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Building a Flexible Supply Chain and Company Culture with Mike Honious
95 Plays6 months ago
In this episode, Mike Honious, President and CEO at GEODIS Americas, joins Host Brian Glick, CEO of Chain.io, to discuss:
- The state of the international supply chain
- Opportunities to grow during a supply chain recession
- How technology has changed the way supply chain teams work
- Approaching supply chain problems from an engineering mindset
- Leadership, culture, and communication in a global organization
- Creating a workplace culture that fosters collaboration and flexibility
As President and CEO of GEODIS’ Americas region, Mike oversees the management and growth of its multiple business units across North and South America, including contract logistics, transportation management, freight forwarding, engineering and technology, IT, ProVenture, and Material Handling Resources. Mike has served several roles over his nearly 20-year tenure at GEODIS and was most recently named President and CEO of the Americas in 2020. Today, Mike leads the region’s more than 17,000 teammates across eight countries to continue offering a better way to deliver for its customers.
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Transcript
Introduction to Supply Chain Connections
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Supply Chain Connections. I'm Brian Glick, founder and CEO at Chain.io.
Introducing Mike Honius
00:00:09
Speaker
On this episode, we're going to talk to Mike Honius. Mike is the president and CEO of Americas for Geodes. You'll hear in the episode, but Mike and I have worked together for a very long time. And Mike has always been a person that I've admired for his forthright approach and his willingness to put people first. So I hope you enjoy.
Mike's Career Beginnings in Supply Chain
00:00:38
Speaker
Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you, Brian. How have you been? Long time no speak to. Yeah, yeah, no, I've been good. Again, thanks for being on. Why don't we just dive in? Tell us how you got into the business. I know it's been a long journey. Well, Brian, how long have we worked together? 12 is 20 years. Yeah, pretty amazing. So I guess by that people can calculate how long I've been in the business when I have to add on about 10, 10 more years.
00:01:06
Speaker
But it really, it was by default. So I was in college and this is kind of a crazy story. You don't mind me getting into the details, do you? I love the details. I was in college and I went to the University of Dayton, great school, by the way. And, you know, had a few parties I went to there too, but I did graduate with an industrial engineering technology degree, but I was a co-op. So I did it when I was like my sophomore year. So I went through five sessions and
00:01:36
Speaker
And I was a quality control engineer. I was a manufacturing engineer. And in the Dayton area, we used to call it the rust belt. So it was a lot of OEMs and et cetera. And I thought that's what I was going to be. And sure enough, when I was getting ready to graduate, I was interviewing and I got a, the placement office sent my resume down to a company called The Gap. And I got a call. I got a call. The guy's named Sean Curran and great guy, by the way. I still stay in touch with him.
00:02:03
Speaker
But he calls me up and says, Hey, Mike, I'd like you to come down interview at the gap. I'm like, all right. Well, I had never even heard of the gap. I grew up in a farm in Indiana, like in Fountain City, Indiana. So I go to my girlfriend at the time, who's now my beloved wife of 31 years, Sue. And I'm like, Hey, I got the gap to interview me. What the heck is this place? You know what? You've never heard of the gap. And I'm like, no.
00:02:23
Speaker
She's like, Oh my gosh, I got to take you to some stores. So I'm walking around and she takes me into the ball and she shows me around the gap. And I'm like, Oh, blue jeans. Okay. I get it. And then I meet my future mother-in-law at the time. And my future mother-in-law she's in like, uh, one of these stock, you know, like personal, you know, they have these like little stock committees or whatever, you know, they do on the side and she's going, Oh yeah, the cap stock. That's great, Mike. It's really going. I mean, this is like the early nineties.
00:02:51
Speaker
And I'm like, okay, well, it's got a good stock price and my wife likes the store. So I'll go to another interview. So sure enough, I meet Sean and Sean's like, Hey, Mike, you know, Hey, I graduated in the eighties and dating, you know, we're trading like dating stories. And he was a mechanical graduate, mechanical engineering graduate. And
00:03:10
Speaker
And we started talking about it and we hit it off. And sure enough, he offered me a job as an industrial engineer.
Commitment to Supply Chain Industry
00:03:15
Speaker
So, you know, back in the early nineties, and I had other offers in automotive and manufacturing. Cause I thought that's what I wanted to be. And I go down and it's like this over a million square, two facilities kind of together over a million square feet with gap and old Navy. And I was doing productivity standards and that's how I got started. And I thought maybe I'd be in a supply chain for like maybe two years working in a warehouse and
00:03:39
Speaker
I'll be day gone 31 years. I'm talking to you, Brian. I've known you for 20 and I'm still in it. So there you have it. So why'd you stay like you could have gone and done something else. I could have, I could have. And you know, the first reason is gap old Navy banana Republic. I mean, those were the three brands that I worked with. I mean, I helped start up the old Navy brand back in the day. It was a great company. It was a great company. I learned a lot. I got to do all different types of things. I was,
00:04:08
Speaker
industrial engineers and I got an opportunity to be a project manager. I'll never forget Brian getting in your little tech world. I'll never forget I was this engineer trying to create this forklift utilization project and I was coding in Fox Pro and trying to design a better efficient way on how to move forklifts with pallets into the storage racks and then
00:04:28
Speaker
and not have them be what you would call dead head back. So I'm like, hey, if we can get them to pick up a pout and take it to shipping, I mean, I'm increasing my utilization rate. So I got like really into that. And before you knew it, I was trying to find a software to do forklift utilization and bingo, I'm walking right into the world of warehouse management systems. And you got to think this is like 1994, 1995. I met the founder of Manhattan.
00:04:53
Speaker
And he was trying to sell me a receiving module. It was even before Manhattan was even developed, you know, back in the day. And yeah, it was a lot of fun. I was just learning a lot of different things. And, you know, there really wasn't too many schools that were in supply chains. So it was pretty fascinating to me. I had a job that, you know, none of my friends really had because they all went pretty much into manufacturing. And here I am working in a warehouse and supply chain. So about
Engineering Mindset and Leadership
00:05:18
Speaker
God, almost 10 years ago, I was at a tech conference and there was a panel and the topic for the panel was should executives know how to code? And the argument on the panel was, was not necessarily that executives should spend their days coding, but that they should understand the concepts of like how you structure things and how you bring that kind of engineering mentality to problems. As someone who has written code,
00:05:44
Speaker
Right. And as now a senior executive, do you think that coming from that engineering background and coming from that process oriented structure has affected what you do today and the way you approach problems? Well, I never really thought about it, but since you brought it up, I feel like I'm one big if then statement now. Right. So let me elaborate a little bit. I mean, for those of you out there in the world, and most of you know what a then statement is, it's a lot about logic.
00:06:11
Speaker
So if you do something, then what are you going to do? And, you know, back in the days when I was learning how to code, I mean, that's how you did it. I mean, you just tried to do a lot of scenarios and, you know, really helped me out on how I think through problems. I address things logically. It allows me not to get into what I would call the drama world. It really kind of like sets you back to understand, okay, what's the real problem that you're trying to solve? And is there a way to be able to do it? And there's a way to do it the most efficient night.
00:06:40
Speaker
I've always had this saying, and I use it because I've worked in the IT world, I worked in the engineering world, and I compare five engineers, and I can compare five IT programmers. And you know what? They're all gonna come up with a different way, most likely to solve the problem, and they're all gonna think their way is the best way. But at the end of the day, it gets solved. And as a leader, knowing how all that works together, and you appreciate the fact that it's solved, and you appreciate who did it,
00:07:10
Speaker
That's all you need to do. It's okay sometimes when it's done a little bit differently in what you think. And I think having that background and that experience back when I was younger has helped me think through things now that you don't always understand exactly what the true problem is, but you do have a method on how it gets solved and you have a great team that works for you to be able to do it.
00:07:30
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, like for me, one of those things is the abstraction changes, right? So, you know, like if you're in the early eighties, you're sitting there, you're actually like soldering wires and things. And then eventually we get operating systems and programmers now work at a completely different level. They just generally just code in business terminology. And then directors are trying to figure out how to move people around and VPs are trying to figure out how to move departments around it. But it is that very much, I agree. Like that if then statement and that.
00:07:59
Speaker
Being able to see those patterns, I think that those of us who see that probably really do have an advantage. Brian, I got one more better for you. All right. I remember in the late 1980s, I got to use the first version of AutoCAD. Not many people might not know what AutoCAD is, but it was the software to where you actually create and draw things because I was an engineer. And the job I was doing, I was drawing politicizer knives or whatnot.
00:08:28
Speaker
This is why I was in college. When I heard the terminology, snap. And the way AutoCAD worked back then, you had dots and you would snap the lines to be able to draw the part that you're trying to create. So imagine me learning how to use the first version ever AutoCAD on a 386 and then migrating to this exceptional software called FoxPro, like in 1994. You know, I'm like, I'm blazing the path knowing that I actually knew how to do Fortray in college. So.
00:08:56
Speaker
I mean, I am like way dating myself, but that's a...
Problem-Solving in Warehousing
00:08:59
Speaker
I think you are establishing your street cred, though, with any nerds who might be... We get supply chain people and tech people listening, so I think we've cleared your street cred for the day. I was thinking back last night about probably the one argument that I remember you and I actually having.
00:09:17
Speaker
We both tended to complain about others more than we argued with each other at the time, but I remember we were standing up a warehouse one time and I was in charge of all the infrastructure, which included the Wi-Fi, and your team was in charge of the layouts of the warehouse and so on. We stand up a warehouse for a beverage company and the first day none of the Wi-Fi works because my team didn't understand that we were going to fill all those racks essentially with water, which blocks Wi-Fi signals.
00:09:45
Speaker
And it caused a heck of a storm because the place was non-functional because none of the scan guns were working. And my team went, we did our jobs and your team went, we did our jobs. And then us as management had to like sort that out, which ended up being a lot more about the soft skills with the customer than it became about like, we knew what the problem was. We just needed to put more wifi in. But like, as you've now gone from being the person in front of the AutoCAD to being management,
00:10:14
Speaker
right like what did you learn that let you make that transition from managing people and not being able to go in and just hang the things yourself and having to like coach people on how to get through problems. Let's just get in the real world in our argument let's have people visualize us walking around the warehouse and i'm like.
00:10:33
Speaker
Okay, RF gun's working, working, we're up, it's not working. And you're looking up going, well, the antenna's up there. What do you mean is the antenna up there? I got 25 people. Well, is it because you have too many people hitting one antenna or not? Well, let's walk on this other aisle. See, Mike, it's working. Let's go down to aisle 35. Well, okay, Brian, we're walking down. Well, it doesn't work anymore, Brian. What the heck's going on here? Well, I don't know, Mike. What'd you do? Did you turn the RF gun off?
00:10:56
Speaker
Anyway, this is as visualized as that world. Right. So neither of us gets to do that anymore. We have to get other people to do that. What did you learn that let you go from being the person who actually walks around with a gun to having it, to letting that go, right? And having to trust somebody else to do it. Yeah. I have to tell you, it's tough. It's tough, but you know, you love what you do. And the first lesson,
00:11:21
Speaker
don't tell anybody out there is you got to listen. All right, you got to listen to the person and you got to get feedback on exactly what's going on. And you listen to that. And then you ask somebody else a question about what they're seeing. And you listen to what they have and what they have to say and what they're seeing. And then as a leader, it's your job to be able to facilitate a conversation and a discussion with the team to understand what the root cause is. There's many techniques out there. Oh, we can do a fishbone diagram or
00:11:50
Speaker
let's do a root cause analysis, et cetera, et cetera. But as a leader, you are the one that's bringing people together. No matter what their mood is, no matter what their temperature is, no matter how they're feeling, as a leader, you're the one bringing the team together to make sure that you can solve the situation. And it's all about listening and everybody has a voice and you have to make sure that that happens. So it's interesting. I want to double down on this because
00:12:14
Speaker
There's another way that I've heard people kind of answer that question, which is everyone brings stuff and you make the decision and you didn't just say that. You said you facilitate the decision getting made. That is actually not probably the more common view of leadership. I think people get confused and, you know, I've been in this business for a long time and
00:12:34
Speaker
I've learned a lot and I've made a lot of mistakes in my career, but about 20 years ago, and it would be, believe it or not, it was actually before I made you, Brian, and you might not have thought this, but I got into this really servant leadership mode.
Adopting Servant Leadership
00:12:49
Speaker
And what I realized was, you know, and I mean, listen, I've had a special career. I've worked with great people and I've learned so much, but you know, when I was younger, I'd say less than 10 years, you know, in my career.
00:13:02
Speaker
You know, I always felt like I had to be right and I had to be the one with the answers. And, you know, that's great, but you know what? That's sort of a turnoff sometimes too. And, you know, one of my developmental objectives is like, Mike, you don't have to be the first one to say something. You know, there's other people that'll say something too. And I learned from that and it's taken me a long time though, to be able to develop a servant type attitude. And when you do that,
00:13:27
Speaker
You really learn that you're not better than anybody else. You learn that other people have really great ideas and you learn to listen and you learn to facilitate and you want to hear what other people say. Matter of fact, I enjoy it. I want to know what people can bring to the table. I want to know what they're able to add. I want to know what type of value they bring to the company and I want to help them. And when you start thinking it through that way, it's not necessarily easy because the go-to move is to make a decision. But you know what? It's not about me. It's about everybody else. And you just got to learn how to do that.
00:13:56
Speaker
So you grew up in Indiana, you went as far as Ohio, and then you went as far as Tennessee. Fascinating states. Fascinating places that we love. And then now you're part of a very global organization, right? That, you know, has headquarters in on another continent and divisions that are spread as far as the winds can blow, you know, kind of what has it been like learning to
00:14:24
Speaker
operate in that environment, right? Which actually happened after we stopped working together. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. You know, when you say, what's a very large company? And people ask me that and I'm like, well, let's talk about billions, not millions. And they're like, what might you? I'm like, believe it or not, I actually do this. You know, listen, I mean, I didn't even grow up in a city. So, you know, the population of found cities, probably like 750 people. And I had to drive four to five miles just to get there.
00:14:53
Speaker
And, you know, and I was actually totally happy where I grew up. I mean, it wasn't even a restaurant to go to, you know, I had to travel a ways to be able to do that. I think when I got into college, I started to learn different, you know, people come from all different areas, you know, different cities and whatnot. And you get curious about other cultures. And I think that's what's really exciting for me
00:15:15
Speaker
today. And I've been almost every, you know, I've been a majority of the countries in Europe. I've been over in Asia. I've been, you know, I'm responsible for South America. So I get to go down there and I really want to experience the culture and I want to go out of the way to experience the culture. And I want my team to take me to what they want me to see, because it's special to them. And if it's special to them, it's going to be special to me. And that allows you to be able to stay engaged, you know, with the team.
00:15:44
Speaker
And then when you think about where I have to go when I have board meetings and whatnot, you know, and I'm with, you know, somewhat of a more of a peer group, you really got to learn about, okay, well, people are from different countries. They think about things differently. Like, is this a country that's high context? You know, we live in the United States, so we're low context. What does that mean? Well, other countries really like to explain their position.
00:16:06
Speaker
And they like to talk about it. Other countries like to debate. In the United States, we just like to state matter of fact and try to get to a decision. Well, it may take an hour or longer in other countries to be able to do that.
00:16:17
Speaker
And some countries don't even like to make a decision. They are more collaborative. So you have to learn that too. And there's a book that I read and it's called The Culture Map by Aaron Meyer. And I really took that to heart and went through that. And it really talks about the different cultures and what the cultures appreciate and how to communicate. And I read that book. And matter of fact,
00:16:40
Speaker
I have a little cheat sheet underneath my keyboard. So it shows me kind of what it is actually is, I mean, being an engineer, you know, I'm bullet pointed out, okay, well, what's important to this country from a cultural perspective, and I pull it out every once in a while when I'm in meetings where we got to make decisions, because it helps me get through the conversations. I think one of the things that's interesting, and I remember going through this when we did the first international acquisition and
00:17:03
Speaker
I was one of the only people in the IT department that had a passport, so I was the one that was sent to Asia, right? Was kind of this figuring out that you can learn these things, right? And they look very natural. The senior executives, especially in the international freight side,
00:17:18
Speaker
you know, that we grew up around, it seemed like they just knew all of this stuff. Like it was, they'd been doing it so long, but that these are things that people can learn, right? Like you can learn, this is how business is done in Germany. This is how business is done in New York. And if you bring a German approach to a New York meeting, they're going to stop listening to you before you get through the first point. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly how it works. You nailed it.
00:17:45
Speaker
And we'll try to get a link to that book in the show notes as well. So you get to think about the future. I'm assuming a lot in your fold now, you know, and where you guys are going and where the industry is going and to some effect where the economy is going, all of those things. I'm not going to ask you for predictions because they're silly usually, but what are you excited about?
Navigating Supply Chain Challenges
00:18:06
Speaker
Like, what are you seeing out there that has you jazzed up? Well, I, um, I actually have a pretty good pulse beat on what's going on.
00:18:14
Speaker
My job allows me to do that, but I participate on other boards and whatnot. And that's always helpful as well. But we've been in a supply chain recession. I'd say over the last nine months, probably even if you look at the freight forwarding sector, some would say a year. And here's what's so exciting about that. And people would be like, why Mike, would you be excited about a supply chain recession?
00:18:34
Speaker
Well, it's not necessarily the funnest thing to do in the world, but you know, you're in it, you know, I'm in COVID and I'm drinking out of a fire hose and you know, everybody wants us to ship something wherever, you know, and they're like, what do you mean? You can't ship it. It's like, we'll get to it. And we find capacity and we help people out, you know, during COVID. And then all the inventory levels got, I would say overbought, you know, by, and the consumer packaged goods and retail industry, et cetera, to where,
00:19:00
Speaker
Basically the bordering spigot got turned off in the back half of last year. So you go through these cycles and what gets me excited is, you know, we had to go through and a lot of supply chain companies, you go through kind of the defense mechanism. I mean, we're playing somewhat of a defense and.
00:19:15
Speaker
I'm talking to my team next week. I actually have an offsite strategy meeting and actually I've been working on, you know, my session and we're talking about how do you turn defense into playing offense. And I'm really excited about that because in order to be able to get in the offensive mode, if you want to talk about sports, you know, you play, there's a defense and there's offense and there's times that turn certain things on. And we definitely, I see an opportunity for us to get more offensive and being able to go after some market share, especially in the situation where the transportation
00:19:44
Speaker
capacity has been so abundant. There's been a lot of consolidation happening in the industry. I mean, this is an opportunity for us to take advantage of that. And we have such a global presence. You know, we got the opportunity to take advantage of those situations. We're building out an end-to-end supply chain. So there's going to be opportunities on the acquisition side. There's going to be opportunity for us to bring in new logos. As we go through consolidation, we're able to cross-sell more. I mean, it's just the abundance is there. But as a leader, Brian,
00:20:14
Speaker
You got to get people's mindset shifted on where they need to go. And we've been in this cost control mode and we've done a great job. We haven't been one of those companies that has had to announce massive layoffs or et cetera, et cetera, because we're constantly looking at how we're running and sure we have to tweak at times and we've been able to do that. And I just feel right now it's an opportunity for us to get more offensive. And I'm going to go through that with my leadership next week and I'm excited about it. And I'm looking forward to how they're going to react to it because I'm sure they're ready to go on offense too.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yeah, this actually maps pretty well to a number of conversations that I've been having with, I would say, your peers in other companies about that sort of, okay, people are getting back now to talking about how do we bring more value to the customers? What can we do to differentiate ourselves? How do we provide a service offering other than we have capacity?
00:21:05
Speaker
Right. Cause for a long time it was, we have capacity and then it was now we're okay. Well, everyone has capacity. We can be cheap. And now people have servos. Okay. But maybe we need to get back to the world where there's something other than capacity or cheap. Right. Well, you know, let me tell you something. I look at this in the supply chain world. I look at it in the IT world. There are companies that will buy based on price only. And when you look at those type of companies, they are not very strategic. Number one, number two,
00:21:34
Speaker
They treat their partners as commodities. And number three, value is not important to them. And when you're a leader and what's important to me is, do I really want to partner with a company like that? And do I want to sell to a company like that? My answer is no, you know, we're not commodities. We're value players. All right, Brian, you're a value player. You solve your problem. You know, we solve problems. We add value and you got to make sure that when you look for those new logos, you're doing it in a way
00:22:03
Speaker
because you want to be their partner, you want to be their growth partner and you want to solve their problems. And I think time and time again, you know, and I think this is what hurt companies going into COVID. They were so unprepared, you know, and they were in like shock. And the fact of the matter is if you have a business model that really is able to tap into the value and really tap into flexibility and adaptability, you're going to make it through whatever the situation is. And that's why,
00:22:30
Speaker
when you talk to me about what I see and about going on offense is that we're coming out of supply chain recession and we're going to be bigger, better, leaner, meaner, and add more capabilities and have more capabilities than our customers were ever able to provide, you know, in the past. And that's exciting. That is very exciting. Yeah. I mean, we have this conversation internally all the time because if we ever compete on a deal on price we lose, we're kind of expensive. But what we found growing this company from zero was
00:23:00
Speaker
as we mapped the best and worst customers over time, the ones that paid us the least consumed the most resources and not even on like a per dollar basis, just like the ones that fought us the most at the beginning, fought us the whole way, right? And never really get the value. The ones that really do want to partner with us are usually willing to also make sure that we're making money, right? And that it's becomes less transactional. So like, I totally, totally agree with you.
00:23:29
Speaker
So, and I know we've had customers together that have been like that over the years, the ones that make us better. They're not always our favorites either, right? But there's the ones that make us better. And then there's the ones that are just super transactional. So I want to ask you something. So, you know, you're in this big organization and you have all of these cost constraints or not constraints, but like there's, you know, you make budgets and you're, you know, a well-organized company. Last time I visited you, you had redesigned and rebuilt the entire interior of your office building.
00:23:59
Speaker
like gutted it and started over. Why?
Office Redesign for Collaboration
00:24:02
Speaker
Well, here's my saying. It'll be simple right at the very beginning. You don't want people to feel like they have to come to work. You want people to want to come to work. And there's a couple of things and we actually started this in 2018, 2019. We were growing out of our space. I went and did several tours of other office locations and we were looking at bigger offices and
00:24:27
Speaker
I was like getting people were like, they knew that we were looking at my teammates were like, Mike, do not move us, please. We like the area. I'm like, all right, you know, we're south of Nashville. I mean, it's a great area. And I'm like, okay, we need to think about that. We also, you know, being a supply chain, we have a lot of people that, you know, have to be on job sites and whatnot and travel. And we looked at it and we're like, okay, well, let's look at having more of an a community type experience.
00:24:54
Speaker
where people can come and they don't necessarily have to work in their same desk or same office. They can work in their neighborhood. Let's have neighborhoods and let's have collaborative spaces and let's be able to create an environment where people can walk around and have discussions and be more of a team. And I love my geodians and they love working in a team type atmospheres. So we went and we decided to sign a long-term lease in the current place we were at. And at that time, I mean, it only holds like
00:25:22
Speaker
700 people and we're growing up to over a thousand. So we knew already that we needed to do this three day, four day, five day work week type scenario. And we went ahead and started implementing it. And sure enough, here comes COVID. After all, we had all these plans COVID came. So during COVID, it was pretty interesting. We were actually remodeling our offices during COVID. So all that was going on. So people couldn't even be in the office anyway. So it just worked out. It helped us out. And
00:25:50
Speaker
And you know, now we're all back. I mean, we have a full office today. It's fun. We did a seafood boil on Friday out in the parking lot and everybody did it, our whole team. So we had team members that were checking people in. We had team members that were doing the seafood boil. We had team members passing out drinks. It was great. I mean, we had a blast on Friday and it's nice to have an atmosphere to be able to do that. And I hear it over and over again, how much people appreciate being able to work here and having some flexibility.
00:26:19
Speaker
And we even have some Ivy plants, everything like, even in the main entrance, we used to have this water fountain that we took out. Brian, one you used to hang out by. So we took that out and we created a kind of an Ivy plant display with our company name on it. I mean, it's nice. I like to go down there at eight in the morning, have some coffee and wish people a good morning when they come in. They know they can't walk past me without saying hi. So it's good to get some good early morning engagement. That's awesome.
00:26:46
Speaker
Just really, I mean, I have been to the office since the renovation and you really do get that sense of like people are moving their feet a lot around the office. Like I saw a lot of walking conversations versus, you know, kind of being locked in a conference room. And I thought that seemed like a, so I was a little bit jealous. Well, everybody knows I'm a time robber too.
00:27:09
Speaker
So they see me walking around. They know, my gosh, here's Mike. He's going to get me in a conversation. And I freely admit it. I'm like, Hey, I know you're working on something important, but I just want to come and rob your time for a little bit. Just hang out and talk, see how the family's doing, et cetera. It's fun. It's fun to be able to do that. So this might become redundant to that, but I want to wrap with just asking you kind of what is your favorite part of your job? What gets you out of bed in the morning? It's a lot of fun being able to work with a team.
00:27:38
Speaker
And listen, I've been doing this at this company for 18 years. And I've only worked for two companies. I mean, people can say I'm like as boring as boring can get. Now I've had the privilege to work in all different departments. But when you walk around and you're hanging out, you know, we're a multi floor facility. I'm on the second floor hanging out with IT. Now I'm in like one of their like little
00:27:59
Speaker
cube areas, you know, like teamwork areas, and they're all coming over to say hi, and you know, we're talking and I go shoot down to the first floor and I'm hanging out with solutions and engineering and you know, I'm looking at some facility that's being designed or they're working on some project and I go over to client services and we're talking about, you know, what's going on with some of our big customers and kind of what's the next big thing. I mean, you just learn a lot. It's fun. It's fun seeing the team grow. It's fun seeing all the
00:28:28
Speaker
different types of diversity that we have. I mean, we have all of our ERGs and employee resource groups. I mean, I was talking to Anthony Jordan, our chief operating officer. He just took good out for a lunch. That's Jodian's owning their own diversity. And I was outside and one of our little tables eating lunch and he comes over and we're having a good time and have such a good experience that, you know, they were having, having lunch and getting everybody together. I mean, it's exciting. I mean, and it's fun just seeing smiles on people's faces and
00:28:57
Speaker
how much they appreciate the work that they're doing. And I think as a leader, that's like one of my number one priorities is making sure that that momentum continues and people have an opportunity to work space, to be able to do that. So that's how I feel about it. You know, I can't think of a better place to wrap. So Mike, thanks so much for being on us. It's great to catch up with you and to learn a little bit about your approach. Brian, as always stay in touch. It's always good seeing you.
00:29:27
Speaker
We'll get some links in the show notes there for Geotis as well as for the book that Mike mentioned. Uh, hope you enjoyed the episode and as always make sure to subscribe to the chain IO feed on LinkedIn as well as to the podcast. If you're not already subscribed, we're got a lot of new product updates coming out as well as some exciting updates specifically around digital transformation and supporting those strategies for both logistics providers and shippers. So.
00:29:56
Speaker
Hope you enjoy all that content as it comes up and thanks for listening.