2- Lessons from the Top with Steve DeSutter, CEO of Focus Brands

This is Jordy Gampson and we are back with another Icebox Wadcast. If this is your first time with us, the goal of this podcast is to give our listeners a glimpse into the making of a modern business. Let's dive in. I am here today with Steve DeSutter, the CEO of Focus Brands, which is the parent company of Mose, McAllister's, Shlotski's, Sinobun, Carvelle, Annie Ann's and now Jamba Juice, which is internationally known over 6,000 locations. It's an incredible company that you are the head of and we're very happy to have you here in the studio today. So thank you for being here. Jordy, thanks. It's pleasure. Let's go back to the very beginning. You grew up in Indiana, Central Indiana. Tell us what kind of child you were. I grew up in a family, six children. I was the second born and I was the oldest of five boys, an older sister. Wow. And it was a farm family. We were poor, but we didn't know it until somebody mentioned it because we ate pretty well. You know, we out of the garden and raised our own livestock and it was, you know, life was good and it was simple. What did you grow in the farm? We had, well, when I was really young, we had cattle and we made hay and we had corn and wheat and then eventually we raised hogs later on in my teenage years. That was what I was good for. I was the farm labor, which really created a kind of who I was. And so I was the oldest son that was made me really important to the farm economics for my family. And so I looked forward to the idea of, you know, to drive a tractor and when I got old enough and I started kind of at 12, that was before that was sort of thing you wouldn't do anymore. But I certainly was young and worked around the farm, worked with the livestock, but it was a fairly simple life. The closest house to us where a child of my age lived was about two and a half miles. And so when I was young, that was my social network. And it didn't matter whether I liked him or not, he was my friend, okay. And your siblings, I'm assuming because you're in my siblings, right? Right. And my siblings. So that was, yeah, so it was close. But wonderful. I'm at the school there were six kids in my first grade class. There were six really. The second grade class in my own teacher taught both classes. And I went all the way through sixth grade that way. I'm visualizing. I did not grow up in a farm. So, you know, crack of dawn, working the land, you always see kids that come out of farms as like the kids with the best work ethic and all that with that. Is that you? Yeah, yeah. So I think Opie, right? And it was pretty simple life. But it was a great life. You know, if I got to get on a tractor early in the morning and get off the tractor late in the day, I had the open cab. That's before tractors even have cabs on them. And on the fender beside me was a was a red radio. And I had to turn it up all the way. And I could get one station WLS out of Chicago. And that was, you know, rock music. That was my life all day long. And back and forth, what would seem pretty boring to me was pretty fulfilling. Wow. So you so you grew up in the farm and high school, you were high school athlete. What did you do in high school? Oh, well, you know, I played basketball. Okay. So I grew up in Indiana. My hometown was unusual. A little town of Attica. It was 5,000 people. It was 5,000 people. When I was born, it was 5,000 people. I was in high school. It's 5,000 people today. It's never changed. It just got stuck in time. And and my graduating class was the hundredth graduating class. And we were the last to graduate from high school before it it burned down. And the reason it burned down was the bleachers and the gymnasium. Everything was wooden. And so it just went up like a match. But here was the amazing. So it was a hundred years old. I was the hundredth graduating class. The gymnasium set 2,000 people. Wow. So it'd been around for a hundred years. That was how important basketball was. Yeah. Where I grew up. And the movie Hoosiers was filmed about 10 miles away from where I lived. And so it was very much a Hoosiers story. Now you said you asked the question was an athlete. I said I played basketball. I wasn't very good. I was I was I was too short and too skinny. Well, if you had 2,000 people from your hometown, if you if you had 40, what is that? 40% ish of the of the hometown they're watching you. And you're on the team. You're giving you're not giving yourself enough credit. I would trip over the lines. You know, I was so nervous all the time. So you leave Attica. And you go to Niagara University. Is that there was your. Oh, man. A lot of stops before. Okay. So yeah. So let's walk through that. Okay. So with school initially at Purdue University. Okay. Didn't really know why or what I wanted to do. So interestingly, my first major was in food science, which was great. I ended up in the food business, you know, eventually in my career. But I just I did it because of a teacher said, you know, that's a good thing to do. And I said, okay, I would do that. My parents were not all crazy about kids going to school because they needed the help on the farm. And so I had to kind of figure that all out. So I go to school. I take food science. And the first thing I find out is that everybody in all my classes are in pre vet classes. And if you know anything about veterinary science, it's actually harder to get into veterinary school than it is to get into medical school. And so the idea of a curve had gone away. And I and I needed a curve. I didn't. Me too. My high school. My high school education wasn't the best. And I wasn't ready to compete in that environment. So eventually I transitioned to agricultural economics. I always wanted to be a farmer. That's what I thought I would do. I got an associate's degree, but I also got, I also got married and dropped out of school then after that. And it took. Yeah, it took another another 20 years and about three more universities before I finally finished the undergraduate. I think I took macro and micro economics four times. Okay. Eventually I was able to get an A. Okay. So you finished your college career at where? The Niagara University. Okay. Okay. And you did. I was I was 40. Yes. By the time I did that. Yeah. Okay. So I have to ask you this because you went, you took macro and micro multiple times, which by the way, for myself, a guy that's in business, I was a history major. And I was always afraid of the business classes, which who would think that this is what I would end up doing. I have a daughter who actually just finished an exam and they freaked these kids out today about all these studies and everything. Academics, how important are academics in the workforce today? Oh gosh, wow. That's a great question. So I don't even know where to start there. And they're important, but being the top of the class is not nearly as important as being motivated. Will is more important than skill. Character still matters so much. Drive personal ability to learn is more important than what you might have learned. And we have it all over the board. You know, I have Harvard MBAs on my staff and and I have people like myself who, you know, got degrees from small schools and I think the other way to think about that is as a parent of six children. You can be sure I did not want them to take my path, which is the 20-year path. So it was a great. I was very insistent. Go to school, finish it. And I got the bedad and I got the don't but dad me, you know, finish now. And so as a result of, you know, one of my daughter who's a physician's assistant, the baby is a dentist. So they've all gone on. They finished her degrees early on. And I'm glad they did all that. But I don't think it's necessarily the marker of success. Well, the way that you so eloquently put that with the will and all that, my daughter will be the first to listen to this podcast because I want her to hear that. I couldn't agree with you more. At what point now let's shift over to career. So your finish was school. Where did you go from school? What were you thinking when you're graduating and did you know? So I graduated I was in my 40. So that was a long way from first shot. Okay. So let's go all back to first job. So first job was making hay and getting paid, you know, ten cents a bail. And then one day it's the I'm a senior. I'm about to graduate. And I had down to the out of the field to see my dad who's on the plant or he's planting soybeans at the time. I stopped helping him load up the plant or put the seed in and he hands me the keys of the pickup truck and says go down to the corner to the fertilizer plant. They need help. Don't come home without a job. I drove down to the corner about four miles away and I filled out a couple pieces of paper. You didn't have to fill out very many pieces of paper back in the day, back in 1972. And they gave me a job. And so immediately they stuck me in a truck. They sent me out to the field with a load of stuff in the back of the truck fertilizer. And I was supposed to drive across this field and do all these things, which I'd never had no training. So I went out there, went out to this field. I made one pass through the field one time through and I'd have to make like 30 to do it, right? The truck was empty already. I went oh that's not right. So I drove back and found out that they had missed set the truck up right for me and dumped the whole load of fertilizer in about a 10 foot path that was supposed to be across like a whole field. And I thought okay there's my first official job and I'm going to get fired. I haven't even been here two hours. So from there, I worked part time, went to school originally at Purdue, met my wife, who were about to sell right 45 years together into this month. At Purdue? Yeah at Purdue. Congrats. But school was, I just, I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do in life. And that was, that was, you know, I really relate to kids and young people are starting trying to figure it out. 'cause I just didn't know how to figure it out. So I dropped out. I dropped out, I got married, making minimum wage, first baby comes 11 months later, and all of a sudden necessity becomes the driver. And I remember I was working in minimum wage job, I was working in the Ag business, and I was laying under a rail car, trying to scrape fertilizer out of a rail car. Can you imagine this as CEO telling us? Sale, right? And I just let there, and I said, I better start using my head 'cause my back, this is a bad idea. So I went back to school and progressed, became a multi-unit manager in an Ag business, then became a rather progressive one. And by the middle eighties, I had an Apple IIE computer on my desk with the two floppy disks. Wow. And I was making recommendations to growers, what to put on their fields, how to grow their crops, using technology. And when no one was using technology, probably the first in the world to actually do that, I was part of a big company that the time was, eventually was owned by BP at the time, was owned by Standard Oil, which got acquired during those years. And it started really a great part of my career, which so first career, 19 years, with an employer, seven or eight different jobs, several different industries, moved from the country to another state, a multi-unit where I was in my late 30s, and the average person that reported to me was in their late 50s, so I was really getting an education on how to work with people with a different perspective in life, which was great. It was a wonderful education. And then moved to the big city of Cleveland, and I was the only marketing person on the campus of 700 PhDs. And my job was to start new businesses from biotech. Believe me, I was not qualified for it. And I hadn't finished my undergraduate yet. And every time BP would tell me, "We're not going to promote you again until you finish your undergraduate degree," and then they would move me, and then it would promote me, and then I would go to work, and then I'd have to go to night school. So I was working on all that at the same time. So I started a couple of businesses, got like a BP incubator. Yeah, it was. It was totally a business incubator. It was a philosophy at the time that research and technology was a renewable resource. It was a nice idea. We lost a lot of money. I got my name on a patent. We started a couple of businesses and sold them off. And again, experimented across many different industries. I wouldn't trade it for anything. And ended up then with more traditional roles as I finished out that career. And the last thing I did with BP was an M&A work, which actually sold off all the businesses that I work for. And so when that time came, it's like, okay, they said, now what would you like to do? And I said, just write one more check. I'll go off and remake myself. And that's what I did in my early 40s. And so after 19 years there, I realized what I really wanted to do is what I do today, which is run businesses. And back to general management, where I'd started my career, I wanted to get back to it because that was the fun of getting people aligned around goals and objectives and then going to hitting those goals and objectives. And I've been able to do that ever since. So I went through a series of jobs to get the title that I needed. Because I had to remake myself. I had been a director in a big oil company. And nobody wants a director in a big oil company unless you're in a big oil company. And so my target was mid-size and mid-cap businesses where I wanted to eventually do what I do today. Wow. So part of it took you overseas. You're in a reinvention. You're collecting your knowledge. You got your degree. You're now and then you're in London. Where were you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So along the way, even during my days with British petroleum, I had the privilege of oftentimes having responsibilities outside of the United States just having never lived there. So I've probably been traveling to London for 35 years at the time. So I've been international. I've been to Latin America. I've been to Brazil several times. And I've been around in Europe. And so I had a lot of cultural exposure. I did special projects for three consecutive CEOs of British petroleum around internal comms and communication and quality and leadership. I would somehow get pinned to these special projects. I remember when I had to tell the CEO of a BP, they had a problem with internal comms. When the problem was, every year they do a climate survey, ask employees what they think, and every year they get really lousy scores on communication. And the reason was the company had been going through a lot of transition. And every year there'd been a layoff. And every summer there was a layoff. The problem was that every summer just before the layoff, the rumor would start that there would be a layoff. And management says, oh, no, there won't be a layoff. And then there's a layoff. There's a layoff, right. And so it was a credibility problem. So it was a really easy fix. Somebody had to go tell the CEO that the problem was, you keep lying. So just tell the chairman, yeah. And it'll be OK. And I'd say lying, not really. But it was the public thing. They couldn't say it. And so the fun projects. And so the time I hung around the hoop been in several different industries. And I was working with somebody who had gone off to be the-- actually, we tried to merge Aloha and Hawaiian Airlines at one time. We were 30 days from closing that deal. That was really fun. I lived in Hawaii for a few months. And I said, I could take this. I could do this. But we ran off to run Burger King. And he went off as CEO of the Burger King. And I got the chance to move to London as president of Burger King's International Business, all the Eastern Hemisphere. I loved it. I finally had a patch big enough in place where I could influence the business in a big way. And got to live outside the country. And London was not a bad place to be. And will you traveling all around Europe in the Middle East and all that from London? Yeah, I had Asia was also my responsibility. So I had everything from, I used to say, Auckland to Iceland. Wow. And so it was a big patch. But I had a great team. We were in 35 of those countries with Burger King's. And I had the three largest Burger King's volume, Burger King's in the world. At the time, one was in a ship pole airport in Amsterdam. And then two in London, with two blocks from each other. Wow. That was really bringing me into the food business, which is where I'm at today in the restaurant business. As I say, catch up, got in my veins in those days. And I enjoyed that business. I think mostly because it was the really people businesses as much as they were product businesses. And there, the power of aligning people around a mission and a goal is what you do in your business every day. And it's the power of CEOs. We get a chance to align people. And if we do, they do magical things. From Burger King from Europe now. And I know you said that that brought you into food. And catch up in your veins. So what was it immediate to focus? Or from-- No, there's a-- Stripes. Right. Well, I've been in 12 different industries with at least 12 different companies. As I say, I'm obitually unemployable, Jordan. How's that, right? I think so. Now, I came back. I did a little consulting for a little while. I came back from London. And then joined and went to a convenience company, which I was like, I'm not sure I want to do this. I had it offered to work at a private equity firm or to go run a convenience stores. And my roots, what I was about was much more basic. And so I liked the idea of running the convenience stores. So we moved to South Texas, to Corpus Christi, Texas. Rene, the parent company was called Susser Holdings. I ran the retail business, which was a $6 billion turnover business. We eventually had two stocks traded on the York Stock Exchange. Fortune 500 company. The last two years I was there. We were in the top 5% of returners to shareholders. And I really enjoyed it. Convenience retail. We also had our own food concept inside. It was a little different than being in the restaurant business and its own complications. That was the taco. Yeah. The taco was our own branded inside of our sea stores. Gosh, we made money. We were growing the business, spending a pile of money every year to build new convenience stores. And it also came at a time. And I will always say this, because it sounds like you're bragging. And I don't think any of us ever should. And I certainly shouldn't. It was-- I went in 2008 about the time the rest of the world here, and especially in the east, was going into this huge recession. And I was in Texas, and we didn't notice. Because the oil patch had been rediscovered, fracking, and it started. There were gold rush towns being popped up everywhere. And you couldn't not be successful when the wind blows that strong behind you. So I'm always grateful that if the winds behind me, I look like I'm pretty smart. But having the wind behind you, it really helps. It really does. Well, it stripes a franchise, or it was all corporate owned. Oh, corporate owned. OK, all right. So after stripes, focus brands-- Focus brands. Right, OK, all right. So at the time, I thought, oh, this is my last thing, stripes. And then a crew called somebody knew really well and said, hey, there's a private equity company. They're just super nice people. We think they're too nice. I said, OK, I want to meet people like that. And they've got this company called Focus Brands. And it has at the time, these six brands. I said, well, what are the brands? And they went down the list. I said, oh, gosh, I know them all. And I love them all. And they're really healthy brands. They're not beat up or they're iconic. And many of them are leaders in their categories. And said, you know, in their 50, 60 countries. And I said, oh, gosh, I love international. I could do one more. And Atlanta, you know, what a great place to come to. What a great city. And I said, OK, I'll do one more. And that's now six years ago. Wow. Focus. I mean, where do we even begin with focus? You've recently added Jamba. The growth amongst focus and the different brands have grown. And as you already mentioned, they started off iconic. But from someone that services them and is in the field and sees what's happening. And as a customer also, by the way, you're doing a pretty good job. Whatever that's worth for me. Well, thanks for the business. Well, of course, I appreciate that. I'll always need more customers. It's fun. It's a fun business to be in. There's a lot going on. And every brand has its own life cycle, has its own history. It's a different place in what its needs are. So it's not as straightforward as one solution doesn't fit all. That's probably the biggest single challenge is for an executive team in a business like that. You've got to modify kind of where they are and their process steps, in terms of evolving. On the topic of focus, QSR, I know you're a snack and what's the other-- Fascade. Fascade, thank you. Where do you see the future? Again, and it's a great question. If six years ago, I joined this company on St. Patrick's Day, you know, I remember in 2014, I gave a-- I'm sure was an incredibly boring hour and 15 minute talk right out of the box. 9 a.m., first day on the job, all hands, everywhere, either video conference or live. And I laid out what I said was the future of the next five years of what was going to happen in industry. And I predicted huge amounts of change, disruption from the internet of things, and that we would have to be nimble and to be successful. And here's the way we would have to go about doing that. And just kind of laid out my vision for the business. I look back now of five plus years from those dates and say, I was right and I was incredibly wrong. I was right that we were going to be disrupted. I was incredibly wrong in the sense that it was so much faster and more magnitude of change than I'd ever experienced in my life and in my career. So now, what's the future? I would just say whatever is happening will accelerate. 5G, it's going to change everything. Oh, lower again. 5G's not here yet. It's been talked about. It will just show up one day. And a lot of our toothbrush will talk to us. Crazy. It's crazy what's going to happen. And so how it's going to connect the brands and food and how blockchain is going to connect food all the way back to its origin, where I can actually know while I'm sitting in a restaurant where my ham from my ham sandwich actually came from. Because of blockchain technology, or I can buy my coffee and know what plantation it was grown in in Costa Rica and send a tip to the farmer. The ideas are beyond how to even contemplate it. So I would say the future of food is great. I'm thinking we're going to keep eating for a while. I hope so. I hope so. Some of that will be eaten in off-premise and in different ways. And it has been in the past. A lot of it will still be inside of restaurants or other venues. I think the venues will change. And the challenges will be how to take all of that infrastructure that we all own and morph it to those changes fast enough. That is the single biggest challenge in business. It has been to retail. It's now a big deal to food. Everybody wants everything faster, maybe delivered, maybe not delivered. I'm curious your thoughts on delivery. I think people still want the experience. And as convenient as it is to have something arrive at your doorstep, it's also that we're still human beings and we still need interaction. What do you get when you go out? We do. So we just finished the new kind of strategy. I looked back at five years and said, gosh, I was so smart, we were so good. We got a lot of it right, but missed big things. It was really interesting. Five and a half years ago, third part of the delivery wasn't email on the list of the channels. It didn't-- I mean, postmates. It wasn't even known at all, right? You're right. And so today, it's such a big disruptor to the business. Delivery's going to change things. Consumers want the experience, but part of our mission going forward is understanding that guest experience and making it exceptional, no matter where the guest enjoys our brands and our food and our products, that experience is all part of ours. And somehow we have to own that through third parties and alternatives. And that will be a challenge. But it's a challenge. Whoever's going to win in there, it's going to be the winner in the food business, I think. It's interesting. Let me ask you this, pain points. Where do you see the things that may be most challenging in your world to navigate around, whether it's professional or anything other? As a CEO, if I back up 10 years, because I'm at the retire/rewire part of life, right? If I retire, I'll just rewire. I'll still do something, but I'm at that part where I look back. And I set in these times and I look forward. I'd say, where are the pain points? And the pain points are change and the pace of change. But it's also the fact that the labor market is so dynamically changing all the time. And so I think one of the biggest pain points is satisfying this need of our Gen-wise and Gen Z's for a variety, career paths, fulfillment, and what they do. Those are going to be continuously tough challenges for everybody to meet. And then, of course, the rest of the disruption at the internet of things. I just have never seen it all move so fast. My pain points are probably being able to get an organization to be nimble enough to adjust to change quickly enough. And how do you do that? Alignment is powerful, right? If you go to the secrets of life, if you can align resources, organizations, and thought, and commitment to those things, then you can get a lot done. But the ability to align is really a challenge. It takes a special skill, which means that the skills of icy brand leaders today, more and more, I need brand leaders that are not foodies, which is almost heretical to say. In a restaurant business, I need brand leaders who are really their thought leaders and their influencers. So they can bring our franchisee partners and our independent operators along for this journey. Because look, we're humans. On any given day, we want it to be the way it used to be. We want the house to change its hard. We want the good old days to come back. And they're not going to come back. What worked five years ago doesn't work today, and what worked 10 years ago in your fondest memories, so we just need more of that. That's a brilliant idea, but it just won't work today. So is that your skillset, alignment, bringing talent, and alignment? Yeah, well, certainly the couple things that are just kind of lifelong axioms, and I've learned them over time. So lifelong would be unfair, learned along the way. Most arrows pointing in the same direction are powerful, even if it's not exactly the perfect direction, because that's how you execute. So it takes alignment to do that, which means you have to be able to influence. And if you're a good influencer, you're probably also inspiring, and I have a saying, which is that inspiring people will not work for uninspiring leaders. And so you have to remain inspiring. Even on the days you don't feel terrible inspiring, you need to look inspiring, and be inspiring for your team. And so my job is enabling. I've just-- I've got to get the resources to people and enable them and then try to keep them aligned against what we're trying to do, not manage them. Who inspires you? I often say this. My wife certainly inspires me, because my wife of 45 years is an amazing mother. Still is. Still parity in children. I guess you always do. I see her now volunteering in equine therapy programs for challenged kids and adults. And some people who would-- a lot of people look at it as the not so lovely people of the world. She sees the loveliness in them and brings it out. So that certainly inspires me. If I go back to the roots of what made me tick, it would be my father and my original life in upbringing. I used to say my dad had to have the straightest rows, corn rows, you know, rows in the county. And why was that important? It was important to my dad because we were dry land farmers. If it rained, you'd have a crop. If it didn't rain, you wouldn't have a crop. But the one thing you would have was rows. And so all summer long, I would watch my dad get in the pickup every afternoon and drive down the road really slowly and look down the rows. And they had to be straight. Because I learned my father control the things that you can control and give them your personal best. And the other stuff you can't control, well, you can't control it. - Yeah. happens and you go on and you do it again. - Yeah, so to keep yourself energized, I know your last time we spoke, you weren't quite at the thousand ride, you're probably at the thousand ride, not quite yet still? - No, 827. - Oh, well you're getting there. - 827 this morning. - Okay, wow, okay, and I'm referring to Peloton, so we have that in common, although I am not quite at the 800, well, embarrassed myself. - No, no, 10 rides is great. - You know, whatever. - I'm more than 10, but less than 800, let's go back to you. - Good. - Yeah, so clearly you keep in good shape. That's important. What do you do to mentally clear your head? You know, whenever I see the commercial, I can't even remember what they're advertising, but they talk about Loma Linda, am I pronouncing it right or Linda, you know what I'm talking about? - Right, yeah. - I think of you because our conversations over the years, we had a conversation about that one time, and these are the types of things that I, from my just perspective of you, you are a deep thinker, and you're always figuring stuff like that out, and I love hearing about that. So, where does your mind go when you're not working? - Yeah, so it's working most of the time. Try not to have it there. You know, I'm sure I share with you. I read a book younger next year, a few years ago, and it again inspired me again to take care of myself, be more aggressive and more active, and make fitness my job. So, that helped, and that helped physically, but I also knew that it would help from a mental acuity standpoint. Gosh, I read some, but not voraciously, although lately I've read a lot more, and I'm enjoying it. A little of that is just, and I'm in a place in life where I have a great team that works for me and work really takes care of itself. I can't solve all the problems anyway, and so I can give myself the freedom to take the break. I would say, though, that, look, I think it's a great differentiator. You're the same way, Jordy. Always learning, never stop. Do the best you can to keep learning, and then learn from all of your experiences that you can at 12 different industries. What does that have to do with making a cinnamon roll? There's nothing to do with making a cinnamon roll, but has everything to do with inspiring people and understanding what's going through their heads and understanding how to lead leaders. All of those things added up over time to make us the collage of who we are as a human, and so I'm always glad to pull from the past, but always needing to know that I've got to make myself also pull from what looks like the future. So speaking of the past, growing up back in Attica, Indiana, waking up early and keeping those rows straight for your dad, and first of all, did you ever imagine that you would be the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation? That's a two-part question to that. And the second part is, if you can go back to that young boy on the tractor with the red radio, what would you say to him? So first of all, no, I couldn't have imagined it. When I stared out the window in that four-room school house, as a first grader-- in fact, I teased my children that I'm not good with colors or numbers, because there was no kindergarten. It wasn't available to me. So I missed all that, so we have fun with that. I stared out those windows. It was a pretty stark world of old school building, not a blind on a window, and looked out and said, I didn't know what life could be. And so I figured it would be pretty simple, and no, I could never have sculpted today. And I am so grateful, because again, I will reinforce. And it's good to have the wind behind you. I don't think we get a control of our destinies. Everybody wants to. I would have wanted to, too. I happened to be a fortunate one. In terms of, what would I tell that young man? And I get to do that quite a bit now. I'm at a place in life where I do spend time with younger executives, some that work for me, others trying to find their way. And others come to for advice. Others make the mistake of asking the question. And they get advice if you focus on doing the right thing, treating people with dignity and respect, keep learning. All those things you're worrying about, they're going to work out probably generally in your favor. Not exclusively, but they can work in your favor. Treating others really well, don't make enemies. Not made many and regret any I might have made along the way. More friends, pay attention to your reputation. You know, all that stuff, it'll work out. But I had no idea. No idea. Well, I can tell you that you have incredible insight. I consider you a mentor. You're inspiring me in lots of ways. I think I'm probably going to get on the peloton tonight. My family says that every time they see you, they're like, can't get over how good you look. But I just really want to thank you for taking time. I know you're a busy guy and to come in and talk with us and give this conversation to anyone that's going to be listening. So I really, really appreciate it. Well, Jordi, thank you. Just finished a warehouse tour. And your business is just as fascinating to me. I admire what you've done as a founder, as a creator of something special. I often look at founders and say, I've been successful. I've never done what you've done. That's the hard work. So thank you. I'm honored. Well, I'm the one that's honored. So thank you. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Icebox Wadcast. We'll be back next time with more stories and conversations with our inspirational customers and friends. Stay cool. [MUSIC PLAYING]