Episode 61 – Leadership: Insights from the C-Suite

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats, and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRS a represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

 

I’m Jason Risley, and you’re listening I’m Jason Risley, and you’re listening to another episode of the Linen, Uniform, and Facility Services podcast, interviews and insights by TRSA. TRSA recently held its 2023 Leadership Summit in Chicago for CEOs, emerging leaders, and next generation executives in the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Several c suite executives shared their perspectives during a panel presentation to close out the event. Panelists included Brian Harrington, the CEO of PureStar Group, John Ross, the CEO of Mission Linen, Jim Rosackus, the executive vice president and COO of Cintas, and Steve Sintras, the CEO of UniFirst. The executives touched on a wide variety of topics during the discussion, including industry growth opportunities, operating safely, recruitment and retention of employees, ESG initiatives, and more.

 

Let’s listen to the discussion recorded live from the event. We will do some polling. So we’re gonna ask you to get out your cameras, and take a picture of the red tag on your table here, or you can take a picture of the question that’s up here in front of you. And we’re looking for what do you see are the biggest challenges facing the industry over the next 3 to 5 years. And you can put a couple of answers in and we’ll get a word cloud, And then we’ll ask the panelists to kinda comment on that word cloud if they have any comments about that.

 

It’s either they see other child other, challenges or whether they reinforce kind of the things that you said. So go ahead and type those in. So we got labor, PFAS. Alright. Looks like labor jumps out.

 

And, Jason, you know, you wanna take it from there? Sure. It looks like labor jumps out just like, Joe just mentioned, PFAS, environmental issues. Do you see these as the do you agree that these are some of the biggest issues, or, are there anything else that you have to add to what the audience had? Anybody wanna take that one?

 

I agree. So I do. I do agree that those are all valid issues. I guess the one thing I would say about it in general is there’s always seem to be the issues of our industry. The the particular might change, but in broad terms, we’re always under regulatory scrutiny.

 

We’re heavy heavily involved with labor. And But we’re a service industry and we do great things for customers. So, I think we’ll be able to work through those things. When we talk about labor, I might have just maybe a little different spin on it. I don’t view labor challenges in the next 3 to 5 years continuing the same way they did in the last couple of years, especially when it comes to recruiting frontline partners or employees in our production and SSR ranks.

 

But I do view labor to keep up with the growth of the industry as being something that we need to be very mindful of and that we’re all growing at rapid rates. We continue to do so. And making sure that we have the leadership bench in-depth is going to be critical to be able to sustain those growth rates, 3, 5, 7, 10 years down the road. So maybe not necessarily bringing folks on board. I think I read this morning, they said that the great resignation is officially over.

 

I don’t know who declared it to start and I don’t know who declared it over, but they’re thinking that the labor market has shifted at this point, and more stabilized. And, we’re certainly in a great staffing position relative to having enough folks to complete all the work. But we’re always going to be mindful of the fact that growth rates look attractive for the foreseeable future and we need to be able to step up for that. Yeah. Our HR director always warns that, you know, the labor issues are somewhat cyclical, but at same time, there is a divide between, birth rates and, you know, people retiring if you just look at it over the last 20 years.

 

So that will continue to provide some challenges, and I think it’s really somewhat generational as well. The other thing that we look at is that when you look at the people who are in management at our company and a lot of companies are baby boomers, are generation x, and we’re trying to manage for newer generations. So it’s that it’s that mind shift. It’s changing the way our leaders, operate and recruit and retain and work with the teams to make sure that, and I think it’s a question that’s coming up in the panel, that we’re able to retain those people and show them that those opportunities. So I think there will be labor, but it’s it’s a matter of how you motivate and retain that labor over time.

 

Maybe just to add a little bit more. This time last year, I think it was a completely different story in terms of the labor crisis on unskilled labor. We have about 5,000 employees, and, what we found in the last probably 90 days, we’ve seen a significant loosening in the labor market where we’re seeing people return back into the market that had exited for about 2 years. And we’re encouraged by some of the current signals that we’re seeing. There’s always a few pockets where it’s challenging.

 

We operate in Hawaii, for example. That’s a really tough labor mark. But places like Cancun, last year at this time, you couldn’t find people, believe it or not. And now that market’s come all the way back. So we’re very optimistic.

 

I think unskilled labor, especially in soil sort positions, seem to be the highest turnover rates. And for us, it’s more about that skilled labor piece, the engineering talent that continues to probably be the biggest challenge and scarcity that we see continuing for quite some time. And we do want to talk about, I think building technicians from internal. Or you guys investing in you don’t have to get into detail, but investing in building the technicians in within your own company. I know I know UniFirst does some of that, but I don’t know if you wanna talk about that at all.

 

No. No. We’ve certainly ramped up, our programs around bringing people in, our training programs and getting them certified. We’ve formalized the different ranks within the maintenance staff in terms of Tech Ones, Tech Twos, Tech Threes, tech, you know, supervisors. And and provide them that career path, but also provide them the knowledge to be able to move along and see that career growth and and compensation growth that they can achieve along the way because it’s as everyone said, and I a 100% agree, it’s it’s super competitive.

 

And we’ve we’ve even had to look at what have historically been different levels for, say, a maintenance manager versus even a production manager or other other levels within the company because the demand for those positions is starting to bump up against sort of the traditional hierarchy of, of what the industry has operated under over the years. We’ve we’ve done the same, and I’ve had a great amount of success as well, growing, internally, through an apprentice program, very similar to what Steve described. So we’re looking up, see a lot of health care then you add surgical to that which is also health care, acute, non acute, sections, outpatient centers part of the same, Like medical accounts part everybody calls it some different retail medical, nonacute, specialty medical, lots of different terms for it. I will tell you, we pulled our members, I guess, about 6 or 8 months ago, and that 70% of our members are in health care in some way or another. So and I know looking up here, other other than Brian and, PureStar, everybody else is doing something in health care, unless you’re doing something Brian that I’m unaware of.

 

Only in Hawaii. Not yet. Right? So everybody is in health care. And certainly, sir, certainly see that as a growth opportunity.

 

I think most of the folks are getting into the non acute space more so than the bulk health care. But we are seeing a lot of changes in the health care space as well. I don’t know if anybody wants to comment on that or we’ll just move on to the questions. The only the only thing I’d react to is from what I see there on the direct sales side. I think we all acknowledge that as the economy evolves and certain jobs become more light soil that having capabilities in that direct sale area is going to become more and more important.

 

We have more accounts today than we did 5 years ago that are combo rental and direct sale customers today. And so continuing to develop those capabilities, I think, is going to be important in the next 5 years. Mission really touches almost every part of the textile service industry. And, what Steve just said about capabilities, I think, is one of the great strengths that all of us, in the industry has. A textile service company just has a lot of great capabilities.

 

So, we try very hard to look at our capabilities and our infrastructure, look at our customers and and the problems that they have, and see how we can match those capabilities to solving their problems. And oftentimes, it leads us into these directions or other. Yeah. We used to joke that we used to have rental salespeople that would, you know, talk to a customer that, you know, maybe wanted a direct sale. And they would they would talk them all the way to the end where we lost the account because really, what does the customer need and how can we fit that solution?

 

And from a fact of market diversity, if you didn’t diversify after the ‘eight, ‘nine downturn, you’re certainly going to diversify post pandemic. We saw what the impact it had on certain sectors in our business. And so you’ve got to look at those opportunities, diversify your market space as much as possible. So I’m gonna get off the stage. I’m gonna broom, ask for q and a, and I’m gonna turn it over to Jason.

 

Alright. We’ll start off with a question about, safety. So based on the most recent SAFE T RSA survey, our industry continues to reduce injuries and illness rates faster than all industries combined. Under your leadership, your organizations continue to invest in safety. What areas of your safety investment have had the largest improvement on safety, and what can you share about the benefits to your organization beyond reduced incidents, time away from work and lower worker compensation costs?

 

You want to take that one, Jim? Sure. I’ll start there. First of all, my compliments to the whole At Cintas, we’ve been on that journey for quite some time. It’s been something that we’ve taken At Cintas, we’ve been on that journey for quite some time.

 

It’s been something that we’ve taken very seriously for a number of years and we’ve tried a lot of different things in order to get really where we want to be with safety, which was that it became cultural and instinctual and just part of the DNA of everyone who was a part of the organization. So folks would begin to self police or govern and really look out for each other. So the areas in particular that have been really successful for us has been working with the OSHA VPP program. We found that to be exceptionally successful in having that combination of management, and the front line working collaboratively together to ensure that we’re creating a safe environment. We’ve got quite a number of our facilities that have reached that VPP star designation, and continue to pursue those.

 

And there’s ongoing certifications, but that has been enormously beneficial for us. We’ve also gone down the path of ergonomics and getting in ergo programs and trying to keep folks into their power zones. And we’ve entered into a bunch of different competitions. But again, think about front line folks looking out for each other and figuring out ways to do simple things in a more efficient manner and try to eliminate a lot of the sprains and shrains and repetitive motion injuries that we have in our industry. And then I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, vehicle safety because I know we all have big fleets that are out there and we’ve spent a lot of time and energy, on driver safety, both our sales people, and then our our fleet itself.

 

And and we’ve partnered up with Smith Systems. I’m sure a lot of you have worked with Smith in the past. But their certification process has been, been a big part of our our safety journey. We recently, a couple of years ago, expanded that into an Arrive Alive training series, which is a supplemental monthly training series, that goes along with the regular certification. And it’s really just a kind of a drumbeat, really short training on demand that just reminds you of some basic safe driving and defensive driving practices that we found have been extremely successful and really has made an impact on total, but specifically those 1st year drivers that we know we always have the most issues with folks as they first get into the industry.

 

And their learning and everything is an upset condition, and we’ve seen a tremendous benefit. The the byproduct of that is, we have, more highly engaged, employees. And when we do our employee engagement surveys, we see right away that they are very appreciative of how safe they feel and they understand that’s clear top priority as being an employee of Cintas is that your safety is, 1st and foremost, and then nothing comes in the way of safety. And, so it’s clearly a great relationship there. Anybody else want to add anything about what you’re doing with safety either on the plant or with your fleets?

 

I think the only thing that I would add is that over the last 5 years, Jim mentioned it. You know, it it really it really it’s hard to say it’s the number one priority because you talk to your managers, you know, often they feel like they have a lot of number one priorities. You really have to get to the point where it’s just inherent in your day to day activities. And so we’ve done a lot of work trying to motivate our locations, raise awareness, and and we have safety awards for all our locations now, and it’s it’s it’s a competition. Can you get bronze, silver, gold?

 

And there’s a number of things. You have to have the meetings, you have to have the awareness, but it’s really about building that culture locally. And some of it is about results too, and keeping claims down and incidents down, but we found that, like Jim mentioned, the employees expect a safe environment. We talk about employee retention, engagement, and, the new generation of workers coming in. They will settle for nothing less, and so unless management has that, that culture and that emphasis, you’re really gonna be behind the 8 ball with your employees anyway.

 

So, we’ve done a lot of work in in some of the same areas over the last 5 years. And certainly on the driver side, that 1st year, like Jim said, is is huge. We see it’s interesting. We see the trends that the 1st year is where you have the highest incidence on the auto side. It actually dips down, and it actually picks up a little bit later in people that have been with you a few years whether they get a little bit lax.

 

And so we’re trying to do some of the same things in terms of those constant daily reminders just to keep awareness high. I’ll just say, I’d like to thank Jim and CentOS because we benchmark ourselves off of, you know, their performance. And if you’ve never downloaded their ESG report, which I think they just came out a few months ago, it really is world class. I’ve been in multiple industries and, our industry, we can continue to do better, let’s just say. The oil and gas market is at about a 0.6 incident rate.

 

Electrical industry is around 1, 1a half. I think your Cintas is about 1.6. When I entered our business 3 years ago, we were not doing well. We were in the 5, 6 incident range. And it really started at the top and it is very cultural.

 

This is an industry that deserves to be safe. We’re in the threes. We’re aspiring to get to twos next year. We Pareto the heck out of all the incidents. I think transparency and visibility and regular communication is a big part of this and bringing every employee on the journey and holding them accountable to help their colleagues find where there are risk areas and call them out in a very professional way to prevent it has been a big success for us.

 

But we still have way too many, slips, trips, falls, cuts, cart incidents. All right. Well, we touched a little bit on labor earlier. Maybe things are loosening up a bit, but, attract new potential employees to take jobs in the linen uniform facility services industry, especially the next generation of workers? Steve, would you like to take that?

 

Sure. I think, you know, there’s a lot of things we’re doing that I’m sure a lot of people in this room are doing, challenging job design, challenging compensation, work weeks, 4 day work weeks. We’re we’re we’ve been working on a number of those things, piloting them across the country, trying to find the right balance of, what’s attractive to to the new generation in terms of work. But I think one of the biggest things we’ve we’ve focused on is, you know, I talked before about the new generation of workers, whether it’s expecting a safe environment, they also want to know what’s their purpose, what’s the company’s purpose, what’s its vision, what’s its mission. So a couple of years ago, we really undertook rebranding the company in all those areas, kind of starting with our core values, where the founder of our company had established, but really kind of modernizing our vision and our mission and our purpose as a company.

 

And we found that to be very effective. I mean, it’s it’s amazing when new employees come in. I talk to new employee groups, particularly on the sales and service side, and they wanna ask, well, what’s what’s our purpose as a company? I think the pandemic helped define the purpose of the industry when you look at, the amount of essential businesses that we’re servicing. And I think promoting that to your employees and kind of rallying around that purpose and our mission as a company has made a difference.

 

You have to provide those employees that day to day purpose. In addition to that, I think one thing we’ve certainly learned in the last really 5 plus years is that we have always known our industry is one that provides a lot of opportunities for employees to progress and stay with companies for careers. But we’ve we’ve really tried to shift the speed and the and the focus in which we’re bringing people along through those career progressions. You cannot have people as often that are willing to be, say, a route driver for 5 years, a district manager for 10 years and with the hope to be a general manager 15 years into their career. So fast tracking employees, upskilling them, giving them those opportunities sooner is just something that’s been critical to keeping people engaged and and and interested in the business.

 

So if you can tell someone coming in a year or 2 out of college, look, in 3, 4 years, you could be a general manager, progress further, other opportunities in the company and supply chain, engineering, you know, those are the things that will keep new talent coming into the company. But I I’ll go back to culture and leadership. One of the other things we did as part of this brand refresh is kind of a refresh of our leadership principles and really retraining our leaders throughout the company. It started with the senior leadership team after we established these new leadership principles. Everyone on the senior leadership team received coaching in the leadership principles so that we could drive from the top down how we felt leadership needed to act and develop people for the for the sole purpose of of retention and providing that advantage.

 

I think everyone in this room, has examples where you say, look, if I have a location manager, if I have a district manager who who is leading in the right way, is is is hiring good people. They have good retention. We find that our retention issues look. Some of them are are economical and and environmental, but a lot of them are self controlled. You know, can we do better in the way we shift how we lead our people?

 

So we’ve spent a lot of focus on that in the last couple of years. When we have 90 plants, you can see plant by plant the ones that are doing better than others and in most cases it come it starts at the top. And so we’ve put a lot of energy there because we think that’s where we can make the biggest effort. That’s not to say we aren’t doing other things with retention bonuses and other things to try to get people over that 1st year hump to a place where they’re getting successful, whether it’s sales or service and seeing that path. But the leadership and the culture side is, surveying would tell us that that’s the biggest reason why people leave.

 

So moving from, recruitment and retention to, new technologies, we’re reading about artificial intelligence or AI, more and more every day, both potential opportunities as well as risks with this new technology. How is your organization approaching AI as a business resource? John, you want to take that one? Sure, Jason. Thanks.

 

You’re right. You can’t turn on the business news without somebody saying, we do AI. And I would imagine most of you in this room do as well. And I could point to things in mission to say similar things. So there’s there’s a little bit of a distinction between, you know, kinda typical AI and what you’re hearing about generative AI, which seems a little bit mysterious and ethereal.

 

But I I just was speaking to a group of colleagues a couple weeks ago, and, I mentioned it to him. I said, I’m not sure if you realize, but we do AI. And, most people look at you and say, what? And I think if if we back up from my point of view to about 2014, we made a conscious strategic decision to try to reduce the transactional friction in the business. And there’s a lot of transactions, as everybody knows, that happens in these sales and service businesses.

 

And that caused us to do certain things. One is to really take a look at our architecture. So we committed to being cloud native as much as possible, putting all of our core applications in the cloud or working with applications that are in the cloud. The second thing that we embarked upon was really building out application protocol interfaces or APIs. And those are very useful over time across a lot of things.

 

And then we we said, okay. Well, we’ve done that. And along the way, it allows us to be this thing called headless, meaning it doesn’t matter if it’s on one device or another or one input vehicle or another. It could be through a TV or a handheld or a computer screen. And then when we started down this journey, we started doing a lot of low code apps.

 

And those low code apps then provided a lot of data, which forced us into saying, oh, jeez. Where can we how can we manage our data better? And that all sets itself up to then do the types of things in the future that you see on the commercials and things of that nature. By no stretch of the imagination are we there, and certainly, there’s more work to do than we’re we have the ability to do on ourselves. But at the end of the day, what we are looking to do is have as frictionless a transaction as possible for our internal transactions and our external transactions.

 

And through all those things, we’re continuing to pursue that. Is anybody else experimenting with any new technologies, AI or otherwise in your companies? I just to leverage what John said, I yes, I wouldn’t say we’re doing anything real specific to AI. There is some stuff with respect to call center software and so on. It’s starting to use aspects of AI in terms of dealing with calls from from customers and so on.

 

But I agree with what John said, and, obviously, it’s a very data rich industry. And I think we’re we’re also doing a lot of work on the business intelligence side, sort of setting yourself up that as some of these technologies come along, you really need to have the data and the transaction sort of all kind of laid out in a format where you could leverage something like AI in the future. So it seems like we’re similar places in kind of the the lifecycle there where we’re kind of not quite at the AI level yet, but getting a handle on your data and the transactional level information because it’s a very data rich industry when you look at your customers and all the different aspects that impact customer profitability and all those other kind of things. Now for a brief message from TRSA. Hey.

 

Hey, my TRSA friends. I hope you have already blocked off your calendars for October 10th through 12th for this year’s 110th t r s a annual conference. Yes. That’s right. You, me, and a few hundred of our linen uniform and facility services professionals are getting together in Naples, Florida for 3 amazing days.

 

Now sure, you’ll have the opportunity to connect and network with the industry’s biggest and brightest people. And of course, the event will be packed with industry insight and new leadership possibilities that that are tailored and designed to help transform your business. Oh. Oh. And you you bet.

 

There will be an opportunity to celebrate the year’s award winning achievements, and because you’re in Naples, you’ll have the chance to experience the wonderful sun and sand that Naples, Florida has to offer. But here’s something you haven’t had the opportunity to experience since 1913. Yep. I just got off the phone with Joe Ricci and he’s put together a fantastic lineup for this year’s event. First of all, NBA legend, Walter Bond, will be kicking things off on October 11th in a session you are not going to want to miss.

 

And yes, for the first time in a 110 years, I’ll be joining the TRSA annual conference. Yes. That’s right. We are going to dive deep into the cube of creativity. I am going to break down the 4 simple constraints you can add to any project or initiative to come up with better, more creative ideas, faster ideas that have the potential to transform not just your business, but the entire industry.

 

So book your flights, reserve your room, and I will see you October 10th through 12th for this year’s 110th t r s a annual conference in Naples, Florida. It is time to start thinking inside the box. I’ll see you there. Now back to the episode. Alright.

 

Let’s shift from, tech to investment. As a mature industry, we continue to witness consolidation and an influx of private equity investment as either family owned or and operated businesses exit the market or or capital investment requirements become too great. How do you believe consolidation and outside investment will affect the industry in the near term and in the next 5 years? Brian, you wanna take that one? Yep.

 

Thanks, Jack. So first of all, I don’t I don’t know if this is such a mature industry. I think this is a real growth industry. This is a great industry to be part of. I’ve been with 5 public companies and now 5 private equity companies.

 

There’s a lot of similarities actually between the 2, governance, margins, cash. There’s probably 2 big differences though, and I’m sure there’s many others, but in my simple mind, there’s 2 big ones. Private equity, things are private. You can’t share all the financials publicly. I think Andy’s in the room here somewhere.

 

I don’t have to spend time with Andy. We spend more time with our investors, LP partners, the board, and overall governance. So there are some similarities, but it just isn’t public. And then the second biggest thing is the timing aspect of an investment. Private equity typically looks to double their money in 5 years.

 

And every private equity company I’ve ever been with, that’s pretty much the theme. And there’s a reason behind that because their investors are looking for that 20% plus return over that 5 year span. And to hit a home run, it’s 3 times, and that doesn’t happen very often. But that drives a lot of good things and some bad things. Now private equity in our industry, this is a very attractive industry to private equity.

 

I just got back in May, I was in New York City for 2 weeks, went and saw a bunch of private equity companies, talked to a bunch of investment bankers. And what really resonates in our industry is the following things. It’s there’s a growth market that grows above GDP consistently. It’s highly resilient. This is a highly fragmented market that has a tremendous runway to be rolled up compared to other industries still.

 

They’re blue chip customers. I mean, the customers we deal with, they’re really good, better than a lot of industries. The recurring revenue, the service aspect of this industry is huge. It’s one of the biggest drivers. And whether it’s a family office or private equity or venture capital, that resonates typically with everybody.

 

It’s that recurring revenue stream that they get really excited about. Because you wake up every morning, and for the most part, it happens. Easier said than done, right, Steve? That’s right. The other thing is, look, the margins are pretty good in this industry.

 

Mid teens is really attractive to the private equity landscape. And then this is a CapEx light business. There’s not a whole lot of plants being built. You’re not spending 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars. It’s incremental, and as a percent of revenue, it’s 2%, 4%, 5%.

 

In a lot of businesses, you may run 10% to 15% of revenue in CapEx. So the CapEx light approach is really attractive too because what private equity always looks at is adjusted EBITDA less CapEx. That gives you really your operating cash flow and the operating cash flows in these businesses are good because of that recurring revenue model. So that free cash flow yield is what everybody is thinking about. That attractiveness is really high right now, I can tell you.

 

In our meetings that we had a couple of weeks ago, I’m amazed how much money is sitting on the sidelines. I’m not talking about $5,000,000,000 or $10,000,000 I’m talking about $20,000,000,000 $40,000,000,000 $70,000,000,000 of dry powder in these private equity companies right now. And just think, that’s their equity. Then they lever that up 4 to 5 times. They’ve got a lot of money to spend when the dysfunctional debt markets reopen.

 

Maybe today is the beginning. I don’t know. There’s a pause, but now it’s a little bit more. So the question will be next year, when do those debt markets open and when can they go and put that money to work because all of these investors want that return. And this industry, I think, is ripe because of all those factors, and I think you’ll see over the next 3 to 5 years continued consolidation because of that.

 

There’s not as many service industries that exist like this one, and I think there’s gonna be a pretty robust appetite. And we’ll move on to ESG. What questions or requirements are you receiving from your customers regarding sustainability, carbon dioxide emissions and environmental, social and governance or ESG initiatives? Jim, do you want to take that one? Sure.

 

And I’ll start with the environmental component, because I think that’s the component of ESG that right now is getting the most attention, albeit they’re all getting attention. At this point, we have we’ve gotten some inquiries from our largest customers. And you think about the, you know, Fortune 100 type companies of the world, are asking more and more questions. Some of them are beginning to ask, can you trace emissions for our specific goods? And right now, they’ve been okay with the idea that the sustainability report is sufficient enough.

 

I’d also say that most of our large customers love a good story. So we give them a good story on where we’re making progress. So I think we recently released some of the LED programs we have and what that’s done to reduce carbon emissions. And we have a solar program going on now, and so that’s helping. So anytime there’s a nice narrative with it, they seem to be very enthusiastic about it versus, punitive if you don’t move quickly enough.

 

So so far it’s been pretty good story. But I would say it’s also it’s a good story for our industry in totality. And when we think about environmental, and you go down the path of, alright, if you’re going to procure these goods in another fashion, what are your options? So do you buy a disposable? And and certainly, I think we all know the ramifications there on disposables.

 

And, you know, we saw what it did for us during the pandemic in in health care, with a lot of us getting involved in isolation gowns. You look at, some in the food industry, etcetera, they could put disposable gowns on. But using a reusable textile is much more environmentally friendly than a disposable item. And then we’ve had a couple studies recently that have talked about, well, if you’re gonna get a textile that’s reusable, you have to launder it at some point. And you either launder it at home or you’ll launder it with us.

 

And I think it was at least recently, released an article showing how much more water efficient, energy efficient using an industrial laundry process is. TRSA did the same. We’re getting ready to publish one of similar findings. So we’re all finding the same exact thing. So in other words, if you want to wash your laundry at some point, use a reusable, our industry is the best option for everybody.

 

So I really like where we are from a positioning perspective. And then of course, you see the technology and how rapidly it’s advancing. I mean, we just spent an hour and a half talking about electric vehicles, or alternative energy vehicles. We spoke a little bit or I briefly mentioned what we’re doing with solar. We I think there was a session earlier about recycling and reutilizing textiles.

 

So there’s a lot of advancement happening. Waste water, we know that we have an opportunity to reduce our water consumption. So all these things are happening as of right now. So I think we’re in a good starting position. Our customers seem to appreciate the starting position.

 

They’re taking our macro numbers for today. But I believe our position is going to continue improve here over the next couple of years as technology catches up with the demands, some of the commitments of the biggest organizations and a lot of the governments. And have you established sustainability objectives? And if so, what are they? And how are you communicating those goals to your employees and customers?

 

Well, we have publicly, so we’ve already made our public ambition for, greenhouse gas net 0 by 2,050, and they have been released publicly and they’re part of our sustainability reports. We did have a couple of questions that came up. When we talked about safety, somebody had a question that said, well, positive reinforcement is also the best way to achieve safety success. Does anybody have any comment on how you track and promote the use of positive reinforcement? We do things throughout the year, but one thing that we culminate with is we celebrate safety awards just like we celebrate sales awards or operating awards.

 

So we try to elevate it to a place where it it is not only of import, but recognized as something that it can be tied into our culture long term. So, yeah, we we make a big deal out of it throughout the year. Anybody else wanna touch that one? Yeah. When we talked about our awards, and and, actually, Mike Krohadi was with us here today.

 

He had made a point that any location that won a safety award in his region, part of that was that himself or myself or whoever could kind of go would go to the location, have a lunch with the team, kind of another opportunity to promote, and to show others that like, look, this is a big deal for us. It’s actually becoming a good problem because there’s more and more locations that are winning these safety awards now, and it’s difficult to kinda get around to all of them. But, it just shows that people people want to be recognized for it now. They’re seeing the importance of it, and it’s becoming more inherent in, like John said, it’s just as important as a as a sales award or a retention award or, profitability award. Yeah.

 

And and this morning, when we had our speaker, one of the things he highlighted was, you know, recognizing people for when they do something good, whether it’s safety or anything else. And, you know, we do our industry awards. I can’t tell you how that’s grown because people wanna recognize their employees or their vendors or their customers. So all that kind of recognition, I think, helps lend itself to all the retention labor issues that we’re talking about, recognizing that doing well as well as being safer and reducing the cost. Yeah.

 

Beyond that, Mike, first of all, I agree with all of those, and we we do the same thing. And the only other one I may talk about is just we have a safety improvement committee, meetings that are held regularly, and they are frontline employee led. And we measure how many suggestions come in from the Safety Improvement Committee and how many are closed out, because we feel like that’s really important from a, hey, you took the time out of your day to point out something that could either be unsafe or that you can improve the location safety. And we want to ensure that those get attended to with great urgency and that those folks feel like their voice was validated and listened to. So we have done that in addition to.

 

So top down leadership being highly focused, but then also validating the front line that if they bring something up to us, that it’s going to be handled very quickly. Great. Carrying on that safety issue, one of the questions we had about fleet safety, and I think I know the answer to this. But, are are you using dash cams, internal or external and or external dash cams? That’s off the internals to see if your drivers are behaving safely, but then the external is to to be able to track what’s going on in front of these vehicles.

 

But do you are you guys using those? We are not yet. No? Anybody else? And one more question before we go back to to Jason.

 

Somebody asked if you had any, advice on succession plan. And if some of you had successions, some of you are looking at succession, so I don’t know if there’s advice on succession planning. I mean, I just thought the perspective that it’s probably the most important thing you do as a leader is succession planning. So if you’re not talking about succession planning almost every day, then, I think you might be missing the mark there. And, you know, some organizations are different in scale and magnitude, so therefore, there’s different numbers of conversations that have happened.

 

But, building, your bench, has got to be relentless pursuit. I I always view it as, being like a college football program, and they have to continuously be reintroducing more and more talent into the organization and getting ready to replace the seniors that are graduating or who’s going to go out early or whatever it is. But, yeah, I think succession plan has to be almost an obsession. And if you’re doing it well, it really excites the organization because they see the opportunities, they see people being brought along. You’re right.

 

It has to be done constantly because it can certainly sneak up on you. And it’s not just the top of the organization. It’s really all the way all the way through the organization. You have to have a deep bench all the way down, particularly in your organizations with as many facilities as you’re running. You gotta have good bench strength at those facilities as well.

 

Jack, Jason? On a related note, states such as Massachusetts have moved to limit textile waste in landfills. This was discussed earlier by Kevin and probably in other meetings. Is this a signal that the industry needs to do more collectively or as individual companies to repurpose and recycle textiles? Steve, is a Massachusetts based company Yeah.

 

I would think the answer to that is yes. Right? I know the answer to that is yes. I think that, we talked earlier there was a session on that. I think that there’s a lot of technology floating around, different people kind of fooling around with the technology.

 

And I don’t mean fooling around in a bad way, but I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg. I think that everyone’s looking for a direction, but I think more and more states are gonna continue to to limit the waste of textiles. And if we really Jim mentioned how much of a selling point for our customers our model is at its core. And I think if we can take that to the next level and kind of get garments back into the manufacturing process, I think it’s a huge lift on sustainability for the future. I mean, when we talk about ESG as a company and and it starts with it doesn’t really start with your customers.

 

It really starts at the investor level. I mean, some of it does start with customers, but a lot of companies are being pushed by their by the investment community. And so we are asked by customers, but we’re also asked by some of our largest investors about what are we doing. And I think it’s interesting because, you know, we were at the Baird conference with Andy a couple weeks ago, and we’ve had some investors say that the focus on ESG, it sort of was at its peak when the when the market and the economy is doing really, really well. But as things start to slip a little, people worry about recession, people worry a little less about ESG, a little more about profits.

 

So where those things meet meet in the middle are and the way we think about it is, what are the ESG things that, you know, are good for the company, good for the customers, and good for the environment as a whole. And and, Jim mentioned a few of them. And that garment recycling can really be a win win all the way around if the technology comes along. So I think as an industry, the more that the industry can work together to find good solutions with our vendor partners to complete that cycle over the course of the next you know, 5, 10 years, I think, will be a huge advantage. We have another question about fleets.

 

So nearly 15 states have implemented or are implementing zero emission fleet requirements. How’s your organization preparing, and what are the challenges? You wanna take that one, John? Well, California, which we have a little bit more than 50% of our routes running in, is about to publish the regulation in accordance with the statistics you saw this this morning. So, we’re gonna really take the milestone approach.

 

We’ve done our due diligence with a couple of the major EV manufacturers. And that milestone approach is gonna work for, kind of where fleet fits into the overall capital expenditures that the business looks to do year on year and allows us to step up the amount of EV as that technology continues to prove because it has improvements that are on the horizon as well in terms of its battery technology. So, really, that’s that’s gonna be Mission’s approach. Okay. Then next question.

 

Several of you, really all of you, have seen tremendous growth and expansion whether through acquisition or organically, perhaps expanding geographically or adding products and services. Leveraging scalability and culture offer tremendous differentiation and opportunities for growth. What are you doing to communicate and maintain your company’s core values and culture to inspire your team? Steve, you wanna take that? Yeah.

 

I I talked about this a little bit before, and and kind of the brand refresh that we took on a couple of years ago and it was really with that in mind. A lot of our companies have started as family founded companies, and we all have our cultures that we feel are different and unique and help make us successful. And as we’ve grown larger, we’ve had to continue to put a lot of effort into, maintaining that because we do view that as a competitive differentiator. We do a number of things as a company. We have something that we call Founders Day that we celebrate in July every year, which kind of rededicates everyone to those core values and that culture.

 

I talked about the leadership principles that we established. These are really you have to work really hard at it. And you talked about consolidation as we’ve purchased other companies along the way. I mean, that’s one of the things we do when we evaluate some of the companies, that we’re looking at is, are they good cultural fits? Are they gonna kinda seamlessly come into UniFirst and kind of add to what we had and supplement what we have?

 

Yeah. It’s it’s a constant focus because I I’m a big believer in in in leadership and culture as being a differentiator, and it really starts with that leadership focus. So we spend a lot of time on it. I think at at Mission, we’ve taken a similar path. You know, our founder built just a a wonderfully capable business, and we’re replete with great people that have been with the business for a long time.

 

And so that’s that’s a real blessing to be able to build off of. And probably about 10 years ago, we developed what we call our aspiration. So it’s this big, big out in the future type goal, and it’s to build a bigger, better, stronger company that improves people’s lives for generations to come. So how do you do that? Well, you do that a lot of ways.

 

Will we achieve it? Not tomorrow, not next year. It’s something that we’re continuing to to work on. And then along the way, we were looking at our capabilities. And I remember a colleague of mine, we had this kind of chart mapped out of all the different things that we were gonna offer like a system.

 

And she says, boy, there’s really more to mission. I said, that that’s just brilliant. And we’ve we’ve come to establish that as our core belief that there’s more to mission. If you think about that, and it’s it’s a great help to me as the leader of the company because then the things that we go out and do, the new things, has to do with our aspiration, has to do with our core belief. It’s not about me or a marketing team or something else.

 

It’s about the customer and our capabilities and that we believe these things. And then you could ask of yourself and the organization to work towards new things constantly. The big thing that we work for is then winning, winning at those things. And so there’s this great, great cycle that continues to go on on top of this really rich historic culture. And then in the middle, you’re managing a dynamic changing situation, which is as much art as anything else.

 

So very, very similar to what I think Steve outlined, that’s going on in in that that organization. Joe, are you seeing any more questions from anybody in the audience? Do you have any questions? I haven’t seen any more on the slide. I’ll repeat that.

 

It was, what would 1 or 2 pieces of advice be for young leaders or our next generation executives who are our emerging leaders? So, you know, the meeting here is about developing leadership. We’ve got our CEO group. We’ve got our emerging leaders group, and our next generation executives. So, you know, piece of advice to them, as they start to come into the industry and take over and really drive this industry’s growth.

 

Solve problems. Solve problems. You you solve problems, and you’re gonna be asked to go solve bigger problems. And it’s that’s easy to say, difficult to do, so it takes a lot of skill to do that. But if you solve problems for organizations, boy, oh, boy, you are valuable.

 

What I would what I would add to that is is, from a development perspective, kind of immerse yourself in diverse experiences. Right? So I think the most successful leaders that are emerging in our companies have had experience in operations. So you’re not single threaded through the organization, whether it’s sales, service, engineering, supply chain, finance. If you kind of build diverse experiences as you come up through the organization, I think when you have that opportunity to be in a higher level leadership position, the ability to kind of see across the organization and what makes it successful beyond kind of your more narrow lens, I think is very, very valuable.

 

And so people in our company that’s been been involved with, you know, projects, technology development, they kinda come out the other side, and they’ve had some operational experiences as well well rounded leaders. And that’s the nice part about our companies is that there’s there’s there’s so much to learn across the organization if you if you’re willing to kind of step outside maybe the the discipline that you grew up in? I think someone told me this once, and it really resonated. Take the role in your organization that nobody else wants to take. And if you can do that and make a significant material difference, you’ll be wildly rewarded and recognized.

 

And the person who told me that was Jack Welch. I don’t know how we talked Jack Welch. Falling out with you. I spoke to Lee Iacocca yesterday. Yeah.

 

It’s tough one to follow-up Ayeli, all these, I I completely agree with. And, I I think they’ve they’ve all been said. And and during a culture conversation, there was an undertone. And even in the in the safety conversation, there’s an undertone. And and I think it’s just one that’s always worth mentioning because we all get so fixated on the numbers and the things and the, hey, I’m going to fix this process, etcetera.

 

But the number one thing to keep in mind is, you want to lose people. And as you’re growing up in the organization and you’re trying to make a name for yourself and you want to go in and prove that you’re worth the new next promotion or whatever it is, just take a second to slow down and remember that you got to have a foundation of trust with your team because otherwise you’ll be leading an organization and no one will be standing behind you. So, so again, I know it’s pretty rudimentary, pretty simplistic to think about. But in today’s world, and it was really fast, It becomes less and less personal. We’re doing things via cellular phone and and, and no one actually interacts.

 

I have teenage kids, they when they wanna hang out with their friends, they they FaceTime. I’m like, this is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Okay. But, there still is that human connection. So if you could think about that even though and take on the tough assignments, get a real broad diverse experience level, then the sky’s the limit.

 

And I agree that what’s beautiful, and we say this all the time is you could change careers multiple times or ever change companies when you’re in the industry like this. So it’s a it’s an awesome place to be. Just how does organized labor affect your valuation of a potential acquisition for PE versus publicly traded companies on the panel? So I guess we’re asking asking John and and, and Brian really that question initially, and then if anybody else wants to chime in. But, again, you can pass on it.

 

But What’s the question again, Joe? How does your organized labor affect your valuation? So you’re looking at acquisition. If they’re organized, how does that impact your decision? We have about 50% of our business unionized.

 

We do a lot of business with casinos, hotel, resorts. And it’s interesting. As we were coming out of COVID, the unions played a very important role because seniority was so important for employees coming back. And we actually had great retention at the unions, but the nonunion shops were a complete disaster because a lot of the people left the workplace. Now with that said, if we had our druthers, we would prefer nonunion.

 

But with many of our customers, there’s a customer connection that makes it very important. So we’re always open. We see both sides. We negotiate really well with the unions. We always find a win win.

 

We just did the culinary in Las Vegas. I thought it was going to be potentially the worst negotiation of my life. And it turned out, thanks to our HR leader who’s in the room here, turned out to be a real win win. And we were the first one to go in Las Vegas, and we set the tone for the other 140,000 members there. But it can be a good experience, and it can be a real win win.

 

Unions today are very different. I mean, I did business in the early nineties in Detroit, and that was tough. Unions were really tough. It’s not like that now. Unions are very professional, very pro business, and we’re very willing to kind of work with the business too.

 

John, any comment on that? I’d mirror a lot of what it was just said. It’s no surprise that if you were starting a business, you probably wouldn’t say, let’s unionize on day 1. But, I have experience in this industry in a union environment and a nonunion environment. And the the thing to to really remember about a union is they’re they’re not an employee of the company.

 

So you still have the ability to do all kinds of great things because they’re the team. Your employees are the team. It’s not the union. And I’ve I’ve seen that in my, you know, current experience as well as I’ve seen it in, places where there hasn’t been organized labor. And then you look at kind of all of the regulatory things that we’ve been talking about today, there may be today a little bit of a difference between an organized company versus nonorganized vis a vis what it would have been maybe 30 years ago.

 

There’s so much regulation out there that there there’s marginal differences compared to times of the past from my perspective, although that’s very well cannot be shared by many. Anybody wanna comment on that? Do have a good question here. Time is one of our most precious resources, obviously. How do you choose where to spend your time each day and how or do you coach others on that topic?

 

Time’s the only commodity that you can’t buy more of. Right. I think I’m sure all these guys have lots of experiences too, but it’s the most important thing that I do is managing my time so that you have enough time for situations, enough time to work with people, develop time to, you know, make sure that sponsors and owners and investors are good. It’s really allocating in a disciplined way enough time throughout the week, the month to get all those things done. But having enough free time in your schedule, so when things come up, you can react quickly.

 

And we also may toss It may sound kind of mechanical, but if you know, I look at people in my organization’s calendars and they’re just packed. And I say that that’s a problem. Right? You you have a problem. You have to have that time, that flexibility because particularly in our jobs, you need the ability to be flexible, to have the time to step back.

 

And, you know, whether it’s ad hoc visits to locations or or, you know, ad hoc strategy sessions with smaller teams. If you’re if you’re 80% meetings during your week, it’s a problem. So I know it’s kinda mechanical, but you really have to find a way and, you know, as as you you raise up in organizations, it’s really about creating that leverage with your teams, and it goes back to succession planning and having the right people. If you have the right people, you should have the time. And that goes for any leader in the organization.

 

If you’re a general manager and you don’t have time to do the things you think are important to move the business forward, then you probably should be challenging the team around you to some extent. But it’s not easy. No. And there’s a, you know, a big emphasis on work life balance, which I think, you know, we talked a little bit about this morning. Having time to recharge, having time for yourself.

 

Obviously, big things that are really important to your own mental health and your own well-being before you help anybody else. Anybody else have any comments on that? I I’d say maybe taking a little bit of different perspective of time, I’ve had the the leisure or the pleasure now of working with my colleagues for many years. And we’ve really built kind of some stakes along the path of a year that we can come together, talk about things, know that we’re gonna come together at the other stake, and people have working orders, so to speak. And then you could do some interim things that are less formal because you’re always coming back to those stakes throughout the year.

 

You know? Something at the beginning of the year, something at the end of Q1, something at the midpoint of the year, something at the very end of the year that are routines, but very much dynamic in nature. When I think about time and and working alongside all my colleagues, that’s what we’re we’re used to doing. Joe, you talked about work life balance. Just a quick story.

 

Mike’s dad, I worked closely with for about 15 years. He used to run me out of the office. Right? He used to say, look, let’s go. Let’s get out of here.

 

Go see your kids. Right? Like, it’s important. It is important. I’ve tried to carry that forward with me because as you get busy, you wanna drive the team.

 

You wanna get things done in the time you wanna get them done. But, you have to keep that other side present. And I try to do the same, and I always think back to what Ron told me over those years. And I’ll just, to close it out, and he got a lot of great perspectives here, but just another one just to consider is, as you’re anchoring your schedule, and everybody’s looking for, hey, we want more time, we want to have the work life balance. You guys say, what’s important and where do I need to spend my time?

 

And we think about it in a couple of different ways is are you investing in people, either your people or a customer, so you’re investing your time there. Are you investing time to think or strategize, either alone or with a team? And I invest in time in getting feedback either from your people or from the customers. And if you go through a week and you say, alright, I’ve dedicated time to solicit feedback so I can stay relevant to what’s really going on in the business, not what everybody wants to tell me and put in their status reports or do the dog and pony show and show up. But in a real feedback, you can invest in people and you can invest in time to think.

 

Then they could build the rest around that once you have those anchored in. And then when you leave at the end of the day and you want to go see the kids ball game or whatever it is, you feel good that you’ve at least contributed the things that are most critical to your role as a leader. Thanks, Jim. And we have another question here from the group. And I think this is really relevant as well.

 

I think we’re an industry that thrives on, being able to grow people from within. Todd Schneider, former Rauman, is now the CEO of a 7 or $8,000,000,000 company. Right? We’ve had that we’ve heard that story over and over again of different people that have come through our industry, and built their way up from internal. Obviously, that’s not gonna be Brian’s case, but, a lot of people have done that.

 

So one of the questions was for the benefit of our young, leaders next generation, what were each of you doing in your early thirties? The things we’re allowed to talk about? Yeah. Yes. Things we could talk about in public.

 

Besides chasing kids around and, you know, being a a a young dad who had no idea what he was doing as a young dad. But, yeah, early thirties in my professional career, I think I I first took over a regional, assignment. That was a whole new adjustment process for a young family at home, traveling, nonstop, you know, in between 2 different countries. I think Jay was talking about this earlier. Our Canadian days, going back and forth, that worked out well until there was some issues one time and and crossing the border didn’t go quite as easily.

 

But anyway, so, so that’s really where we spent that time. And, I think that was a great learning experience because you learn that in the singular operation that you grew up in was not exactly how the business ran everywhere. And you start to really, I think Steve’s point earlier is you gain perspective, on the way things work and how they’re different. So that was kind of probably the starting point of, my regional type assignments. With Incentives.

 

Correct? With Incentives. Yep. John? I had just come out of business school and entered this industry, and I was doing nuts and bolts.

 

I was I ran a bunch of routes, more routes than I can count. Counting shop towels, renewing customers, selling new customers, holding service meetings, holding sales meetings, walk in production, learn how to you know, washer works. Went from there and learned a whole bunch of facility service stuff with larger groups of organizations and trying to solve problems, from there. So a varied amount of things. I probably didn’t use anything that I learned in business school well beyond that point.

 

Brian? I was at GE in Europe running a $100,000,000 business. I’d just come out of a sales role, took a job running kind of a small P and L nobody else wanted and moved to Europe, moved the family, was there for only about a year and a half, 2 years almost, and then moved to Cleveland to run the sales organization for the lighting business. So I changed within the company and industry and went back into sales. And then I moved to Rio de Janeiro, probably my mid-30s and ran all of Latin America for GE.

 

It was a quick jobs nobody else wanted? Was it? Those were jobs that nobody wanted. Right? It accelerated.

 

It really accelerated over those 6 years. That’s great, Brian. Thanks for sharing. Steve? Early thirties is really when I joined UniFirst.

 

So, I’ll be coming up on 20 years. Excuse you a hint how old I’m becoming. But joined UniFirst on the finance side. I’ve talked about it a little bit before. The great perspective that gave me is I was able to you know, Jim mentioned that, you know, the how diverse the companies are, location to location.

 

I was very involved with the kind of budgeting and planning process for all of our locations. And again, Mike’s dad who was CEO at the time, we we planned for the following year, at the plant level. And so for a number of years, I was very involved with him going around to every plant for budgeting planning process every summer and really had that opportunity to kind of see front, you know, first front row seat to how 80 different plants are operating and the difference in management, the difference in culture that that management brought to those plants, and then, you know, what made one successful versus the other. So it was a very interesting process and a big part of my development with the company. Any other questions, comments?

 

Yeah. Bob, hold on. In keeping with the theme of this meeting, leadership develop I’m gonna say development, and then given maybe you gentlemen status, the fact we have a lot of next generation up and coming leaders, What do each one of you do, if anything, for your own leadership development at this stage? I’ll take it. I mean, it it’s, it’s something we took on a couple years ago.

 

I alluded to it. We we wanted to bring more leadership development to the organization. Yeah. Excuse me. I mean, for you personally.

 

Yes. Yeah. I I was gonna get to that. So we wanted to bring more development to the organization. So, I had never worked with a coach before, and a lot of our senior leaders had never worked with coaches before.

 

So we all engaged coaches to work with. And it really it it revolved around the new leadership principles we were bringing to the company, but it was an opportunity for us all to step back. And I’ll be honest, when when you are the CEO, you know, who’s your mentor? Yes. I have a board of directors and a certain relationship with the board, but it was very interesting process and helpful process to work with a coach that you could talk to in a way maybe different than you talk to other executives you’re you’re interacting with day in and day out, or even with the board.

 

Right? Really, that candid relationship and and work with that that individual for for about a year, and it was a very, very positive experience. So it was one I would I would recommend. I’ve, some executives that have come into our company had a lot of experience working with coaches, and for those of you who have or or people that I have interacted with that have, they sort of swear by the process because it really helps you kinda come out of your day to day and, reflect which is is pretty important. I work with a bunch of mentors.

 

And what I found was, you know, I’ve done a lot of leadership training, attended a lot of different leadership courses over the year, which have all kind of helped build me to who I am. But the continuous learning is, I think, talking to people that have been in the chair before, have lived it, will cut right to the chase. I talk to Larry Bossidy about every 2 weeks. He’s 87 now. He was the chairman and CEO of Honeywell.

 

He’s one of our advisors and our sponsor. And it helps a lot because you can bounce things off just like a coach really and get real candid feedback. And it’s really about the candid feedback to understand blind spots or understanding how to work with people or get through big challenges that you want to make sure that you’re kind of thinking about every single possibility and you exhaust it. And in these roles, I think it’s a lot more not only about your reflection and your self awareness, but it’s the coaching and development that you can share with your team. And that’s where I spend quite a bit of time.

 

Let me give a slightly different perspective because I agree with that, and I can’t really add to it. You know, I come out of the army. So, there’s this thing called the 11 principles of leadership. And the the first one, know yourself and seek self improvement. So I tried to do a lot of things that we talked about this morning in our breakout sessions, in various ways with other people or material that I can get my hands on or service to some things that I’m involved in in in my community.

 

And then the second the second principle down below that is be technically and tactically proficient. And when there are things that are gonna be new or I’m gonna ask of the organization, I wanna I wanna kinda dig in and figure out how to do those things proficiently so I could work alongside people and and then hopefully help them with providing resources that I could provide in my role, knowing what I know about what they’re dealing with technically and tactically with a customer, a business line, a challenge. So, those are 2 things that that I really focus on. It’s tough to go forth. I just wanna go for something new.

 

Lucky for me, I still report to a CEO and a chairman who have both been in the business for, I think, combined, like 80 years. So they give me lots of feedback whether I ask for it or not. The only thing I’ll add, I was kind of meant to be funny. But, the thing I will add to what Steve said, just another perspective. When you have a coach, an awesome part about that is if you have other executives in the company that you ask to get a coach, initially, they’re going to put a wall up.

 

Like as if, hey, I did something wrong and now you’re telling me I need a coach because I’m clearly not getting the job done. And, just have the conversation to say, hey, I went through this experience and it worked out so well for me. It’s not about doing something wrong, it’s about that spirit of continuous improvement. And, by doing so, I think you’ll really benefit from it. So it’s not only the personal benefit, it’s also the unintended consequence, which is if we’re going to create a culture of ongoing learning and development in the organization, you know, you have to walk the talk as a leader.

 

That’s a great point. And when we went through that coaching process to a person, everyone ended up with goals for themselves. And when I sat down and and they kind of presented me, these are my goals, they were all right on point. So it was all about breaking down those barriers so they could self reflect. And maybe there were things I thought they needed to work on, but they came up with them themselves through working with the coach.

 

And I think it was, like you said, because they felt like, you know, I can do this, everyone’s doing it. It’s not a punitive. It’s it’s just so we can all get better. I think that’s a good place to end. I wanna thank you very much for your time.

 

I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Let’s give them a round of applause. If you have any comments on today’s show or suggestions for future episodes, send an email to podcasts attrsa.org.

 

That’s podcasts attrsa.org. Thanks again for tuning in. And if you liked what you heard on today’s show, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Itunes, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. For the latest news and information from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry, subscribe to our newsletter, Textile Services Weekly, and our monthly print publication, Textile Services Magazine. Additionally, don’t forget to follow TRSA on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.