming a big thing for us these days. there's the traditional way of managing door open and closures, which is a very electronic way of doing it where, you got to pay ADT, all kinds of money to wire up every door and

wire [00:36:27] up every, and then put it back to a central

central signaling location. Increasingly, we're seeing video being used for the same thing. So video analytics, strictly noticing when a door isn't shut for a period of time, setting a notification update. [00:36:42] Into our software

and making that available for people without all of the wiring and all the other things that have to go on.

You're using your existing video infrastructure to solve another access control problem. And one, yeah, yes, certainly it's heat [00:36:57] getting out the door, but open doors, open rear doors are a place where material walks out as well. So, so being able to. Keep track of that on a closer to real time basis. It can be an important benefit for stores.[00:37:12] 

[00:37:12] Mike Koelzer, Host: Talking about the promos and stuff I met Kohl's with my wife and we're buying me a sport coat because I got to go to my niece's wedding so I'm pissing and moaning I'm [00:37:27] all hot and sweaty and stuff cuz things aren't fitting me and so we go up front and check out and it looked like my wife in this very nice gentleman who was at the register, it looked like [00:37:42] a drug deal going down.

My wife's okay, here's 40 percent of this. And now do I get the cash back on this? Well, no, but if this was this sale and this and that, and. I walked out with my head spinning, but for my [00:37:57] wife, if that didn't happen, it would feel like somebody going through, let's say, Mexico or something and not dealing with somebody, it just didn't seem natural just to go in there.

And I get scolded if I ever go into some [00:38:12] stores and if I didn't 

use the 40 percent off something, you never buy at 

[00:38:16] Russ Hawkins: Well, I think 

[00:38:17] Mike Koelzer, Host: of thing.

[00:38:18] Russ Hawkins: you and I have similar experiences there and sound like similar wives. My, my wife wants to get every possible discount she can get, and she

wa wants to get every [00:38:27] promotion and she in fact, does get mad at me if I'm not e

equally attuned to me to making that happen. 

[00:38:33] Mike Koelzer, Host: And my wife's not 

terribly frugal, but when you are there, you've got to play the game. 

[00:38:41] Russ Hawkins: Well, [00:38:42] my wife view views, Hey, this promotion is here for a reason and

I'm it. So I'm gonna tell, I, I'm the one that that they created this thing for,

and I want to get every piece of value I want. Who doesn't love a deal, right?

 My wife loves deals,

and I love deals too.

 I don't always have the patience

to [00:38:57] remember everything. I mean, even online, they have these. What is it? RR Rakuten, I think is, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but you know, th this is a kind of a third party that will help you get deals

on any website that you're on.

And for me, it's just, it's like just too much [00:39:12] noise, and I don't know how to work it, and I, but my wife has that down to a science. She understands every

aspect of it, 

[00:39:18] Mike Koelzer, Host: Well, after I've tried on my third pair of pants that don't fit and this and that, I'm in no mood for that. Russ,[00:39:27] 

when you and your team are dealing with let's say CEOs,

 What feeling of a CEO is the hardest to sell to, for example [00:39:42] If somebody said to me Mike, you could do better on this thing at the store, maybe I'd get offended.

Not trying to, but let's say I get offended. If somebody said, we're going to help [00:39:57] people not break in at two in the morning. Well, maybe I'm not offended because I have nothing to do with that. I can't control it. I have no pride in that. Is there an area that you run into with leaders that they're like, sure we could use help here?[00:40:12] 

But this doesn't happen in my house that people do this, it's a tight ship and you're like, yeah, whatever 

[00:40:19] Russ Hawkins: Well, that's it. I mean, I think you hit right on it. It's the people part of it.

My general experience has been CEOs are generally optimists or [00:40:27] successful ones are generally optimists and they

believe in people and they believe in the team. And if they don't believe exactly what I was saying before about, take care of the people, they'll take care of the customers, they'll take care of the show.

If they don't believe. That strongly they at least believe in the [00:40:42] people that they have working for them because let's face it most CEOs have built their businesses, right? They've, in, in many cases, I mean, of course, some of this depends on the size of the company and so forth but, if you're running 10 stores, I mean, you probably started with one and then you [00:40:57] went to two and every step of the way. You made hiring decisions, you made people development decisions and you're comfortable and confident about those things and you want to believe the best. You want to believe that those folks are the best. Similarly, this would [00:41:12] be number two in my view about the way that you run your business by that, the kind of your rules of the road, and I and the things that you hold true. About how you want to interact with your customers. And so that comes down to, what are the procedures we're going to put [00:41:27] in place? What are the policies we're going to have? And so you do get a lot of resistance to people hearing the upfront part of it if you could do better than this, X, Y, Z, these people, this situation, there's a natural [00:41:42] tendency. To not believe, to

believe that you've done things very well. I mean, most CEOs also know that they have things that they can improve on. I mean,

it's a continuous 

improvement world. 

[00:41:54] Mike Koelzer, Host: Ask our wives Russ. They'll tell us [00:41:57] right?

[00:41:57] Russ Hawkins: Absolutely. No, they certainly will. That's part of their job

and I'm glad 

of it. 

I'm glad of it. 

[00:42:02] Mike Koelzer, Host: That's right. 

[00:42:02] Russ Hawkins: But, I always come back to using a couple of phrases, right? I use something called feel found, right?

I understand how you feel, everybody that we talk to [00:42:12] feels the same way. but then when they see the data that we can deliver, when we show you in your own data, What we've found, you'll feel differently,

right.

So, that all comes back again to the data access. I mean,

[00:42:27] I'm not asking you to believe my opinion. I'm

asking you to believe what the data says. I'm asking you to... Objectively review the data that is coming from your own stores

And to assess it objectively and to make [00:42:42] decisions based on that, based on the facts.

And if you do that, then it's it, at least in my experience, it's hard not to come to the same conclusions. And a lot of this is because I make my customer set, I have about 210 customers. [00:42:57] And that's my reference list. It's not...

It's all 210 customers.

You want to talk to one of my customers?

Talk to any one of them

and let them tell you their experience and what they got. And

so we're able to overcome that by focusing on [00:43:12] facts and by giving them the opportunity to talk to other CEOs that felt the same way.

When we first spoke to them and to get the comfort that we know what we're talking about

And that, we can do this in a respectful way that isn't going [00:43:27] to disrupt your philosophy.

It's not going to disrupt the culture that you've built in your organization. In fact, if we're going to do it right together, we're going to work together. We are on the same team.

We are going to work together to try to improve the [00:43:42] culture that you've got and to make it one that's beneficial to everybody.

Beneficial to the people. Beneficial to the customers. Beneficial to the owners.

[00:43:50] Mike: Thinking about the data, A lot of people, they don't know how to look at the data and they might not even know what data [00:43:57] to look for It makes me think of Steve jobs when he said that some customers don't know what they want. If you did a poll of what people wanted back in The mid eighties, [00:44:12] nobody would say, I want a thing, the size of a deck of cards that fits in my pocket and carries 10, 000 songs, people didn't want that they wanted DVDs that didn't skip.

And they wanted that kind of stuff, better eight [00:44:27] tracks, all that kind of stuff. 

 Until, more experience and depth in the category comes along.

[00:44:33] Russ Hawkins: They're not even aware of the data that they throw off

in many 

cases. Yes, I mean... I mean, there's a huge amount of data generated in businesses. And this [00:44:42] is a recurring problem for everybody.

We were talking about ourselves in our own company last week . We had a strategy meeting and we were talking about how we explain to people The benefits of what we do and how we capture the use cases [00:44:57] and the value propositions that we deliver.

We know we deliver them. We know our customer success team and our sales team hears it every day from

our customers about what benefits we're delivering to them.

We need to do a better job of. And so we're kind of gathering that up and making it available to our [00:45:12] salespeople and making it available to our customers. One of the things we try to do, by the way, is to think of ourselves as a community and to think of our customers as a community. So we have a thing called the water cooler. It's a virtual water cooler. Well, I've already told you that we're in, we're [00:45:27] headquartered in the cloud. Of course we

have a virtual water cooler.

[00:45:30] Mike Koelzer, Host: right, 

[00:45:30] Russ Hawkins: And so the idea is, we don't need to be there. I, it doesn't, this doesn't need to be moderated by Agilent or by the company, but we want to create a place where people can put it out there into the [00:45:42] community and say, hey, I got this problem.

How do I solve this? We've got a bunch of pharmacies.

We've got a bunch of shoe companies. We've got

a bunch of grocers.

No, no matter how unique you think of your business, and most people think their business is unique in that they've got a culture that's unique. [00:45:57] But a lot of the, a lot of the issues and opportunities are the same within the same segment and the same industry, of

course.

But, uh, and having a way to share that in a non confrontative, a non, critical [00:46:12] way, I think is great. And it's one of the things that we try to do. And it's been one of the keys to our success. I like to say that customer success is our success.

The only way I'm going to be successful is if my customers are

successful. And we want to continue to learn from each other. We want to put it out there. I've [00:46:27] learned more from my customers. Then my product managers have brought

to the table. Matter of fact, one of the main things I want in product managers is I want them to be good listeners. I want them to get out in front of the customers. I want them to talk to them. I want them to learn how we're solving [00:46:42] problems and how we're helping them exploit opportunities or how to, how did they improve their businesses, and then we want to share that with everybody else,

right?

And that really works, it really works very well for us. And

so, if you're a CEO and you have some doubts, and you [00:46:57] think that that maybe what I'm saying is too good to be true, then, let me let you talk to some other folks and let me let them, I'll let them tell you how great it is and how their business got improved by working with us.

 And it's been very effective.

[00:47:09] Mike Koelzer, Host: On that same line of thinking[00:47:12] pharmacies kind of weird accounting because of the DIR fees that come out of the back end and things like that. And so we had an accountant for years and as things started getting hairier with the PBMs with all [00:47:27] their sneakiness it was hard.

For me to explain what the hell was going on to our accountant, because they couldn't believe a lot of the stuff. It's yeah we're going to have some expenses come out seven months from now. And we have no [00:47:42] idea how much they're going to be that kind of thing.

What was very valuable for us was the cloud, because.

A couple of years ago, I kept my personal stuff with these accountants, but the pharmacy stuff was with a company [00:47:57] that, I don't know, I'm going to guess 50 or a couple hundred pharmacies or something. But now my accountant is teaching me the industry standards, or at least using them for the books, instead of me trying to explain what's [00:48:12] going on to an accountant that sees pharmacy stuff, 30 minutes a month kind of thing.

[00:48:18] Russ Hawkins: Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that's part, it is, it's a big, it's a huge deal. It's part of us, it's part of our story. I mean,

We look at this [00:48:27] stuff every day across 210 customers. We're

looking at, we're looking at the same things over and over again. Yeah, there's some uniqueness in certain businesses, many, as I mentioned, many businesses think That their culture is unique, their customer is unique, and in many cases they [00:48:42] are, but a lot of the underlying fundamental kind of rules of the road, the things

that you're talking about in terms of accounting, in terms of

dealing with the government regulation, dealing with PBMs, dealing with the evolution of the industry.

That's going to be the same from organization to organization. And [00:48:57] so an expert can help you navigate that stuff the most efficient and most effective way.

We can't all learn everything as we go

[00:49:05] Mike Koelzer, Host: No, And where are you going to learn it? You can't learn everything because it's not out there until you're [00:49:12] talking to other people. There's no research on those kinds of things that's in print.

You need that access. Russ, I imagine, I'm just out on a limb here. I imagine that AI is pretty cool for you because [00:49:27] thinking about, Oh, like my Google doorbell, I can tell it to only look in this square area. So I was thinking about the video stuff that you were talking about.

And I know, I was just reading last week that they can say that what the hell was it? It's something [00:49:42] like... AI can listen to somebody talking for one minute and have an 80 percent success rate of picking out that they have diabetes, it may be something with the vocal [00:49:57] cords or something like that.

So just amazing stuff happening, but when I think of what you are talking about. What the video can do and stuff. It's not a human eye seeing it and kind of, deciding it's all, [00:50:12] everything's digitized, in the whole AI thing. It's not speaking from an artist's view to a computer.

It's like the computer's already turned all that stuff into accessible data.

[00:50:24] Russ Hawkins: No, no question about it. If there's a [00:50:27] real revolution going on, There's a consultant that I know that says we're in a Gutenberg moment. The printing press revolutionized the distribution of information.

Uh, you know, Mo mostly around the Bible, of course.

But [00:50:42] we're this individual who runs a research firm that basically says we're in a Gutenberg moment when it comes to ai. And I tend to agree with that,

and I'm not as, I'm not as worried about it as. As some people are, right? We look at 2001, a [00:50:57] space oddity, and we see Hal taking over the spacecraft. I don't, they're not, AIs are not going to be sentient beings. They're not going to be originating new thoughts. It's the same thoughts, but done [00:51:12] in an incredible period of time, incredibly short period of time. The

large language models that are out now, the chat GPTs of the world, I mean, what is interesting is that they have been trained to do certain things.

And so, I think of not AI, [00:51:27] I think of AIs. Right.

There are AIs that are being trained in all kinds of different areas. And we're

really just on the cusp of that. Video is a perfect example of that,

where you know, facial recognition and the ability to, [00:51:42] focus cameras on a certain number of pixels and do that repetitively and to glean information and to make it immediately accessible or at least near time accessible.

We're really in the infancy of this

stuff. Now, it also comes with other [00:51:57] other kinds of 1984-ish things, right?

You've got Facial recognition, for example is one of those things where, people don't want to be recognized for the

most part, 

and, there is a pharmacy chain, one of our pharmacy chains experimented extensively [00:52:12] with facial recognition and the whole idea was to be able to identify a potential. Thief. And this is external theft. This is somebody coming in off the

street to be able to identify them before they had a chance [00:52:27] to do anything. And literally the software would identify an individual. If you, in fact apprehended someone, you would say to them, well, we're not going to call the police, but you have to agree to this release and give us the [00:52:42] authorization to use. And so when that individual shows up in another store and thinks back to our ORC discussion at the beginning of organized retail crime, and they're driving down the highway. [00:52:57] If I can now identify an individual. Coming into a store at the south end of that highway because I already have their image in my database and I can immediately identify them when they come in the door. Then I can dispatch a [00:53:12] store manager to ask them if they need help and maybe ask them to That, they're part of the database, they signed a

release, they need to leave. Now, I would say that this particular vendor had, this particular retailer had mixed results. And there were some negatives about it.

[00:53:27] People don't like it. They don't like that kind of action. And there were some cases where there were mistaken identities. So, that was three or four years ago. So today, we're seeing it used more and more. We're using it. In our application now to kind of predict the [00:53:42] future, right?

We're trying

to use the knowledge that we have and the patterns that we've seen to score whether an event is going to happen. We see this, for example, in returns management. So if you've got and it's not so much in the back end of the pharmacy, and [00:53:57] actually pharmacies probably aren't The most able to use this kind of technology.

But if you think of people that are buying material and then returning it for cash. Well, I guess some of the pharmacies have this

issue. So, I want to be able [00:54:12] to effectively use machine learning. to score the likelihood that a particular person who's trying to conduct a return, whether they are more or less likely to be a legitimate customer, a

legitimate returner. And so, [00:54:27] you're seeing things like it's almost like a credit score. It's as an individual. We think you're a high risk returner,

and so we're going to modify our return policy to say that we can identify you and we can [00:54:42] say that, we'll allow this return to happen, but we want you to know that moving forward, we're going to be reluctant to accept returns from you.

This is

the, and this would be obviously, we're You want to be careful about that. You don't want to do it to a good customer, right? But we're seeing [00:54:57] that play into a number of different ways. We have a thing called DNA score, which is, which can be applied to anything. It can be applied to a process.

It could be applied to a product that can be applied to individuals or a store. And what it says is I want to. I want to take [00:55:12] a large number of variables and I want to bring them together to try to predict whether this process will fail or this product is more likely to go out of stock or this product is more likely [00:55:27] to to cause a problem or this individual or this store and to be able to, in fact, get ahead of the curve, be aware of what the potential problem is.

Thank you. And to get that store manager apprised of the [00:55:42] situation, and we use an alerting function to do

we say, hey, you've got this situation evolving in your center store, and you want to be aware, take these following steps. And it becomes almost a workflow thing for us where we're able to [00:55:57] identify processes that are likely to fail, get the management team involved in it so that they can curtail it and avoid the problem before it actually happens.

We're seeing more and more of those kinds of applications of AI and we're. We're [00:56:12] trying to do more and more ourselves. I would say at this point we're only touching the surface. We're just scratching the surface

in terms of opportunity there.

[00:56:19] Mike Koelzer, Host: There's an entrepreneur guy I watch online and he was kind of joking about how so many people [00:56:27] say they don't want big brother looking and things like that, but. And I'm throwing my own thoughts in here. He's like, I want to know when the underwear short in my drawer and, and if someone sees my face and they think I'm [00:56:42] thirsty, I want someone to hand me a Coke, I mean, some people are really going to hate it and some people really love it, but with that said, I think that.

Even the people that love it [00:56:57] probably don't want AI poking around their health insurance records and that kind of stuff. It's a continuum.

[00:57:06] Russ Hawkins: thEy definitely do not, and of course, you see this today in the search area, in the, [00:57:12] in just on online and

the amount of data that Google is collecting and what they've got available to you. There are some people that love that. Yeah. I want the product recommendations. I want you to tell me that other people looked at this and other people looked at that.

I, and I do think that the number of [00:57:27] people that. Don't want it to be relatively small. Now, I'm one of them.

But, my chief technology officer is definitely one of them. He's the most risk averse person that I've ever met. But, the vast majority of people in the world, they [00:57:42] want convenience.

They're good people.

They have good hearts. They're not trying to game anybody. They're not trying to screw anybody. They see it as a convenience and as a benefit for systems to anticipate their needs. Get them that [00:57:57] water when they're thirsty. Give them this option to purchase something that maybe they wouldn't have thought of.

And I think that's going to continue. I'm going to probably still be in the other group, though. The ones that are, that don't want to get tracked.

But, uh, The average person, I mean, the [00:58:12] reality is that if you're not near doing well, if you're not trying to game the system, then these things can be very positive for you.

I mean, this could be something that is very beneficial.

[00:58:23] Mike Koelzer, Host: What [00:58:27] is a part of your week that you don't like to do for the company? 

I know you gotta be careful because of the investors and all that, but what part, either an hour or a day, what part don't you like?

[00:58:41] Russ Hawkins: Well, it's, I mean, I have a [00:58:42] general answer to that, which is of my own doing. So what I'd like to do is to. We're in the cloud now, as I mentioned. So, one of the things I've lost, I didn't mention this when you said, I mean, I lose the interaction with the people that report directly to me. [00:58:57] So I have a team. I have a chief revenue officer, a chief technology officer, a product person, a marketing person, and a finance person. And I don't have that, I can just drop in that kind of thing.

So that's become a formalized thing. So every Monday now. I [00:59:12] have a series of calls from one. I have a one hour kind of one on one session with each of my managers, and I could probably solve this by breaking it up into multiple days.

But I really hate Mondays because by the time Mondays are over, I'm exhausted [00:59:27] because I've talked so much and I've learned so much

and I've taken so many action items. That is, it's a little bit overwhelming. Now,

the good side of that is for the rest of the week, I have the confidence of knowing that I know what's going on,

and I can spend the rest of the week [00:59:42] actually delivering value to my, Not only my team, but I can also deliver values to my owners.

We're a private equity backed company. We were venture capital backed and then a private equity firm acquired us two years ago. And so I have bosses just like anybody else. I'm [00:59:57] the CEO of the company, but. I'm doing the bidding of the owners of the business, and I'm trying to improve their lives, and that brings me back to the virtuous cycle that I talked about before. But Mondays are not much fun.

[01:00:09] Mike Koelzer, Host: Yeah, well, that's part of the reason I do [01:00:12] this show. I come out every Monday morning at midnight on the East Coast and so it's fun because I know that's a positive thing. I get to focus on coming out instead of negative. And I hope it's a little [01:00:27] bit of a Oh, I hope it's a little bit of treat for somebody going in on a Monday morning to say, well, let's relax a little bit and chit chat before we're just 

[01:00:36] Russ Hawkins: Sure. 

[01:00:37] Mike Koelzer, Host: into this stuff.

[01:00:38] Mike Koelzer, Host: I talked to a guy last week, he was talking about [01:00:42] mergers and things like that, and he was just talking about the after lunch, that after these mergers, when things get kind of tense, they'll often have a nice big lunch or maybe that's symbolic of [01:00:57] shooting the crap back and forth and getting back into a rhythm instead of having all this business stuff.

I think what I missed when I Did some talking with my staff online from [01:01:12] COVID was I think I missed that afterwards of a conversation where you get back to life again. It might be as something as simple as after you've had a little bit of [01:01:27] tension and if it hasn't culminated in a real positive thing at that point, it's something like Hey, so you think the lions are going to pull it off tonight on, Monday night football, something like that was just as a little bit of a [01:01:42] afterwards that you don't always get.

 It's almost like if I was talking to somebody through video, it's almost like I wish that I would run into him out in my hall and I could just, say, Hey, just something to lighten that tension. If there [01:01:57] was from a conversation I think that's what I would miss.

If I did too much of that,

[01:02:01] Russ Hawkins: Yeah, I think that is one of the things that I miss tremendously. I mean, being able to just casually have a conversation. One of the things I've started to do is whenever I have my one-on-one or [01:02:12] meeting I take the first few minutes, actually to just... I talk a lot about dogs. I have a dog. I have a dog, and I've had dogs my whole life. And I like dogs and I enjoy walking my dog. And many of my [01:02:27] team members have dogs. So we talk a lot about dogs. Hey,

How's your dog doing? What's going on? What's going on with Milo? 

[01:02:32] Mike Koelzer, Host: What kind of dog do you have?

[01:02:34] Russ Hawkins: I have an Irish doodle. An

[01:02:37] Mike Koelzer, Host: doodle. 

[01:02:37] Russ Hawkins: doodle. So it's an Irish setter and miniature poodle [01:02:42] combination.

[01:02:42] Mike Koelzer, Host: I'm thinking of Annie when you say that, like she's gonna be singing all the orphan songs. 

[01:02:47] Russ Hawkins: Yeah. 

[01:02:48] Mike Koelzer, Host: a look I'm picturing a curly redhead.

[01:02:50] Russ Hawkins: Yeah, that's right. That's what it's like. She is a redhead and she's a bundle of energy and she loves...[01:02:57] I had three criteria. I've had dogs my whole life. Most

of them have been mutts.

And this one is actually a mutt. I mean,

it's not a, it's not recognized by...

The American Kennel Club or anything, and I'm not

sure why, but it is part of the doodle, doodlification of the dog [01:03:12] world, right?

They're matching doodles and poodles with every kind of dog around.

And it's because of the temperament. This particular dog was one of the only times I've ever, and actually is the only time I ever got a dog from a breeder. And I happened upon this [01:03:27] breeder. Through a friend of a friend kind of thing and this guy was out in Pennsylvania and he had six children under 10 years old. And so, the dog got acclimated right off the bat.

There was

no... This dog is used to [01:03:42] being manhandled, by

kids and has between her breeding and her nurturing in the nurture environment, it is the most evenly tempered and just fun dog to have, whereas in the past I've had mostly [01:03:57] rescues and rescues, rescues are a little 

Rescues can be a little tough because typically you're not getting them until they're a year old.

And the old saying about a dog year being seven people years is not actually correct.

[01:04:08] Mike Koelzer, Host: no. I had that conversation with my wife.

[01:04:10] Russ Hawkins: the first year of a dog's [01:04:12] life is almost like the first 18 years of a human's life. 

They come in mostly formed. So you're getting a rescue, which I. Always felt compelled to do.

You're, you're accepting them the way they are, and you really

I don't know. It's a little bit of a crapshoot. But

with this [01:04:27] dog we got right from the breeder. We had three criteria. One, she had to want to walk. Secondly, she had to be hypoallergenic.

That was my wife's big ask.

And the, and we wanted to have a puppy experience, rather

than a one year old dog experience. 

[01:04:42] So, it's just been wonderful. Do you have a dog?

[01:04:44] Mike Koelzer, Host: First of all, I tried to explain to my wife and one of my son's last week about our four year old black lab. I tried to explain to my wife and my son that our four year old black lab is actually [01:04:57] 54 years old, 

and they're like, no, she's 28. So she had her Her first cycle when she was seven years old. In human years, I'm like, no, she's 54, but they didn't buy it.

But I'm with you Russ on that. Now, Russ, I got to back up just a second. When you [01:05:12] say temperament, is that the poodle temperament?

[01:05:16] Russ Hawkins: Yes. Yes. The poodle temperament.

[01:05:19] Mike: We had a toy poodle and she was blind and her. Teeth were gone on one side. So tongue always hung out her [01:05:27] back. She had all these excuse me, listeners, but she had all these dog warts on her back. And I pictured. Maybe with her blindness she was trying to give a braille message to somebody who would pet something like that.

It was just a bad thing.

[01:05:41] Mike Koelzer, Host: [01:05:42] Russ, thanks for joining us. I know some stuff about shrinkage and things like that. But it's so cool to see where technology is going with this data that's [01:05:57] coming our way that we didn't even know was out there. So it's cool that somebody can take the days off. Managing and owning a little bit lighter so we can enjoy some of the finer things like People's presence and things [01:06:12] like that.

Very interesting thanks for sharing that with us.

[01:06:14] Russ Hawkins: Well, it's been a great pleasure. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but I've had a great time here chatting with you, Mike. It's been really fun.

Thank you. 

[01:06:22] Mike Koelzer, Host: you. Russ. I look forward to keeping in touch

[01:06:24] Russ Hawkins: Same here, thanks.