[00:00]
Phil Shook: If you think back to the early days of Robinson or Backhaulers or Coyote, it was more the secret sauce was your data, your knowledge. Right? You knew the marketplace. Today, things are a lot more commoditized. There's no doubt a handful of people certainly still have an advantage in terms of the buy based on scale. But you could go online and just Google, what's an expected truck rate from A to B? And you can get a pretty accurate number. So it's really: what value add are you bringing? You gotta bring the relationship. You gotta have a certain amount of technology, and you just have to be good at what you do. Right? There's a lot of 3PLs out there. And customers have choice. They're more sophisticated. But I think the flip side of that is it's really great because you had customers that fifteen years ago said, I don't deal with brokers. And now you have some of the biggest shippers on the planet who have a deliberate carve out for brokers and 3PLs.
Jesse Buckingham: I'm excited to release this conversation between myself and Phil Shook, who is leading the transportation division of Crowley Land Transportation and spent twenty-three years as a VP at CH Robinson. This is a really great conversation about all things intermodal, where it fits into the ecosystem, the evolution of CH's culture and structure over time, how the acquisition of American Backhaulers impacted the way that the business operated, as well as a peek into what is going to change in logistics with technology and what's not. Especially focused on how relationships allow brokerages to just develop a better understanding of shippers and receivers and relationships at those facilities that allows them to provide better service. Enjoy this conversation.
[02:18]
Phil, welcome to the Freight Show. Thanks so much for joining me on here. I'm excited to be having this conversation with you.
Phil Shook: Yeah. I am too. Thanks for having me. This will be a lot of fun, and I've enjoyed our conversations in the past. So look forward to doing it here for the audience.
Jesse Buckingham: Phil, I'd love to begin -- tell me a little bit about your initial foray into logistics. And then you've obviously spent a big part of your career at CH Robinson. So I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about that story and some of the milestones of your career at CH Robinson. And then I've got a bunch I'd love to dive into, and then we'll get into what you're building now. Maybe you can wind it back for us.
Phil Shook: Yeah. It's pretty interesting now. I have a nephew who has gone through a supply chain program and is in the industry. I have another nephew who is a supply chain major at the University of Arkansas. What's interesting is if I go all the way back to the start of my career, this really wasn't an industry that you went to college for. You kind of wound up in it by happenstance, which is really what happened for me. I was interviewing with Enterprise Car Rental in their management trainee program in 1994. And it was not necessarily a great fit for me or what I wanted to do. And the recruiter came back and said I had this other company called the Hub Group. I honestly don't know much about them, but it's gotta be better than Enterprise. So I wound up interviewing and accepting a job at Hub Group, and really that was foundational for me and starting my career. It was elementary tracking and tracing old school intermodal containers and trailers and managing a drayage network, and it was fun. And it was something that I really enjoyed doing. So I was there for about three years.
[04:20]
And then as my life started to change and I was getting serious with my wife, I was like, I need to make a little more money. And coincidentally, a CH Robinson recruiter had reached out to me and said, we're trying to build a little more of an intermodal platform. Would you be interested in joining the organization? So this was old school Robinson, completely decentralized. I went to work in the Chicago South office at the time, which -- I was the fortieth employee in 1997. It's an important data point because if you fast forward to when we started making some pretty significant org changes in 2000, that office had over a 100 employees. So in three years, we had more than doubled in size. And in 2000, the company said we're gonna get a little more serious about intermodal. And so we created five regional operating centers. And so I led the Chicago team, and we did that for a handful of years. And then in 2005, we centralized everything, and I started taking on a little different corporate role in managing all of our key relationships with our big vendors, a couple of truckload vendors, but really more managing the railroads and key drayage. And then did that for a handful of years and really had fun with it. And then in 2012, they said, would you mind going back and leading the operations? So that was a really good opportunity to go back and do things. And we'd grown the business pretty significantly over that time.
[06:21]
So as you know, Jesse, Robinson continued to evolve. And as we did, they had created the what is now known as NAST, North America Surface Trans. Yeah. And so we had a leadership team where I led intermodal. Greg led the LTL, and a smaller group of people led the truckload side, both customer and carrier. And we worked together. And then when Robinson bought American Backhaulers in 2000, being in Chicago, having the opportunity to work with some of the Backhaulers team including Jeff Silver and some of those folks, what was really great in learning the more of the true brokerage aspect of things and not just the Robinson way. Pre-acquisition, Robinson had a way of doing things. Backhaulers had a way. And they were probably one, two in the industry. It was a really interesting and fun part to be a part of Robinson. Really help and get to be a small part of that acquisition. So yeah. And then like most people, eventually, you're looking for a new challenge. And for me, that happened during COVID. And so I took a little bit of a break from the 3PL side and worked on the equipment leasing, which allowed me to stay very connected to a lot of the carriers I'd worked with, the railroads, and now some of my friendly competitors were customers. So that was really a lot of fun for me for a period. But then I had the itch to get back into the 3PL world. It's in my blood. It's what I've grown up doing. And so I had the opportunity -- I was presented from Crowley to come in and lead the North America business. So that was interesting for me. It was a piece of brokerage business. There was an intermodal business. There was a pretty significant dray spend supporting Crowley, who I think most people know as a US flag
[08:23]
water carrier serving US, the Eastern part of the country. And since I've joined, we've added the government services business into my portfolio. So it's truckload, LTL, intermodal, dray.
Jesse Buckingham: This is your dream job.
Phil Shook: This is pretty much it. Having the ability to have impact in different areas. For the first fifteen plus years of my career, I was fairly one-dimensional on the intermodal piece. And then the last few years at Robinson, I got to really learn a lot about the LTL and the truckload business, which is obviously what Robinson's truly known for. But also, I have nothing but great things to say about my time at Robinson. It was just such a foundational training ground for me. I had the opportunity to participate in M&A activity, IT, working with the IT team as we think about what priorities look like. It really shaped the type of leader you wanna become.
Jesse Buckingham: I don't know a lot about intermodal. Some of our customers move intermodal freight. Can you give me the crash course on it? Like, what does the 101 look like?
Phil Shook: Yeah. So intermodal -- very basic status is moving goods between two modes. The way intermodal is thought about in North America is generally a combination of rail and truck. So you have this container, think of it like a Lego block almost. Right? You have a trucker picks one up, gets loaded with cargo, the railroad becomes your middle mile
[10:23]
piece. And then when it gets to the destination, another trucker picks it up and does delivery to the customer. It's certainly more nuanced and a little more complex than traditional truck brokerage. But if you're moving goods 700 to 800 miles or more and you're within 100 miles of a primary railhead, it's a pretty good way for your customers to realize some savings. And one of the interesting things -- customers say, oh, I don't like intermodal. And we would say, well, do you buy anything from UPS or LTL companies? Then you're using intermodal. UPS or JB Hunt is the largest user of domestic intermodal services. And so when you look at that type of business, that was a really interesting way to get customers to think differently. Because there are pros and cons. There's cost savings. But when a train is late, you're usually not measuring in minutes. You're measuring hours or even days. So there's a little risk-reward in how they go about it. But if you're running transcontinental shipments from LA to Chicago or a true transcon LA to New York, you're talking double-digit savings potential for the customer. So it's a great option to have in your toolkit. It's not for everyone, but it's a great way to augment.
Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. Why did JB Hunt go so aggressively into intermodal?
[12:30]
Phil Shook: They're a little bit unique in that. Mister Hunt was really a visionary and a pioneer. And with it, where he was talking with the BNSF thirty-some years ago now, they said, why don't we put our heads together -- they didn't call it a joint venture at the time, but for all intents and purposes, it kind of was. And it was a way that they both had some skin in the game. And just when you think about the true pioneers of intermodal -- the original Phil Jaeger, no disrespect to Phil who's now the CEO at Hub, but his grandfather was really credited with being one of the true pioneers. And yeah, Mister Hunt was probably the biggest visionary that came to using your own assets. Hunt is now number one in terms of asset ownership. Hub Group is number two. But yeah, somebody had an idea that we can do something different and think of our assets a little differently. So if you are a broker that's doing intermodal,
Jesse Buckingham: who is the carrier? Is it specialized equipment that you need to put it on?
Phil Shook: Yeah. And so all the railroads except the BNSF have containers that you can use. Think of like a trip lease. You can use them on a one-way basis. So the railroads own the containers. And then you've got companies that do own their own -- Hub, Robinson, STG. Most of the big companies have some form of their own fleet that they can run on any container fleet. Not the trucks. Yeah. 53-foot containers and then there's chassis pools that you can use. And some of the big folks have their own chassis.
Jesse Buckingham: Why has there been a shift away from railroad ownership towards private ownership?
[14:30]
Phil Shook: I think the railroads have figured out their core competency is really moving cargo from A to B. Having all that equipment ownership was actually diluting some of the profitability because you have to, you know, the proverbial build the church for Easter Sunday. You have all of these costs that come with it, then people may or may not come. That's always been one of the challenges with intermodal -- up until a handful of years ago, they started piloting a reservation program. But I was somewhat empathetic to the railroads because they had no idea what was coming to them day to day. From Chicago to Los Angeles, they didn't know if they were going to get 100 containers or 400. And so they have to build a train plan. If you and I go to get on a United Airlines flight, United doesn't decide based on the reservations whether they're gonna fly an Embraer or a triple seven. Here's what they have, and when the seats are gone, they're gone. And so I think the railroads have kind of moved more to that model to have a little more predictability and some more cost efficiency.
Jesse Buckingham: And the reason you said intermodal isn't for some customers is it really just around the risk that you've got multiple moves and so there's a bunch of failure points?
Phil Shook: Yeah. Yeah. And in some cases, quite honestly, if you think especially in today's world where you see truck prices really escalating,
[16:38]
rail is more fuel efficient than trucks are. And so being able to present customers with options -- creating optionality for your customer is ultimately what it's all about. If you don't, someone else will. Yeah. But the longer the length of haul, the more the opportunity for cost savings.
Jesse Buckingham: How much of domestic freight moves intermodal or over the rail?
Phil Shook: You know, it's funny. I think we're talking single digits of intermodal versus truck, or low double. It's certainly not overly significant. There are people out there who publish that information. But I think anything that's twenty years ago, you could probably say intermodal had an identity crisis and maybe some PR issues. I don't really think that's the case anymore. I think a lot of what can go on rail is. I don't disagree that in theory a lot more could, but customers know about it. If they're choosing to pay truckload prices, they want more cost certainty. You've got more failure points. If a train gets stuck behind an accident or something in the middle of nowhere, the recovery optionality is nil. We've had this happen in the real world where a train, you know, there's a derailment in the middle of nowhere in Montana. You can't just pick that container off the train and get it going.
[18:39]
And so now you're there -- there is a fair amount of temperature-controlled business that will run on the rails, but it usually runs on expedited trains. But you bear a lot of risk by doing that. So it's a really good conversation to have with shippers and make sure they understand -- I may save you 20%, but understand the recoverability of any delays is nil.
Jesse Buckingham: What types of freight does that end up being the right trade-off for most commonly?
Phil Shook: A lot of retail, a lot of food and bev. So if you think about a lot of the goods that come into the country from Asia that hit the US West Coast, that's a great transloading opportunity. BNSF and JB Hunt are doing a joint venture out outside of LA to be able to take some trucks off the road and bring the cargo into Port of Long Beach, move it by rail to this new terminal, do any segregation, put it right back on the rail and get it out. So yeah. If you think about where the rail is -- Chicago is the epicenter. All the railroads converge in Chicago and Memphis.
Jesse Buckingham: Memphis?
Phil Shook: Yes. And so kinda Northern half of the US -- Chicago. Southern half -- Memphis. But I think the other part that people sometimes forget, there's only two railroads that serve any geography in North America. And for intermodal, you can use either one. But if you're a carloader, chemical or grain shipper, you might only be served by one of the two railroads, or served by a short line that connects to one of those big railroads. The country was built around the railroads, not the other way around.
[20:44]
Jesse Buckingham: You were there at CH through sounds like various phases of its evolution. And I'm curious to understand a little bit more about what sort of CH brokerage pre-Backhaulers looked like and what it looked like post and what the model ended up looking like after those two businesses were merged. Take me through that.
Phil Shook: Yeah. It was so -- pre-acquisition, so it's called pre-2000. Robinson had -- they were all company-owned stores, but they almost acted like franchises. The general manager got a cut of the profits of their branch, kicked a certain amount upstairs to corporate, and the rest was to cover your operating costs. And so it was very -- Robinson offices at the time actually thought of each other as competition, not friends. And so you might have some relationships with people in other parts of the country, and you can negotiate how you would work together. But if you ask someone at Robinson in 1999 who your biggest competitor was, it may be the Robinson office across town.
Jesse Buckingham: And they would have -- there were multiple offices sometimes in a single geo. And was there any concept of territories?
Phil Shook: No. The idea was to create this ultra-entrepreneurial spirit. And so competition made people better was the thought process. And internal competition was as good as external. So in places like Chicago, Minnesota where the company's headquartered, LA, Dallas, you had a few places where you had multiple offices in one town. So there could be some of that competition. But going back again pre-2000, other than American Backhaulers, there wasn't a tremendous amount of really high quality competition. And so the time -- Sid Verdorn was the CEO in 2000, actually John Wehofer was just becoming CEO and had been the CFO -- and it was one of the, I think, most brilliant things the company ever did was we had a competitor who in some cases was winning. We were much bigger than they were, but they were beating us in a lot of places
[22:55]
and their entrepreneurial spirit was even greater than ours because of the way it was really done. If you take that same concept, it was done at the individual level. You were either carrier sales or you were customer sales like Backhaulers. And your whole thing was go build a portfolio. The person next to you is competing with you. First one to call a customer and get them to do business with you wins. And you got a part of everything they did. And it's a very simplified version. But the same thing happened on the carrier side. You went through a training class and you were assigned -- you were a customer or you were a carrier-facing, one or the other. And people fell into it. And as you'd imagine, in a high-pressure sales role, turnover was high, but the people who succeeded really succeeded. And so one of the big reasons Robinson bought Backhaulers was their technology was second to none. It was kind of the first time you really thought about tech being a differentiator. The Backhaulers system at the time was called Express, and it blew away what we had at Robinson. Interesting. So it turned into -- if you fast forward a decade from that point, the company looked a lot more like the former Backhaulers than it was the previous Robinson.
Jesse Buckingham: And it was like largely cradle to grave at CH Robinson as well. Right? So after the Backhaulers acquisition, is that the current state today still, that there are independent offices competing? Where did that evolve to?
Phil Shook: Yeah. No. As you got into the twenty-teens, I think we started to realize that there was a lot of competition out there. This became the new hot thing to do. And yes, someone used the term of, we gotta focus our efforts outward. We can't be fighting with each other. And so that was really what started the evolution of the one team, so to speak, of Robinson. Because at that point, you had a lot of spin-offs. You had Coyote Logistics, which had been born and was ultra successful.
[25:08]
You had a whole bunch of people who had been former Backhaulers people who had gone and started new companies. Obviously Coyote, the most successful of the bunch. But yeah, all three of the top principals at Backhaulers -- Paul Loeb, Jeff Silver, and John Thompson -- all started new 3PLs. Very successful. What did John Thompson start?
Phil Shook: I'm blanking on the name of the company, Jesse. It was a long time ago. He wound up selling that again. But you know, all those guys were very, very successful. Obviously Jeff is still and Paul is as well. Jeff's probably become the household name now in truck brokerage. And CH continues to be, at least the largest, and definitely a torch carrier in a lot of ways.
Jesse Buckingham: What is it about the business culturally or in the structure that has allowed it to have its early and sustained success?
Phil Shook: Yeah. I think it's a really good question because I think if you had asked that question five or six years ago, there were some questions about whether that was going to be the case. I think one of the things the company has continued to do, for a hundred and twenty-one years now, is to continue to evolve and mature. And I think there had been a little bit of a lull. Right around the beginning of the pandemic. And yeah, Dave Bozeman and his team and Arun and the group deserve a tremendous amount of credit for taking a company that was not very well viewed by Wall Street -- and people were questioning, is Robinson the Blockbuster of transportation? And you know, the board made some changes. And I think there was a lot of skepticism around the choice of Dave Bozeman as an outsider. He knew transportation, but hadn't lived and breathed the 3PL world.
[27:12]
And if you look at them now, they're the darlings of Wall Street. I haven't checked recently, but I think their multiples are in the high thirties, low forties. People believe the story and the longevity and that the company for the foreseeable future continues to be
Jesse Buckingham: best in class. Phil, shifting gears a little bit. You've spent a lot of your career in operations leadership. I'm curious -- what do you think it takes to build an exceptional operations org in logistics? What are the pillars? And if you're taking a team from not good to excellent, what are the typical transitions that you're seeing them through?
Phil Shook: Yeah. You know, I think it's kinda irrelevant to the specifics of the job. But it's really: build a great team. Get people who are detail-oriented, results-focused, that are passionate about what they do and about being the best at what they do. So I think if you build a great team, none of what we do is rocket science. We're not the most complex industry. Your tech has certainly evolved and helped, but also made a little more complex in other areas. But overall, I think it's about team. And whether it's leading the commercial team or the operations team, I think the fundamentals are the same -- look for people who you can trust and build with and have a similar mindset of, especially in my current role where it's not really a startup, but it's not a mature business either. Getting the team rallied around a common goal. So it's really not about an individual or a skill set. It's about how do we coalesce as a team.
Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. Interesting. So get the right people in and then align them around a common goal. And then I am sort of curious -- logistics, there is just a lot of moving pieces happening all the time.
[29:12]
How do you think about managing all of that? Is it mainly about finding detail-oriented people that have a lot of hustle and are willing to stay on top of it? Or is it more sort of a systems and process definition and KPI tracking?
Phil Shook: Yeah. I think it's multifaceted. If this were easy and every part of the process could be automated, we wouldn't be needed. So there's a -- we gotta bring value to the equation. So it's that problem solving. It's the 10% exceptions. The 90% that goes well, that's kind of the foregone conclusion. The 10% and how you manage, how you communicate, how you manage its cost, those are all the parts that are really the differentiators.
Jesse Buckingham: Following that thread, I'm curious to talk about your view on what the future of brokerage and logistics looks like. You've seen this through a number of decades, a lot of new technology that's come in. Some things will change, some things will not. What's your perspective on the role of the broker in the future and what's gonna change, what won't?
Phil Shook: No. You're right. I mean, having been doing this for quite a long time, it's yeah. If you go back, you had Enron. Right? Company called WebModal, and they were going to disintermediate the 3PLs. And even your current state, got Uber and the former Convoy. There were going to be ways. I think technology continues to enable. I think technology is absolutely
[31:16]
fantastic. But one of the things when we talk to customers that matters most to them is that relationship. They wanna know that they can reach out and get a human being and be able to have a conversation and make sure people understand that the end user gets impacted here. So you go back during COVID -- one of our big customers at Robinson at the time was Target. If we failed on something, people were lining up outside their stores to get toilet paper. We all remember that crisis. And if we failed at our jobs, people went home empty handed. So being able to do that -- your customers are very tech-savvy now. And if you think back to the early days of Robinson or Backhaulers or Coyote, the secret sauce was your data, your knowledge. You knew the marketplace. Today, things are a lot more commoditized. But there's no doubt a handful of people certainly still have an advantage in terms of the buy based on scale. But you could go online and just Google what's an expected truck rate from A to B and get a pretty accurate number. So it's really: what value add are you bringing? You gotta bring the relationship. You gotta have a certain amount of technology, and you just have to be good at what you do. Right? There's a lot of 3PLs out there. And customers have choice. They're more sophisticated. But I think the flip side of that is it's really great because you had customers that fifteen years ago said, I don't deal with brokers. And now you have some of the biggest shippers on the planet who have a deliberate carve out for brokers and 3PLs.
Jesse Buckingham: Why is that carve out there?
Phil Shook: I think there's more pressure on them to be more efficient at their jobs. And if you think about the ecosystem of truckers in North America, you can count on both hands the number of trucking companies that have 10,000 or more power units. Well, if you have a multibillion-dollar domestic spend,
[33:21]
90 plus percent of the trucking companies have fewer than 50 power units. Rather than going and chasing all of that niche capacity -- the 3PL or the broker is able to aggregate that and look like one of the big five or 10 trucking companies. And so if you look at any -- Robinson, RXO, Coyote -- one of the things that they tout is the size of their carrier ecosystem. Being able to tap into Jesse's Trucking or Phil's Logistics that, if you're a Fortune 100 company, you don't know who they are and you probably don't care quite honestly.
Jesse Buckingham: So the point about relationships -- I agree with it. But sometimes I feel like it's not precisely defined. I'm curious -- what are the elements of the relationship that you think really matter and therefore will continue to matter in a very hard-to-disintermediate or automate way? It sounds like one piece of it is being able to speak to a human who understands the pain that is caused if something doesn't work and that you trust that person is gonna do everything in their power to figure that out for you. But tell me more about what you mean by relationship.
Phil Shook: Yeah. It's really getting to know their business. It's not just -- you know, does your daughter play soccer or swim? It's understanding the business. Because when you look at an RFP on paper, they all look the same. When you're an incumbent and you get to know a business, you realize how nuanced some of that can be. You look at something and if you get a 52-week data set from a customer, you look at it and say, oh, well, there's 520 loads in from A to B. That must mean 10 a week. Well, that's what it looks like on paper. The fact of the matter is it might be 10 a week, but it's off Thursday and Friday. That changes your costing. Is it -- we had a real-world example at Robinson where it looks fantastic on paper, but 80% of the volume shipped on Thursday and Friday. It was 44,000
[35:34]
plus pounds of beverage in a very niche market. On an annualized basis it looks great, but when it came down to it, we'd make money on 50%, breakeven on 30 or 35%, and lose money at 15 or 20. The net effect wasn't very good. So it was understanding that level of nuance that a spreadsheet or some type of data from the customer doesn't always have. And then as you get to be repetitive on a lane, what you can find is you can actually build great relationships with shippers or receivers who may not be your customer. When little things happen, your customer may not even know because you built those relationships with those folks, whether that's what the drivers doing it or whether it's a CSR type person. Anything you can do to eliminate noise for your customer adds value to that.
Jesse Buckingham: Take me through some concrete examples of where those receivership relationships help you.
Phil Shook: Yeah. So this is very prevalent particularly in the intermodal realm where you could have the same drivers in and out all the time. We had a very large retailer who we would get these amazing scorecards from. But we knew our on-time performance wasn't that great. But the receiver didn't report us negatively because they loved working with our team. They knew that if a driver was late, the driver would show up on the dock -- hey, Joe. It wasn't who are you here with? So being able to do things like that -- a lot of these warehouses run on fairly tight schedules. Being able to -- if a driver is running late because of traffic or something, show up thirty minutes late, still get unloaded. Customer doesn't even know what happened because we didn't have to tell them that. So it was things like that: nobody wants to deal with accessorials. Nobody wants to deal with things that are thirty, sixty minutes late. If it's gonna be days late, yeah, I need to know. That may impact something else downstream.
[37:40]
But taking some of that little stuff and just having those relationships and having people that know how to communicate effectively. But now we're using technology to proactively give those alerts, which then you follow it up with maybe a more human touch email. Things like that go a long way, and it was amazing how many customers we would actually be transparent with and say, we do have these things -- and they'd be like, you know, we don't care. The fact that your driver and our warehouse have an amazing relationship, that's good enough for us.
Jesse Buckingham: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that the relationships allow you to solve problems easier and provide better service as a result. And that only comes from consistency and actually operating that lane and leaning in to figure the stuff out and really understanding the business.
Phil Shook: Well, if you think about what are a couple of big friction points with customers -- it's something's not where it's supposed to be. You kinda remove that if you've got those level of relationships and accessorial or hidden charges. If somebody's running a little late, we can squeeze them in and not have to have any extra equipment charges. Everybody wins. And it goes both ways. Sometimes we've had examples where a warehouse would call the trucker direct and say, know you're supposed to have four trucks coming in today. I'm swamped. Bring me three. And just little things like that go a tremendous way. Because if you think just like most companies, the shippers are trying to do more with less and use technology. And so if you can solve problems before they happen and never hit their radar,
Jesse Buckingham: now you're bringing value to them because they can be more efficient at their job. Yep. And what's the flip side? Like, what are the areas where you're really bullish and excited for technology to have a role?
[39:43]
Phil Shook: I think one of the biggest places has been in-transit visibility. We used to call it the "where's my truck" game. The worst thing you wanted was a customer to call and go, where's my truck? And prior to some of the visibility tools that are out there now, you had to pick up the phone and maybe the driver answered. Maybe they were in a bad cell zone. And it's but I think that's really one of the big things. And then taking a lot of the task-based work out. Customers used to email or fax over orders and someone would have to key them in. Well, now we can stand up an agent that will go ahead and read the unstructured data and turn it into a workflow. So those are places where it just adds more and more value so that we can focus on managing relationships,
Jesse Buckingham: not managing tasks. I love it. Phil, we're coming up on time here, so I wanna be respectful, but really enjoyed this conversation. I could have gone for a lot longer diving into all of your experience, but hopefully we can do this again soon. Thanks so much for coming on.
Phil Shook: No. Thanks so much and I look forward to seeing you in person soon.