We have been joined today by nearly 150, at least at the moment, heavy equipment professionals from across North America tuning in live for today and tomorrow's conference. My name is Phil Riggs. I'll be one of two moderators along with Sean Fitzgerald this week. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping notes. If you would like to ask a question, please use the Zoom Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. Please do not use the chat function for asking questions to the speakers. Please also, for this first session, have your cell phone available since we will be utilizing live polling. We also recommend turning off all apps except for Zoom for an optimal experience, as well as having a strong internet connection. You can test yours at speedtest.net. With that, we've been joined this morning by AED's President and CEO, Brian McGuire. Brian, welcome and thank you for joining us. Thank you, Phil. It is a pleasure to join you as we kick off the 2020 Virtual Leadership Conference. Of course, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm down here at the Beach and Yacht Club in sunny Florida looking for all of you. I've been to every meeting room and can't really seem to find everybody, but fortunately with this technology, it doesn't matter. These unprecedented times have really caused all of us to innovate and kind of re-examine how we're providing service to our customers, and AED is no exception to that. I'm very pleased to report to you that we've got a great conference lined up over the next two days. The team here at AED has really, really worked hard to make sure that the same content and the same level of caliber of content that you're used to receiving from AED at the Leadership Conference is going to be brought to you virtually. So we're excited about that. We hope you take the opportunity to participate for the entire conference, and I think you'll agree at the end of it that while it's not exactly the format that we all had planned on or that we would prefer, we'd much rather be here at the Beach and Yacht Club in beautiful Orlando in Disney World, but since we can't do that, this is the next best thing. And with that, it is my pleasure to introduce my good friend Eric Stiles from Century Insurance, who is AED's insurance preferred provider and a longtime supporter of AED and its members. Eric? Thank you, Brian, and thank you to AED for allowing Century Insurance to be part of AED's 2020 Virtual Leadership Conference. As you can see from my basement bunker, I'm working from home like a lot of you or at least some of your friends and family. Ninety-five percent of Century's over 5,000 employees continue to work from home. We have a dedicated management team monitoring the status of the spread of the virus in each state we have offices, and currently six of the states we're located in have uncontrolled spread and two more are trending poorly with respect to COVID-19. Added to that uncertainty are the highly veritable plans of local school districts. We recognize it may take some time for associates and their families to adjust to new school models. It's all very unpredictable. Our most important approach right now is to be fluid and agile. Now I'm pleased to introduce our keynote speaker this morning, Sean Rhodes. Sean is a global expert on how the highest performing organizations pivot when change enters their plans. Today, he will share with us how to address the constant challenge of managing that change to ensure our teams continue to achieve results. Please welcome Sean Rhodes. In the most dangerous and challenging environments on the planet, where failure means someone isn't going home because so many things could affect success, change shouldn't be one of them. For more than 20 years, Sean Rhodes has been traveling the world seeking an answer to one question. Why do some teams fail when they have more resources than others and others succeed with almost none? Sean explored this question in more than two dozen countries, living alongside the highest performing teams on the planet. The teams that didn't run from change but embraced it. In his book, Pivot Point, Turn on a Dime Without Sacrificing Results, Sean shared what he learned makes the difference between success and failure when results matter. His work and insight have been featured in Time, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., and NBC. Let's welcome Sean Rhodes to the stage as he gets us ready to answer one question. Are you ready to pivot? Well, I am being welcomed to a stage. As Brian mentioned, it's not quite the stage that we had intended on, but I think we're still going to have a great time here. Now, I always like to follow up that video by saying that it was created, like all great marketing, with one purpose in mind, and that purpose is to impress a woman. It's the truth. That's why one day I hope my mom actually gets to see it. Now, I know there are a lot of parents out there right now. We're working from our basement bunkers. We're working from our home offices. We're having to manage that work-life balance in a new way and continue to get our jobs done for our distributorships. That presents a whole set of issues. Now, thankfully, because I was able to talk to a lot of people in your industry before getting on this virtual stage right here, and I'm coming from you from Tampa, Florida, lovely sunny Florida today. It's about 98 percent humidity outside, so for all of you like Phil living in better climates, I'm envious today. Well, pivoting is not new to the equipment distributorship world. How do we know that? Well, there are probably those among you on the virtual seminar right now, Brian might be among them, I don't know, who remember back in the day when all you needed to fix a piece of heavy equipment was expertise and a good set of tools, and obviously that has changed today. We need diagnostic equipment, we need computers, and we need technicians that are all trained how to use them, and while the original intent of this conference was to be for the upcoming leaders, I know we have leaders here from across the experience range ready to figure out how do we create a pivot point inside of equipment distributorships, how do we actually make this something that becomes part of our culture, and as we talk about creating pivot points, we're actually talking about staying ahead of the rate of change itself. You see, AED did not bring me here today because I'm a motivational speaker. You're not going to get a Tony Robbins type experience, unfortunately. They brought me here today because the COVID-19 virus, in addition to the workforce development issues that we've been experiencing since before COVID-19, all of that has created this massive pivot point for us that we need to figure out how do we get around, how do we leverage, how do we make sure that we're prepared for the second wave of COVID-19 or for the next round of workforce development when our technicians are suddenly not available and we need them to fill our maintenance departments. Well, as I began to travel the world, and I'll tell you my story throughout the course of this presentation, we discovered that the teams that were best at actually implementing pivots in their plans didn't treat pivoting as something that was strictly a cerebral exercise. It didn't just exist on a whiteboard inside the corporate offices. Rather, it was something that they really believed in emotionally. So in order to turn this experience today into something that actually creates lasting change for all of us, I have to bring this down to an emotional level. How I'm going to do that, I'm going to give you six words, a very simple sentence, and I'm going to bring change from something cerebral into something emotional. Now as you hear these six words, I'd like you to imagine not hearing them from a guy that's, you know, on a virtual presentation that you've never seen before. Imagine hearing these six words from a doctor or from a first responder, somebody you have a lot of faith, trust, and confidence in. Here's the six words. You have 15 minutes to live. Pretty heavy, huh? You have 15 minutes to live. Now some of you are like, dude, it's not that, you know, it's not that late here. I didn't have enough coffee for this. I need to get up and get some right now. If this is the tone of this conversation, that's going to be the heaviest statement I drop on you today. But the reason that's important is because it's those 15 seconds, that is really all the time that any of us are actually guaranteed, and maybe not even that. And it's those six words, you have 15 minutes to live, that actually brought me in front of you here today. Because it was those six words that started my journey. You see, many years ago, I'm not going to say how many, because, you know, here in Florida, the water keeps us youthful. But many years ago, I was what you might consider a model employee, as in the kind of employee that none of your distributorships or dealerships would want to model. Okay, like I was that guy that was good at looking busy, but not actually being busy. And I know those folks don't tend to last long in our industry, but I was that person. And so of course, right at the moment that I was messing around, I get caught in the act. And I remember this like it was yesterday, because my boss, he put his hand on my shoulder, and it was like a bear claw. I mean, I was able to tour the maintenance department of one of your distributorships. And I saw a lot of these guys. I mean, these are salt of the earth people, they're good at moving big equipment, taking big pieces off of your machinery, putting them on others. This was that guy, six foot five, 300 pounds of muscle. And he had caught me red handed. Now, even all these years later, the thing I remember most about this gentleman was his voice. It was so gravelly, it was like a dozen pit bulls eating kittens while they were lifting weights. All right, like that kind of gravel. And I remember him looking down at me and he said, boy, pack your gear and get in that truck. You have 15 minutes to live. Now, I know we might have some human resources people on the call today. Don't worry. Okay. I know everybody's getting ready to write up performance reviews right now for this cat. Don't worry about that. But I didn't know what else to do. I was just 17 years old when I heard those words for the first time. You have 15 minutes to live. I barely been alive for 15 minutes, y'all. I didn't understand the impact of that statement. But what I can tell you is when I heard those words, my entire world went dark. It was all going to be over for me because he was not the type of guy to mess around. You see, this boss, six foot five, 300 pounds, had biceps as big as his head. Last kind of guy you'd want to spend a night with in prison. All right. That would not end well for any of us. So he was not the kind of person to mess around. And so at 17, hearing those words, not knowing what else to do, I just had to do what he was telling me. I began packing my gear up and heading toward the truck he told me to move toward. And as I looked around me, I realized I was not at an equipment distributorship. I was not at a dealership. I was not even out there in the field with clients. I was here on the front lines of Fallujah, Iraq, in the spring of 2004, during one of the largest urban assaults that the U.S. military has ever conducted. I was surrounded by a platoon of United States Marines, the same ones that you see in this picture. And as I listened to them, I heard them talking. They said, we've spotted dozens of armed insurgents headed out of the city of Fallujah towards our position. We're outmanned, outgunned. We don't have time to call in air support. We're going to have to go meet them head on. And their training told them that against the superior force, they could hold the line for about 15 minutes. That's how long any of us expected to live. Now, I had no idea that I was going to end up in a situation like that. And the reason I was in a situation like that, and the reason I was there unprepared is because I had failed to notice the things that I'm going to be talking about today. The small changes that were happening all around me that I decided I was just going to bypass. I was just going to try to figure out a way around because they weren't that important. I was on to bigger goals in my mind, I thought. But suddenly, all of those changes caught up to me. And that's exactly the position that I don't want any of you to find yourselves in. And so as we begin getting going today, this is going to be a very unique presentation for us. I'm going to be one of the only presenters you might ever see, it's going to encourage you to play on your cell phones while I'm talking. But here's how that works. I want you to engage with you're going to help design the flow of this presentation. So how do we get started with that, I want to find out where you're at in your pivots. And how we do it, I'm going to ask you to pick up your cell phones, open a browser window on your cell phones, not on your computer, I'd like you to keep your computer screens open so we can be fully present here. But if you pick up your cell phone, assuming you have internet connection, that's an assumption I know. But if you're watching me now, you probably do. I'd like you to go to menti.com, M-E-N-T-I.com. And I'm going to ask you to type in those digits, those seven digits 1523289. Okay, if you can type in those digits for me, it'll give you access to the live survey platform we're going to be using throughout the course of my presentation today. Now where we can all engage together. And so don't worry, every slide that I have come up is going to have that login information on it. It's completely anonymous. So as long as you don't list any profanity, I'm not checking your IP address. So feel free to be honest with us. Because if we can't be honest together as leaders coming together for professional development, when can we be honest? So here's how it's going to look today. What I want to start off with is if I could describe COVID-19's effect on equipment distributorships in one word, what would it be? Go ahead and enter that in. And you'll see the words begin to flow in here. The larger ones in the center are the ones that we're seeing the most of, as far as the survey input goes. So we're seeing challenging, disruptive, uncertainty. Absolutely right. That's exactly where COVID-19 is going. So I was able to talk with your leaders, I discovered that this is affecting us in ways that we could have never anticipated. If we weren't pivoting before, and we are forced into it now. And so challenging, disruptive, and uncertainty. I see hectic and uncertain as secondaries there. So this helps me, because I'm actually going to format the entire presentation today off of what we hear in these surveys. So please keep your cell phones next to you. And we'll make sure that we're getting into those. So as we dig into this, I want to make sure that I can give you a little bit about my journey, because you may be thinking, well, this dude out of Tampa, Florida, what does he know about pivoting? What does he know about dealing with change? Let's dig into that. I want to tell you a little bit about how I came to be here on this stage today. In order to do it, I want to show you a picture that's slightly embarrassing. I had to go looking through some high school yearbooks to find this. But the reason I bring it up in this presentation is because I want to point out a couple of things, too. You see those Birkenstock sandals on my feet? Yeah, that's pretty funny, isn't it? I don't know what happened to those. I think I got rid of them around the time I realized that they weren't doing anything good for my social life. Also have prayer beads on my wrist. Y'all, I was so crunchy at that young age, I think I put granola to shame. I was the last person any of us would expect to join the US Marine Corps. But yet, like all of you, I was dealing with things that were constants in my life, uncertainty. I was dealing with having to pivot, and I had no idea how to get it done. Because at a young age, I didn't have any leaders like the ones that are on this chat today to figure out how can I be guided in this. And so I found the organization that was doing this in an active way. And just a couple of years after this photo was taken, I was no longer that 30-pound overweight young 17-year-old. I'd actually become a war correspondent in one of the most elite organizations on the planet. US Marine Corps tasked me with embedding with combat teams across the military services, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and the Navy, work with their special operations teams to figure out how are we able to survive in situations where no one expects anyone to come back. Now, that's the job that I have. But I'd love to find out where you all work inside the equipment distributorship world, because that's going to help us, again, format the content that I'm going to be delivering to you today. Because if I'm talking about pivoting, and I can't pivot, well, what am I doing here? And so I'd like to find out from each of you where exactly you work inside the equipment distributorship world. Are you on the executive staff of your distributorship? Are you in sales? Are you in administration or human resources? Are you on the rental side? Or maybe you're in product support? I know we couldn't capture everybody. So feel, you know, feel free to choose the one that most suits you or that you might have worked in in the past if your particular vertical is not here. But I see a lot of people on the executive team, beautiful, a bunch of us in product support. So what this tells me is that in the equipment distributorship world, the people that are most interested in finding out how we pivot are on the leadership side. And they're also in the people that are customer facing, not just sales, but in product support as well. So that tells me, again, that, hey, we realize we are in the midst of a very challenging time. And we need to make sure that we continue to learn ways to pivot. And that's exactly why AEB has pulled together this conference, even though we couldn't be together in Orlando. I would have loved to take the family to Disney, believe me, because it's about an hour and a half away from Tampa. But here we are. So we have to figure out how do we make it work anyway. And I know if you're on the executive side, the product side, or even in sales, HR, or rental, you're good at doing that, or you wouldn't be here today. But thanks for giving me an idea about where you're at inside of the industry. That's going to help us format this. So as we dig into exactly how we figure out, what does pivoting look like? It really comes down to something that I had to learn the hard way. If you can't tell already, Sean's really good at smacking his head against the wall and learning things the hard way. It's kind of how I live my life. And I know that's not the smartest way to go about business. But for some reason, those are how the lessons really get dug in. So as I began my journey inside of these combat teams, the very first job I was tasked with, as soon as my feet hit the ground in Iraq, was, hey, Sean, we need you to find a team that's doing things in an innovative way. So I said, great, let's go find it. Now in the environment we were in, a lot of urban warfare was going on, as I mentioned. Now urban warfare means they were sending teams into houses in the neighborhoods to clear them out of insurgents, of the bad guys and the bad gals occasionally. But what that meant for us was, you send 50 people into a building, they had about a 50% mortality rate. That means 50 people go in, 25 might come back out. And that's a scary situation. And these teams had to figure out new ways to pivot and prepare in order to convince people to actually risk their lives like that. It's not just because they were in the military, they were doing it. They had the systems and processes that we're going to be going over today that we've been able to implement inside of large companies. So when we figured out, okay, there is a team that has an exceptional success rate. They sent me out to find this platoon of Marines. And they were getting ready to step out on yet another patrol, because that's what these Marines did. And I found them and I said, hey, gents, would you mind sharing with me how you're able to innovate at such a rapid pace. And these Marines were again, resting, getting ready for their patrol to step off. So they're finding shade anywhere they could, 120 degree weather, sucking down as much water as their bodies can hold. And they said, Sean, we got a photo for you, buddy, get your camera out. And as you can see, I carried around that big massive camera with me everywhere. And they gave me a picture that I thought was going to put me on the front cover of all the newspapers in America. I thought this picture was going to win me the Pulitzer Prize. And it turns out that just wasn't the case. Well, here's the photo that those Marines gave me. Now, if you can't see that, because you know, it's kind of small, that Marine is testing out the effectiveness of rocks against a knee pad he's holding against his crotch. Like how good does that knee pad work to protect him? Marines are a very special group of people. And there may be some Marines among the, you know, 250 plus folks we have today, Semper Fi y'all, but you know what kind of special you are. So I sent this back up to my boss. And you know, this is the age of the internet. So thankfully, I didn't have to mail it. So I wired it up to him via email. And I said, Hey, this is the first piece of work I got. What do you think? And he calls me up on a field phone. And he says, Sean, about that photo you sent. I said, Yeah, what do you think, man? I said, Sean, that photo is not a piece of work. You're the piece of work. And looking at the photo now, I have to agree with him. But yet, this is a great example of what happens so often inside of our distributorships. Thankfully, we're not throwing rocks at each other's private parts, because HR would really have an issue then, wouldn't they? No, instead, what we're doing is we're taking goals that we think we have a firm grasp of giving them to our people who are then expected to go out there and execute those goals in an ever changing environment, where customer needs change, where the amount of technicians that we can hire in any given year are going to change, where our sales and service support folks are going to change over. Hey, it's a constantly changing environment before COVID-19. We have to especially be able to pivot in that today. And so as we deal with those situations, what we began to realize was that goals among the teams that were able to rapidly pivot, whether they were in the military and nonprofits, whether they were amongst wildland firefighting units, or hey, whether they were in fortune 100 companies, they all had a common denominator in how they set their goals and how they communicated them. They were constantly asking their people to go a step beyond what they thought was achievable. I'm going to say that again, because it's important for the context of how you're able to pivot in an ever changing environment. They were setting goals that were just beyond what everyone thought was achievable, not way out in the stratosphere of unreality. But hey, if our goal is to sell $100 million of product and sales and service support this year, we're going to shoot for 125. Very simple goal like that. Now to hear it, you might think, wow, that's crazy. We can't expect our people to go above and beyond in a crisis. I'm going to show you how it's incredibly possible and why you'll be able to do it exactly when we finish this presentation, be able to get those plans in place. And so with these teams, we began to understand something critical about how you're actually able to use goals and pivoting. And it's that pivoting breaks through achievable goals. So we think of SMART goals, and I know we all know that acronym, specific, measurable, achievable. They left the achievable part off of their goals because asking 50 people to go into a building where only 25 are expected to come back out, that's not achievable. And so instead they said, we're sending 50 people in and we're going to give you all the training possible so that all 50 of you can come back out. And that's exactly what we're going to jump into with goals and achieving and actually pivoting. But I'd like to find out from you, your idea of where we could be doing a better job in the equipment distributorship world. Because if we have so many people from the executive staff and product service support, hey, I want to find out from you what that looks like. And so I'm going to open up the next survey. I want to find out if there was one area in equipment distributorships, we could achieve more than we currently are. What is that area? And go ahead and enter your answers in on your browser, on your cell phone. We could be doing better with training, leadership, employee development. I love seeing that. And by the way, these slides are going to be available to you. So I'm happy to pull that word art off and you can hang it up in your dealerships because it's going to be valuable for you as you see, hey, we have 252 people or more. Some of you were watching jointly. This is where the industry is at today in the midst of COVID-19. So it's incredibly important that we keep that up to date. So training looks like the main one right now where we could be doing a better job. Well, I'm so glad that you said that because training is exactly where we're going next. And training is a very interesting thing inside of most organizations. It's actually a dirty word. How do I know it's a dirty word? Well, most people would prefer to be in front of prospects if they're salespeople. Most people would prefer to be actually, you know, working on a piece of equipment if that's their job, if they're in maintenance. How many people would prefer to be inside of a training session? Well, hey, if this is the biggest area that we can use help in, I'm happy to format the presentation to that. So what we're going to be looking at is I want to know from you, given the fact that training won the day here, when you think of how we train in your equipment distributorship right now, would you rather be at a training session or would you rather be washing a dirty excavator? Go ahead and list where you would fall on that scale. A couple of us would rather be watching dirty excavators. I love it. I love it. All right, we are tending more toward the training sessions. That's good. So there is something worse than training. That's important to know. And washing a dirty excavator is on that list. If we can't have fun today, then you know, well, why are we here? Right? So it's exactly about that learning and having fun. So I see that for the most part, we're looking at rather be in a training session. Good. I'm going to teach you how to make your training sessions infinitely more applicable because it's out of that training that we can then give our people the resources to achieve more than they thought possible. If you ask people to do more than what they did last year, when they were working their hardest in the midst of a crisis like COVID-19, they're going to make you crazy. So what you have to do is give them the resources to actually be able to go above and beyond where they were before. And how we do that is through infinitely applicable training. Now, when I was out there with these teams, and we were trying to figure out, all right, how do we break through our achievable goals? The thing that scared me the most, believe it or not, was actually not strapping a backpack on my back and jumping into a swimming pool and trying not to drown. It wasn't taking a rifle and trying to hit a target at 500 yards with open sights. It was actually these things. Hand grenades. Because you only have to be close in two things in life, if you've ever heard the saying. You have to be close with horseshoes and hand grenades. You don't have to be exact, but you got to be close. Well, one of the tests that I had to pass before they let me embed with these high performing military teams was being able to throw a hand grenade in case I ever had to use that skill. And so you have to understand something about Sean before we jump into the difficulty of why this is so bad for me. You see, I was not what you would consider an athlete as a kid. So I'm sure we all remember this growing up in the neighborhood when we had team captains, you know, of all the neighborhood kids that would choose people for their teams. You know, Bob would choose somebody and then Sally would choose somebody else and then keep going back and forth until there was nobody left. Can y'all take a guess who was nobody left? Yeah, it was this guy. Now, my therapist and I are working through that every week at the same time. I don't really want to bring that whole conversation into this today, but needless to say, my throwing arm was probably not as developed as it should have been. So I was really scared of what might happen with a live hand grenade. So the way this worked out, this training scenario, I only had to throw one hand grenade and I was inside of a concrete bunker with an open roof. There was an instructor there with us and I just had to pull the pin on the grenade and get it out of the bunker. That was it. That was the test. Well, again, with Sean, a simple test is sometimes a little more than we can expect. So I remember standing in line with all these Marines. We got our helmets on and our Kevlar on and our earplugs in because these grenades are loud. Finally, it's my turn to get in the bunker with this instructor. I'm standing there and he's walking me through the whole thing, all the, you know, full safety brief, just like our maintenance and our technicians would be given to their people first day on the job. And he's walking me through how to, you know, not drop the hand grenade basically. And he didn't realize I still had my earplugs in. So what should have been a very important safety brief sounded like this to me. And so I realized eventually, hey, this is not going to end well. And the instructor's getting mad. Marines tend to have a short fuse. So finally, I was like, all right, I'm just going to remember everything I've ever seen in a war movie. I'm going to pull the pin on the grenade, hold it to my chest, count to three, one, two, three. And then I try to lob it out of that bunker. Now, I don't know if y'all have ever seen a basketball that couldn't quite decide to get in the hoop or not. But that's what that round grenade did at the edge of that concrete bunker, because my throwing arm wasn't that good. So it just teetered there on the edge. Live hand grenade, pins out, spoon is flipped off, that thing is armed and ready to go. Well, I thought for sure the instructor has seen this before. He's a professional, there's got to be a protocol for this. So I looked at him for what to do. And this is the look on his face. So this is not a good sign, not a good sign. And y'all ever had time slow down on you when you're in a crisis like this. So I went back and forth instructor grenade, instructor grenade is that thing was trying to balance itself and figure out where it was going to go. It made the right choice, fortunately, fell out of the bunker into the field beyond boom. Now, in most organizations, I had passed the minimum bar, I threw a grenade, nobody died. Okay, that's the minimum bar in this case. But do you think those Marines let me leave having passed the minimum bar? Of course not. Because they understand if a shot ever has to use this skill in combat, you better understand how to use a hand grenade and be able to do it safely without hurting anybody on his own team. So they kept me there that day until they were very confident I could get a hand grenade at least semi near the target that I was throwing it at. And so as we begin to think about training in our organizations, we have to understand that a training isn't just about meeting the minimum level. It's actually about superseding that it's about giving us the resources we need to achieve more than we thought was achievable. And where does that come from? Well, come to find out, training is actually what makes pivoting possible. Two years later, after the training incident with a hand grenade, I get a call from a fortune 100 company. And they say, Sean, hey, we got a big problem. And I say, great, what's up? How can I help? And they say, we have a whole staff of trainers that go out to all the locations around the country that we have in our company. And they're training people. But yet we're not seeing any movement on the metrics that our company says are important. Customer service scores are coming in the same profitability is coming in the same top line revenues coming in the same. It's like our training is doing nothing. And I said, I think I have a solution for you. They say, great, what is it? It's one question that we've learned in high performing teams to run every piece of training through before we deliver it, whether we're talking about training executive staff, salespeople, human resources, our product support folks, even the folks out in the maintenance departments. What is the one question we have to ask before we decide is it worth pulling our people into training? And the one question is, how will our customers know? So as we think about the training that we're giving, largely in a virtual format these days, and some of us are still pulling people in and we're all face masked up. The question to ask is, how will our customers know that we've delivered this training? Are we going to have faster turnaround times on equipment that our customers give to us to repair? Are we going to have better, you know, numbers for our sales, because we're able to figure out ways to become a leaner and more profitable on our end, we're able to pass that savings on to our customers and lower the gross price of the products that we sell. How will our customers know? Because if you can't answer that question, then training is just yet another thing we have to fit into our day. But if you can even go to a salesperson or somebody in your maintenance department and say, hey, this is how this is going to affect our customers. We're going to shorten the turnaround time by eight hours, because we're implementing this new process, this new system, this new piece of software, and we're going to train you on that today. Suddenly they can connect how what they're doing today in a training area is actually going to impact the top line of the organization that they're part of, whether it's turnaround time, customer service experience, sales, whatever that might be. It's all about, hey, how do we make sure that training is actually implemented? Because that's the biggest problem I see in a lot of organizations I'm able to chat with across more than 400 industries we're tracking now. People say, hey, training is great, but if we can't use it like this fortune 100 company told me, what's the point? And so how do our customers know is a critical question to run all of our training through? So as we think about that, I want you to really think about, okay, if we're doing this training, where does it come from? How do we know that the training we're giving our people is going to have a positive impact on our customers? How do we make sure that our people are engaged in these training sessions because simply telling them how it's going to impact the customer only gets us halfway there. How do we make up the other half? So people want to show up for training, even sometimes getting there early because they don't want to miss a single thing. Well, that actually comes from the solutions that we're gathering out there in the field all the time. Now, when I thought about the people that were great at gathering solutions and training their people in it, no high performing team came to mind more than the Marine Corps snipers. Now, if y'all ever seen any war movies, you've probably seen some Marine Corps snipers floating around. These are the dudes in the ghillie suits with the face paint, trying to look all sexy and all high speed. Hey, I wanted to get with these teams because that's where the action happened. Well, I didn't know this, but as I began looking into it, snipers actually have the most boring job in the entire military. Why is that? Well, they have to lay completely still for eight, 16, 24, sometimes 48 hours at a time waiting for that target to appear. Now, they're not even allowed to get up and use the bathroom, y'all. Like that's how still they have to be for that long. That's gross. I didn't want to have any part of that. So I said to the sniper team that was closest to me, I said, Hey guys, if you ever get put up in the Ritz or you're down there at Orlando SeaWorld, let me know. Cause that's where, that's the mission I want to go on with y'all. And he said, great, Sean. Yeah, we'll let you know that buddy. Well, one day I did get the call. I said, Sean, we're not embedding inside of a, you know, a four-star hotel or a five-star hotel. We're going to be taking over a house, providing overwatch for some Marines working in the field in front of the house. It's pretty much the best situation you're going to find. I said, great guys, let's go. So 4.30 AM in Iraqi time, they're all loaded up, you know, and I'm loaded up. We're going to spend a couple of days in this house together. And of course, they're all ninja quiet, inserting at dark. And you can guess, Sean, you know, with my gear bouncing around, rattling, giving away their position. They really love me, let me tell you. But we get into this house and the Marine's looking out the window. His four buddies on his sniper team are there eating chow, resting, getting ready for their rotation at the window. And I hear that Marine up there at the window, that sniper, he says something you never want to hear said in a combat environment. He said, oh crap. And I look around, I'm like, what is it, dude? We're right in the middle of combat here. This is not a good sign. And he says, Sean, look out this window. So I look, I peek out the window. There's a whole platoon of Marines online in front of that house with their weapons pointed in right at us. And that sniper says, they must not have gotten word that we were putting up in this house. They saw my rifle through the window and they think we're the enemy. You want to go out there and tell them who we are? And none of the other snipers thought that was a good idea either. These Marines are known to shoot first and ask questions later. It's how they stay alive. And so I said, well, guys, don't we have any other way to communicate? Because yelling at them ain't going to do it. They said, well, we do have a field radio. Let's try to get them up on their frequency. And so they're dialing into the field radio and I look out the window and I see that their platoon commander of these Marines all on the line here, hey, they have a field radio too. And his platoon commander is talking into the headset and looking down at a map and pointing at things on the map. Can you all guess what he was doing with that map? He was getting ready to call in an airstrike. He didn't want to risk the lives of his Marines storming into that house. So if we leave the house, we might get shot. If we stay there, we're going to get disintegrated in an airstrike. Now, I have professional training in stress management. So here's what I did in that moment. I curled up in a little ball on the ground, started crying. Those snipers still mess with me about that on Facebook today. I'm in touch with them. And I thought my life was over. Now, one of those snipers in his final moments before the missile hit from that airstrike, he said, you know, I think I might have an idea because he kept trying to raise him up on the radio. And of course, Murphy's Law comes into effect right when it's not supposed to. Anybody that's worked with heavy equipment knows what I'm talking about. Something's supposed to work at a certain moment, it tends not to. It's just the way it goes. That field radio was not working. And so this Marine started stripping a wire off of the wall, one of those old coax phone lines, you know, before these fancy cell phones we all use now, he started stripping that off of the wall and peeling away the outer layer with a pair of pliers he had. And I thought, man, this is a weird thing to do in your final moments. So I uncurled myself, I got up, and I went to look at that window and what that Marine was doing. Now, because I had a camera with me, I decided this would be a pretty good moment to capture what was going on. Well, I want to introduce you to Phil McCoy. So he was 24 years old when this photo was taken, and he immigrated from Black Rock, Ireland to join the U.S. Marines and become a sniper. And in that moment, he was taking that phone line, running it out of the window and jacking it into our field radio. Now, some of y'all might be old enough to remember when we used to hook up, you know, coat hangers and aluminum tinfoil on top of TVs to boost the signal. That's exactly what he was able to do with that field radio to get it working. We were able to get a hold of the Marines out there in the field, let them know that we were friendlies, wave out the window, hey! And fortunately, we got to live another day. Now, what was fascinating about this was that Mr. McCotter, he didn't invent that technique. In times of innovation, or times of crisis, I should say, innovation doesn't really hit its highest levels because we're in crisis mode. We've been in crisis mode since probably the middle of March of this year in a lot of our distributor ships. So I asked McCotter, I said, hey buddy, where'd you learn how to do that? And he said, Sean, somebody in World War I or II or Vietnam or Korea, somebody along the way figured out you could strip wire and jack it into a field radio to boost the signal. And it's because he knew that training would someday make a massive impact on his life that he was paying attention to it. He understood how it would be immediately applicable to his situation because these teams, whether we're dealing with business fortune 100 companies or we're dealing with military teams or we're dealing with equipment distributors, they have to understand that, hey, when it comes down to it, to pivot, solutions can never be kept a secret. Now each of us inside of our distributor ships have a couple of people that I can refer to as the bright bulbs. These are the people that have either been there the longest, they're the first people to raise their hand to try to help out in a situation, to volunteer, to work with an angry customer, to do that customer service bit, that product support bit, or maybe you're on the executive team and you've just been around long enough, you kind of know what's going on. Well you're that bright bulb. And so the question is, hey, if you have that knowledge, that experience, are you transmitting it to your teams? Because COVID-19 did not change the massive amount of turnover that's happening in a lot of our distributorships in the next couple of years. When that senior level of executive leadership is going to retire out and the junior leaders that are with us today, y'all are stepping into their shoes. Well they have 30, 40 years of experience sometimes. Are they leaving anything behind for you? Are they leaving any of those decades of experience in a method, in a format that then you can use to make your lives easier? And then when we get into solutions, the organizations that are doing this the best are doing it in a systemized way. So I want to introduce you to one of the people that I was able to personally interview, great business leader. Some of y'all might know him because of the brand that he runs. His name is Bert Jacobs. He's the CEO of a company called Life is Good. Now, pre-COVID-19, I flew up to Boston, was able to sit down in their corporate headquarters. And if you're unfamiliar with Life is Good, they're an outdoor clothing brand. Think like Patagonia or North Face, but without any of the pretension. That's Life is Good, real down to earth people. Well, Bert had been able to grow his company from having $72 in the bank to becoming a hundred million dollar clothing brand. And the interesting thing is something that y'all really like if you're on the executive side and you control any of the marketing that we're all beginning to do on social media now, he was able to grow his brand to that point without one paid external advertisement, not one billboard, not one magazine placement, not one social media ad. It was paid for completely by word of mouth. Now we'll get here in a minute about how he was able to do it. But when I sat down with him, I wanted to find out about the growth rate, the $72 to a hundred million dollars in such a short amount of time. I was like, dude, you got to tell me how that happened. And he said, Sean, well, when we started, we were just selling t-shirts out of the back of a van on college campuses. That's how they got their start at Life is Good. Now I got a daughter who's two and a half years old now. When she gets to be of college age, the last thing she's going to do is buy something out of the back of a van on a college campus. I'm going to let her know that's not safe. But back in the day when Bert got his start, hey, that was all right. So he'd made just enough sales to grow his company from having headquarters in the back of a van to a one bedroom apartment, still very much bootstrapping. He'd even managed to find four salespeople that were willing to work all straight commission, and they were taking care of different regions in the Southeast U.S. and say, hey, what happened, man? Because obviously something occurred, $78 to a hundred million dollars. What was that? And he said, Sean, in the early days, we were failing. Only one of our salespeople was making a number every month. The rest of them just weren't making the right sales. Now, anybody in the executive team knows what that looks like when our salespeople are not hitting the number. It starts to get pretty scary. And so Bert, being the CEO, wanting his company to survive, loaded up gas inside of his van and he went to visit the one salesperson that was doing great. Sat down with her and he said, you have to explain this to me. How are you able to get it done when the other salespeople aren't able to pivot? They're not able to leverage all of the changes that are happening in the retail clothing market right now. And she said, well, Bert, I came from the pharmaceutical sales industry. Join your company because I love the mission. I love the idea of life is good. I'm just doing what they taught me to do. I'm placing the product at the front of the store, making sure it's well lit, making sure we have great relationships with the people running the locations we're selling product out of. And Bert told me he's writing all this furiously as this woman is relaying this to him. And then he asks her a question you never want to hear a boss ask you. He says, can I borrow $20? And she's like, okay, I guess just add it to my next commission check. Here you go. Well, I took the 20 bucks, gassed up the van and went to visit the next salesperson to download everything he had learned from the one salesperson that was doing great. And he just leapfrogged loans to hit all of the salespeople. Suddenly sales started to spike because they were sharing solutions. They weren't keeping them a secret just amongst one high performing division or one high performing location of our dealerships. Imagine all of your dealerships having access to everything that every salesperson was learning every single day. That's what we're able to accomplish. And I'm going to show you before we finish today, how to get it done. Well, as Bert began doing that, hey, sales began to spike because he realized that if he could make this into a process that his company followed, then he would no longer have to worry about the same issue cropping up again and again and again. And amongst executives, most of the time that we spend, whether we're junior leaders or senior leaders is putting out fires. Well, how, you know, there's normally I'd ask everybody to raise their hands. I'll ask you to do it in your mind today. Cause I can't see everybody, unfortunately. But the question is how many times have you had to solve the same problem more than once? Yeah. Like who has that experience? I'd say every hand of every leader would come up in the room because it's kind of what we do. I used to do that in my company a lot too, figured out ways around it, but it used to be a regular occurrence. Well, as we began to understand something and Bert shared this with me, Hey, in these high performing teams that we're all part of, sidestepping problems prevents the solutions. We are master problem solvers in the equipment distributorship world. I know this because I was able to talk to a lot of your leaders. Y'all are top notch at solving problems. The question is, are we sidestepping the problem? Are we just getting it done well enough for an hour so that we can move on to that next goal to getting back in contact with that angry customer, to getting our dealerships spun up again, to getting that new social media ad placed and bypassing problems, or are we permanently solving them as we encounter them? So that's the difference between a team that can be high performing and one that just has high perform herbs. And there's a difference between the two. I hope you all recognize. Some teams only have a couple of bright bulbs and they carry the entire distributorship. Some teams have more people that are sharing things and suddenly they see that distributorship raise above all the others as a company rather than just one location. So as we dig into this, I want you to keep in mind that, Hey, sidestepping problems is not the way of a high performing team. Now, when I went looking for organizations and teams that were great at never sidestepping a problem, engineers came to mind first because these people are great at breaking down problems into their individual components and permanently solving them. And amongst the military teams, I was able to study the engineers that really did best at this. Hey, they were the military engineers and these folks only had two jobs. They'd build stuff and they'd blow it up. That's it. Sometimes the same thing on the same day. Now, if y'all like fireworks as much as I do, that seems like a pretty cool gig. You get to create big structures and then just level them on the same day. And so as I began to find these military teams, I found one of them that had gotten called out where an ambush had just occurred. And I found their platoon commander and I said, ma'am, you know, what happened? Because I see y'all standing around not doing much. I don't want to say, you know, I don't want to call anybody out. I was like, what's going on? And she said, Sean, you see this footpath? A platoon of Marines was ambushed here about an hour ago. Thankfully, nobody was hurt. The bad guys used these trees as cover and they got away. Well, we've been tasked to figure out what can we do with these trees so they can never be used as cover again, because this is a commonly traveled footpath by all of our forces. And so if they realize they could use it as cover once and stage an ambush, they're guaranteed to do it again. And I looked around and I was like, well, ma'am, I don't see any axes. How are y'all going to cut these trees down? She said, Sean, don't you worry about that. We got it. And she ordered everybody to empty their packs, empty their bags. She was looking for every piece of tape that any of us had. Scotch tape, masking tape, electrical tape. Now, I didn't know this, y'all, but apparently it's possible to cut down an entire forest of trees with nothing but tape. Turns out all it takes is tape and a whole lot of plastic explosives. So those Marines, as I watched them, rigged up each one of those trees in an entire forest with a couple of pounds of C4, put them on a common detonation line, and told me to take a step back. In just a click of a button, they were able to turn an entire forest into an open field. The fascinating thing about this is not that they were able to use C4 to blow stuff up. That's kind of what they did. That was their job. It's that they took the time to do it at all. So you imagine how many times have we encountered a massive problem. We realized that, man, we just skirted around that one. Thankfully, that didn't come to bite us in the butt, and we just continue on with our day. Happens a lot because we're busy people. We're solving problems constantly. We don't have time to dwell on every single problem, or so we think. See, these engineers, the only thing they had to look forward to at the end of the day on a combat deployment was a cold shower and laying down in an army cot with no air conditioning and 120 degree weather outside. That was it. But that was the luxury they had. So why did they spend a couple of hours wiring up all of those trees and taking the time to do this? Well, they understood that we have a couple of choices when it comes to actually implementing training and making sure our solutions are permanent. And one of those choices is to sidestep stuff because, you know, we got bigger goals, so we think. Or do we take the time to solve problems now so that the teams coming behind us don't stumble over them? See, as leaders, as executives, we're great at turning big problems into speed bumps that don't slow us down very much, and we just move on. But the people coming behind us, the junior folks, that speed bump could turn into a wall that stops them in their tracks from being able to serve our customers in ways that we know we can. But we can't be everywhere at once as leaders. We have to empower our folks and allow them to leverage pivoting as well. So as we look at this, as we think about, hey, how do we actually make this a process in our organizations? It comes down to a very simple thing. We either have to learn lessons or we're forced to repeat them. And this applies to every area across our distributorships, from the executive staff, to human resources, to sales, to product and service support, to everybody in our maintenance department, all of our technicians. And our technicians tend to be better than most at learning lessons or being forced to repeat them because they know they don't want to have to learn the same thing over and over and over. What if we made that universal inside of our entire dealership industry, entire, all of our distributorships started doing this? That's exactly what pivoting allows us to do. And so as we dig into this, I want to give you a very simple process to begin gathering the solutions out of the heads of your people, solving them permanently so that you can build those solutions into training so that you can ask your people to achieve more than they ever thought possible, which in turn will allow us to get ahead of the very rate of change that COVID-19 is forcing on our distributorships. What does that look like? How does it happen? Simple. It's called the rule of five. Okay. In your weekly meetings, your bi-weekly meetings, your monthly meetings, I would like you, this is a suggestion, I run it in my company, I'll show you the results here in a minute, ask that everybody brings five challenges. This works up to a group of about a dozen people. Beyond that, you can roll the number down to two or three each. But if everybody brings five challenges, if they solve the problem in the interim, hey, great, bring the solution too. But bring us problems. Just because you solved it doesn't mean the people that are coming behind you next month are going to have the same type of insider innovation. They may struggle with that thing and it could cause massive negative results for us. So if everybody brings five problems, walk through, hey, what do you recommend we do about it? Engage your team in finding a solution and change the processes that you use in sales and human resources on the executive team inside of your maintenance and your service departments with what you learn. And so that if that problem ever crops up again, people now have a database, a resource, the process has been changed. And a lot of you are using this right now with your technicians. I'm going to encourage you to expand it out across your dealerships. This is really where results begin to matter. Now, what happens if you actually make this a process that lasts, let's say the course of a year where you just get 5% better as a distributorship every single week? What are the results like? Let's take a look at that. Now, I'm not a math person. I have to use a calculator to balance my checkbook, but I had a friend of mine build this graph. He's an astrophysicist. It took him about five seconds. And here's the question I asked him. I said, if we start at 5% improvement every single week, where are we at over the course of a year? Because the improvement compounds on itself, right? Three weeks from now, we might be 10% better. Four weeks from there, we're 20, 30, 40% better. What does that look like over the course of a year? And he said, Sean, over the course of a year at just a 5% improvement, just solving five problems a week, I'm not asking you to do it, you know, 80 problems at once, just solve five things that are challenging your distributorship every week. Over the course of a year, you'll see a 1200% plus improvement. Now you may say, Sean, that's real funny math. You know, thanks for sharing that with us. Every organization, including my own, that we've been able to implement this in has seen revenues track on that line as well. Because think about it, our salespeople, the people that are responsible for generating revenue, our maintenance team, our product support team, the people that are responsible for servicing the contracts that we sell on our equipment, every single day, they're dealing with problems. What if you gave them a clear path to do their jobs? What if we removed as many obstacles as we possibly could? Do you think they could do things faster, more efficiently, improve customer service? Do you think our marketing and our sales team could do better in getting the attention of the people that we want to get the attention of? If they didn't have to deal with all the challenges that just keep cropping up as fires they have to put out every day? Of course they would. This is exactly where pivoting becomes a massive life changer in an executive's world. Because as an executive on my end, I never have to deal with solving the same problem twice. Because we have a database of lessons learned. This could be done in an Excel spreadsheet, Google sheet. It's really very simple, y'all. Doesn't require a whole lot of extra stuff going on. But yet it creates a massive improvement in the morale of your people, because they see you soliciting problems and solving them. How many times have our people, or we, for instance, brought a problem up to our senior leadership and nothing happened? The process of solving these problems creates a paper trail in that I can go back a month from now and say, you know, I brought that problem to you, boss. We never did anything with it. Or we brought that problem, we solved it that week, we solved it two weeks from then, HR put a new policy in place, whatever that might look like as a solution, and now I never have to worry about that problem cropping up. Or if I need to access that database, now I have a full run of every lesson that my organization has ever learned in any area. You think that's going to save you some time as an executive from having to answer all the questions? Absolutely. So when my organization encounters a new problem, when any of the people on my team have an issue, I send them to the lessons learned database first, where they gather those rules of five, just five problems a week. And the impact is tremendous. So I'd like to hear from you where you think this would be a best fit inside of AED's business model. Where do you think the rule of five would most benefit you? And in case you can't see the small print on the bottom, sales, technicians, rentals, or maybe even in communication. As I interviewed a lot of your senior leaders, what I began hearing was if there's one dirty word in equipment distributorships, it's communication. That's why it's on this slide. I wanted to make sure that we captured that. And I'm hearing a lot about communication. Okay, fair enough. I can help you all with that. I can pivot the entire presentation to make sure we address it. So yeah, and you'll also see this broken down by where you told me you worked. So what I'm seeing is we have a couple of unknowns weighing in, but for a lot of us, product support. Okay, so this tells us very important data. Our product support people think that we really need to implement the rule of five and it would really impact how they're able to deliver that service to our customers. If that's not the most valuable insight that you might get today, or if it is the biggest piece of insight, I think it's well worth your investment just to know that piece of information. That's the beauty of being able to engage people in a live performance like this. All right, so as we move on, I'd love to address that. Let's talk about communication. Because as we move on into this, there was one team I found that was really, really good at communication, and it was always after the fact. See, when we're performing, when we're moving a big piece of machinery around, there's not a lot of time or room for communication. But if we don't make time for it, communication doesn't tend to happen. There was one team that was excellent at this. Now, for the Marines that might be watching right now, you probably know who these folks are. This is the silent drill team. Now, if you've ever seen a baton twirler, a small town marching band, anybody in a parade that's looking really good, you know, we all kind of watch the Macy's Day Parade on Thanksgiving. Hopefully, it happens this Thanksgiving. You know, maybe not, but we're all hopeful for it. Everybody that's marching in step, this is the team they look to for the standard of excellence. Fascinating thing about this team, nobody that is on the silent drill platoon, nobody's part of this team, has been there longer than two years, because that's the cycle that they rotate Marines in and out of this team, and two years is it. In two years, they have to take somebody that knows little to nothing about drill, that's, you know, popping rifles around and spinning them in the air, little to nothing, and make them the best in the world inside of two years, to make them the model of excellence that everybody else wants to emulate. Now, for a lot of us, it takes sometimes longer than two years for us to get our technicians trained, spun up, and active in artillery ships. So, this is going to be really exciting, because second interesting thing about this team, most of the Marines are millennials, or younger at this point. So, I know a lot of us may be in the millennial generation, but we also may be managing those people in the generation Y, right, there are, you know, the whatever they call the next generation, there's a couple of names for them now, and a big challenge is, how do I get these people engaged, how do I get them off of their phones, and actually engage with customers and clients? The silent drill team has got a process for this, because they take something that is ancient, almost has no place on the battlefield today, and they bring it to life. Now, how they do it is through a very, very direct and focused rule of five program that I'll go over with you here, but as opposed to just tell you about these Marines, I want to show you what they're actually able to accomplish. So, I'm going to show you a short video of one of their performances, and as you watch this, keep in mind, nobody's been doing that longer than two years, most of them are under the age of 20, and finally, hey, what would that look like inside of our maintenance department? What would that look like on our product support team? What would that look like if we could take that culture, that crispness, that focused energy, and make it part of our distributorships? So, let's take a look at what the silent drill team is able to do with an active rule of five program, and I'll walk you through how to get it done. Not bad for a bunch of teenagers, huh? That is entirely possible inside of any organization. And I'm not talking about everybody moving in lockstep, because I've gotten to visit some of your maintenance bays. There's a lot of energy going on, a lot of different things happening at the same time. I'm not talking about everybody moving in tandem. I'm just talking about people carrying that kind of crisp, focused, flawless energy to the jobs that they perform. Now, when I was able to follow the silent drill team around on a few of their performances, I asked their platoon commander at the end of one day, I said, sir, I've got to know, how do you make it look so flawless? Where it's almost like, you know, perfection in action with human beings. How do you do that? And he told me something very interesting that I think is going to apply a lot to all of our distributorships. He said, Sean, the silent drill team has been doing what they do for about 70 years, okay? Long time. In 70 years of recorded performances, not one of them has been perfect. When it looks awesome, we still take the time to sit down and figure out, how do we make it even better? And here's how they get it done. At the end of every performance, they'll gather the team up. It's a couple of dozen Marines, but you could do this on a team much smaller or much larger for that matter. And when they sit down, the person that's the highest ranking, so the senior person, the executive, they're the first person to admit what they could have done better. That's an ego check, isn't it? Imagine the CEO of your company getting in front of everybody on the team at the end of a quarter, the end of the year, whatever that looks like, and saying, here's how I could have led you better. And after the senior ranking person gets done calling themselves out and saying, here's what I could have done better, here's how I plan on improving it, here's my action plan, then the next senior person does the same thing and the next senior person, and it goes all the way down the line. And this accomplishes a couple of things. If your senior people call themselves out first, it gives everybody else the emotional space to be able to do it too. As you think the most junior person on the team is gonna stand up in front of all of their peers and say, here's how I dorked that up, here's how I misplaced that tool or that part, or I misran that diagnostic on the piece of equipment that caused the delay that attributed to X customer retention, they're not gonna do that. But if they see their leaders do it first, suddenly it frees everybody up to look for ways that they could be better. And so on this team, even after a performance that looks flawless to a spectator, they still, even the most junior person will say, I was half an inch off on that step, and here's how I plan on making it better. Here's how I plan on practicing, drilling, looking back at the manual, whatever that might look like. So imagine being able to do that where we have a piece of equipment that comes into our maintenance bay for service, we service it correctly, exceptional quality, we didn't get it out the door when we promised to get it back to the customer, and get it delivered, and it's back on the construction site doing what it does. Everything happened as it should have been. What if we take the time to even then look at it and say, we did everything right, but if we had to do it over again, how would we make it better? That's a powerful question to ask, especially when something goes well. See, a lot of teams, especially executives, are really in love with their post-mortem process, but post-mortems only happen when something tanks horribly, and that's helpful. I'm not gonna tell you to stop doing that when a really bad problem occurs and causes loss of a customer or something like that, but what if we also do it with things that go well? Wow, that's a powerful experience. And so as we look at that, I would like to know where you think this might fit inside of your organization, because I wanna know, hey, if we're looking at pivoting, making a difference, does that happen in setting better goals? Does it happen with more relevant training for us? Does it happen with not keeping solutions a secret? Or would you really think that pivoting would make the biggest difference in my distributorship by not sidestepping problems, by permanently solving them with a great rule of five program or something similar? Let's go ahead and get your votes in, because I'm interested to see what y'all think. We've been able to solve the communication issue, hopefully. Senior person calls themselves out first. If you're the senior person on your team, guess whose job it is. And I run this in my company, it's an ego check every week. But what it also forces me to do is look for ways that I could improve, because I have to bring something to my own meetings every week. It's not just, hey, tell me where you went wrong, or where'd you go wrong? No, it's me first. And because every one of my people's doing that, and every company that I've seen this implemented in is doing that, they go through their week looking for things that could be done better. Wow, what a powerful process that would be if they actually saw change implemented as a result of that. It's massive for morale. So I'm seeing not sidestepping problems. Very interesting, very interesting. And it's good that we're thinking that way. Okay, good, and not keeping solutions a secret. So we're gonna give you a couple of ways to begin building this into your distributorships before the end of the conference, actually. You're gonna get something from me at the end of today that's gonna be really interesting in helping you not sidestep problems. But as we dig into this, I'd like to take us back to where we started, all right? Front lines of Iraq, 15 minutes to live. One of the final lessons these Marines gave me in how to pivot, how to actively pivot and leverage change. See, as we were loading up in that truck, the sun was just beginning to set, and my boss was getting the Marines together loading his gear too. We were all gonna go out and meet those insurgents that heavily outmanned and outgunned us. We thought maybe 15 minutes was all we had left. I remember sitting in that truck, the engine idling. If y'all ever been around a real big diesel engine that's just cranking out exhaust, you know that smell. Y'all are probably real familiar with the distributorship world. That was filling my nose. I remember it like it was yesterday. And we're sitting there in this truck, all faced inward on our benches, engine idling, just waiting for the order to roll out. Sun's dropping out of the sky, and one of those Marines nudges me, and he says, hey man, check that out. So I look up into the sky, and here's what I see. One of the most beautiful sunsets I'd ever laid eyes on. And because I was in a crisis environment, this life and death scenario, I actually couldn't remember a sunset ever happening before that. I mean, I know I'd seen it, but I'd never paid attention. Having to rapidly pivot forced me into the present moment. And that's the picture that I was able to capture that day, as we were waiting to roll into the outskirts of Fallujah. If you've ever been to the Middle East, some of the most gorgeous sunsets in the world are there. And as the sun began to drop out of the sky that day, it began to get really dark around us. I could just see the silhouettes of the Marines in that vehicle with me, as we prepared for our final 15 minutes. And then I heard something that I never expected to hear, even amongst US Marines. That was somebody started laughing. And then it began to catch like wildfire around the truck. They were all laughing, they were guffawing even, and they were all laughing in my direction. I could tell from the direction of their voices. Something was going on that I was unaware of. That's when I heard my boss step up to the side of the truck and he put his big hand on my shoulder, that bear claw, boom. And he said, boy, you get out of the truck. You got more than 15 minutes to live. And I realized now they've been playing a joke on me. They got me in the truck. They handed me extra ammo, extra hand grenades. And I said, man, you know how I am with hand grenades. This was a bad idea. You all did all of this to play a joke on me? Said, hey, Sean, we were just watching to see what you would do. Can you believe that? They said, we were watching to see if you were listening and learning to the training that you've been getting. Watching to see if you could rapidly pivot, not because you were forced into a crisis, but because you trusted the training. You see, these Marines all knew that when they got to the outskirts of Fallujah, they knew who was gonna take up what position. If somebody got hurt, they knew who was the medic that was gonna pull them back, who was gonna fill that point in the line. I mean, they trained for this, just like our technicians have trained to repair equipment. Hopefully like our salespeople have been trained to deal with objections from their prospects. They had all of that wired in. And because of that, they were able to relax and enjoy a sunset like this, even in a stressful, intense environment. Just like your people with the right systems, processes, and leverage over how they pivot can do an excellent job, even in the midst of COVID-19, even when they're working from basement bunkers. So as we figure out, okay, how do we make this work inside of our company, Sean? The biggest problem you're gonna have from any conference is not getting motivated. All right, hopefully I've given you some ideas you can bring into your own organizations and use, but the biggest challenge is actually gonna be implementing it. Well, if all you do is leave motivated from this, then I've failed as your presenter. So I wanna make sure we give you every tool possible so that you can implement what you've learned today. AED and I have partnered in giving that to you. Here's how you get it. What I'd like you to do is pick up your cell phones, but instead of opening up a browser to go to a survey, I want you to open your text messaging app, okay? I want you to text the phrase pivoting to 44222, okay? And if you text the phrase pivoting to 44222, what you'll get back almost immediately is a link, a URL through text. Click on that URL and it'll open up a window for you. Okay, again, text the phrase pivoting to 44222. When that new browser window opens up, go ahead and click sign me up. What AED and I have built for you is a six week course. It's gonna be individually customized to wherever you tell me you need to pivot inside of your distributorship, no matter where you work, no matter how senior you are. We've also included some other resources. I've given what essentially is a breakout workshop session. We've recorded it for you and you're gonna be able to access that. So it's more of a deep dive into how do you get this done on a team. And then the TEDx organization hearing about my work, asked me to come in and present on how are organizations turning missions into movements, like Life is Good did, with $100 million top line and no external advertising. And so we've loaded that entire TEDx talk up into this course for you as well. All free, all because you invested in yourself to attend this conference. So no extra charge there, and I'm not gonna market to you. I got nothing to sell any of you, okay? Unless you wanna get in touch with me, this is it. So with that, figure out, okay, how do we roll forward in this? That six week course is how you're gonna make it happen. And so if all you do is text the phrase pivoting to 44222, you'll have what you need, okay? And you can always log into the course later. I'll keep it open for a couple of days during the course of this virtual conference so that you can have access to it over the next six weeks. All right, so as we dig into this, I wanna close this out, because hopefully we have a better understanding about how teams are pivoting today across industries, military, organizations, businesses, and distributorships. I wanna find out where you think the future of your industry actually lies, okay? And to do that, we got one final survey. I wanna find out from you, if we can pivot in the equipment distributorship world, what's the one word that describes our future? Where do you think we're gonna end up if we all figure out collectively how to pivot? Limitless, bright, profitable. I like technology, because that's what it's gonna take to pivot for a lot of us, especially for our technicians that are coming out of school that we need to hire. These are excellent words, y'all. I like that you're thinking positively about what a lot of people would look at and say, that's a stressful situation, because thinking positively is how we're gonna be able to ask our teams to implement pivots inside of our distributorships. I'll give us a couple more seconds, because this is really the highlight, and I'll make sure that you all get a copy of this slide. This is where we think the future of distributorships are gonna be at a leaping pivot. That is excellent, that is excellent. So I'll hold it there. Just like those Marines told me they were gonna be watching to see what I would do, I'm gonna be watching to see some things on your distributorships. I'm gonna be paying attention. I wanna see what you all do with this information, because a lot of people are gonna be looking to see what you do when you leave this conference and go back to your emails, and maybe you can actually go back physically into your distributorship locations so you can get back to work with your customers. They're gonna be watching to see if what you learned at this leadership conference actually makes a change in how you leave. They're gonna be watching to see, did what you invest in AED pay off in return on investment for you and your distributorship? A couple other people are gonna be watching to see what you do as well. These are the men and women in our families, sometimes the children in our families as well, as it takes an incredible amount of attention and focus to deal with our jobs in a normal world. Add COVID-19 on top of that, we are all under additional stress and pressure right now. I can say that as well, I'm a two and a half year old. I totally get where you're at, all right? Trying to do presentations like this and not have a toddler screaming in the background takes an extra level of attention. They're gonna be watching to see, hey, did what you learned at that conference give you more emotional time with us? Did it allow you to be more present? Because you're not having to worry about putting out fires all the time. You have teams that are now working to actively solve solutions in a permanent way so that those fires don't crop up again tomorrow or next week or next quarter. Your communities are gonna be watching to see what you do as well. Because even though we're all socially isolated, we're still part of this distributorship community. We're still part of our local communities in a new way. They're gonna be watching to see if we can still make positive change. Even though we're all under stress and pressure, if we can be the industry that's standing up, we're gonna get the attention of a lot of people. We're gonna say, hey, in the distributorship world, from what we've learned from AED, we're now able to pivot in a way that we weren't able to before. See, the future is definitely going to change on us again. Change is the one guarantee that we have. How do we manage it? How do we deal with it? It comes through pivoting. It comes through making sure that we manage change instead of the changes of COVID-19 managing us. And I'll be watching to see what you do as well. It's been a pleasure chatting with you today. I'm gonna turn it back over to our sponsor in O'Brien. Name's Kristen. Y'all, make sure you get a copy of these slides. Bill, go ahead, sir. Thank you, Sean, for those great words. And thanks again to Eric Stiles from Century Insurance. We're now going to take a short break. The link to the next session, you can find that in the chat box. The next session will be Rental Strategy, Business Models and Operations, Common Dealer Practices. And it's gonna be one that you really don't wanna miss. The link, as I said, is in the chat box and we will begin that at 1125 Central Time.

Sean Rhodes

equipment distributorship

pivot

adapt to change

innovation

flexibility

ambitious goals

drive growth

training

empowering employees

continuous learning