Find the Cash Trapped in Your Supply Chain | Steven Lustig

Bill Canady: Welcome to the Thousand Day CEO. I'm Bill Canady, and this is where we get inside the decisions that build enterprise value. Today I'm joined by Steven Lustig, founder and CEO of Lustig Global Consulting. His background spans manufacturing, supply chains, and operational improvement from startups to global businesses. We're going to be talking about finding cash in the supply chain, the operating problems that diligence and integration can miss, and what it takes for a family company to establish a useful first board. Steven, welcome to the show.

Steven Lustig: Bill, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be chatting with you today.

Bill Canady: Yeah, me too. We were doing a lot of chatting, off air, and I thought, boy, we should get online and and start talking about it. So let's go ahead and kick off. So take me to a business where cash was trapped in the supply chain. What was happening and what did you see?

Steven Lustig: Yeah. I think a couple of good examples. One is from a board perspective, you know, serving on a board of manufacturers and distributor companies, inventory is important and inventory ties up your cash. And so the ability to efficiently manage your inventory to the point where you're not shorting your customers of the products they need when you've promised to deliver them. But at the same point, not having excessive inventory is really critical. And so in the board, my board role, I've advised the operating leadership on setting up programs to address that inventory. So, for example, SIOP programs, sales inventory, operations, planning programs, as well as programs to address slow-moving inventory. So, first introducing the concept of what slow moving inventory is, and then suggesting paths they can go to address and advising on, you know, the at a high level how to set up an SNIOP program so that they can start tying forecasts and operations purchases better together and reduce the inventory because of mismatches there. And a lot of it was just a question of visibility, looking at the inventory, looking at how to dispose of that, whether that's through sale or other means, and looking at you know, why there is inventory and learning from that so you don't order more than you need in the future.

Bill Canady: That's very important. And so I I g P Sciop or S N I O S

Steven Lustig: Yep.

Bill Canady: I O P is one of the most powerful tools out there. Well, what did you see that the leadership team was missing?

Steven Lustig: Yeah, in in this scenario, what I saw was that inventory was growing as a percentage faster than sales. And that that always concerns me. and that also saw the amount of inventory of of the cash, the company's the family's cash that was tied up in inventory, and how many months worth of sales that was equivalent of. And so that led me into conversations with the CEO, with the operations leader, in establishing and them taking the steps to establish like what's an appropriate level of inventory? What are the right triggers for ordering more? What is older inventory that extra efforts are needed to dispose of? And Putting in place them, not me, my me guiding as a board member, not executing, but then putting in place with my guidance the processes where the various teams concerned, such as the sales teams, the operations teams, would be reporting regularly to those people on the actions they're taking to reduce that inventory.

Bill Canady: Yeah, d i it's really important to the distinction between a board member and somebody operating in the company. It's easy

Steven Lustig: Yeah.

Bill Canady: easy to le you know, lose that in there. What was the first decision that you made that helped them?

Steven Lustig: Yeah. I think the first thing I'd say is is to contrast that to another example where I was in an operation role, and that will maybe help you see the difference. at a previous employer when I was leading a VP of global supply chain, the company acquired a number of other factories in North America. And my part of my role was to optimize their supply chains to train them on supply chain practices. We found number of situations where competitive quoting wasn't being done, inventory programs that, you know, vendor-managed inventory that suppliers offered wasn't wasn't being implemented, and even where just supply and demand analysis wasn't well known. In those roles, I you know really hands-on worked with the operations leaders at those sites and their teams. in in setting up RFQs across different categories, going through supply and demand analysis hands-on, which resulted in a lot of cost savings from reduced supply chain costs, but also inventory reductions through analyzing when orders were needed and through implementing those vendor managed inventory programs. In my board role, it was really not my role, my my job to go ahead and Look at the demand analysis, look at the inventory programs, but really to guide the teams and suggest the things they could be looking at, that the executives could be looking at to address that. And it's really it is it is a important difference. It's not one that every board director gets quickly. but it's very critical because in this case, as a board of director, there's a CEO who's got a job that he or she is doing. There's a a director, leader of supply chain operations who has a job, they don't need the board director trying to do their jobs for them. They don't want it, they don't need it. And it really kind of blurs that line of responsibility.

Bill Canady: Yeah, I tell you, to be able to manage yourself between a board being a board member and an operator is a a really, really big deal. when you first looked at it, how much cash was released and over what period with the help that you

Steven Lustig: Yeah, I'll I'll keep it in percentages just for keeping information private. But you know, we're able to reduce the called older inventory. I think we defined it as you know, more than two quarters worth of inventory. But stuff that is there over two quarters, we were to reduce that pretty quickly by I think it was a quarter to a third. And then we were able to go and look at the you know existing inventory and reduce that probably by lesser, I don't know, maybe 10%, just focused on when they should be ordering things. You know, a lot of it was prevention and prevent prevention, preventing more inventory from coming in. orders that were not needed quite as soon could be made later when when your inventory situation dictated it, when you had a better idea of what your demand was. and so we're able to address it on really those those two different ways.

Bill Canady: Which few products, suppliers, or purchasing decisions were creating most of the problems?

Steven Lustig: Yeah, I would say that, you know, in the example for this board, it was some of the longer lead time items that were from farther away in Asia. And for business locations that were smaller and that a full container shipment was a higher percentage of their overall business. And so if you are ordering something that's a higher percentage of your sales, your revenue, you're taking more of a risk, and you're incurring more of that, you know, percentage cost. And so the you know, those tended to be more of a challenge. The larger, say, subsidiaries could absorb those and were more likely to absorb them, okay, maybe a month later than you had hoped, but wasn't as significant. and you were ordering, if if you were ordering a container, a lower percentage of your say annual demand. Whereas in the smaller sites, you were ordering, less containers, but those containers were a higher percentage of that subsidiary's demand. And those decisions became all the more important.

Bill Canady: What'd you stop doing?

Steven Lustig: well, in the board example, what I advise them to stop doing is to is to plan based on holistic forecasts. And by that I mean was revenue forecasts. So basically the sales team was giving them forecasts by quarter or by month at a revenue level. And then operations was going in. The procurement team was going in and figuring out what they thought was needed by different SKUs, and that wasn't coming from sales. So, one of the first things is advise them to work as part of that SINOP process. It needs to be time-based, it needs to be per month, which it really was not. And it needs to be by SKU, or at least by family, preferably by SKU, and that the sales team knows. better than the operations team, some of the f aspects of what the demand's going to be. how they talk to the customers, they know what incentives are going to be offered. They know what the competition looks like. They know what the government incentives are. And so they can better estimate some aspects of the demand than the operations team can. The operations team can then go in and look and see what they've sold in the past, what seasonality has been involved, what other SKUs may cannibalize it and come up with an overall demand. And then the operations team can then look at what their inventory, their existing orders in place are, and then order when they need to based on that. And so you're taking some of that guesswork off of that. Of course, your forecasts are never going to be accurate 100%, but these teams working together, it's a much better way of getting a higher level of confidence in those forecasts. And you have a less of a chance of having far too much of one SKU

Bill Canady: Mm-hmm.

Steven Lustig: and far too little of another SKU.

Bill Canady: Mm-hmm.

Steven Lustig: If I look at some of the other, the supply chain work I did as VP going into some of these sites that have been acquired, it was really just setting up a question of not depending on one supplier when you had multiple that you could be utilizing. It was competitive quoting. It was Quoting on a cadence by commodity by quarter. And it was looking at total cost of ownership, right? So the price is important, but the quality is important. The inventory terms are important. The payment terms are important. all of that, the shipping logistics costs, if you have to bear them, are important. The inventory costs are important if you have minimum order quantities. And so it was educating them about that. And really some of it was just simple demand and supply analysis, where looking at spreadsheets and saying, why why are we ordering this when you have, three, six month supply of this part already? So what did we stop doing? We stopped ordering things we didn't need to order.

Bill Canady: Who pushed back on you?

Steven Lustig: Yeah, good question. there was pushback depending on the sites at the board level, the board example, there wasn't too much pushback. There was some from some of the sales groups that weren't used to doing this. And I guided through the CEO through communicating with them on on why this was important to the company. but you know, the CEO bought into it, and so that helped a lot and it was Guiding the CEO to communicate that with, say, the sales teams, maybe some of the subsidiary leaders who weren't used to this and weren't used to having this responsibility, which is a financial responsibility they should have. They should be responsible for the inventory at their

Bill Canady: Mm-hmm.

Steven Lustig: site and the inventory they ordered. For the acquisition example, when I was an operator, you did have pushback from some of the procurement teams and some of their leadership. based on it not having been done that way, based on some perhaps too cozy relationships with preferred suppliers, and and concerns about where that was going. And and so you know, you had people who were engaged. Some of the sites, you could tell the sites that were well run, better, even when there were things like this that needed to be implemented, they They learned, they were willing to learn, they were willing to listen, they were willing to embrace, even if it was new and different. And the ones that were not as well run really just wanted to stick to their way of doing things and weren't interested in learning like new and improved ways.

Bill Canady: Let's turn to your acquisition work that you spoke of. Tell me about an operating problem that diligence missed and that became apparent after closing.

Steven Lustig: Yeah. I would say, a good example is it's hard to assess in a short diligence period the capabilities, the knowledge, the the knowledge and the energy of some of the team members that are part of the acquisition. So part of the site that's being acquired. The it takes time to see who is, as I said earlier, who's willing to learn, who understands, say, supply chain well, who can lead a team effectively, who was not there just because someone liked them in management. They were a friend or a colleague or something. it takes time to figure that out because these are things that, the leadership of the acquired site aren't at a going to jump and tell you, right? They often are gonna tell you, hey, you're gonna, the team's gonna stay, can stay after this and how great they are. and that great maybe from a different perspective. In some cases, these were companies that didn't have more than one unit location, one unit, and didn't have a comparison basis, and whereas we did, and so we knew what best practices looked like. and so I think personnel's a big area. It it's Important to spend as much time as you reasonably can during the due diligence process with the personnel, seeing how they lead, assessing their knowledge. So you have some idea of one, of how much training you may need to provide them, which is going to take up your time and their time, or whether you need to find gonna need to find somebody else for that role, which again creates some chaos in your organization, creates a lot of work. Bringing on someone new, but ultimately in the medium to long term will be beneficial for the company and for that team when they have some stronger leadership.

Bill Canady: would have knowing earlier would that have changed the price or the integration plan or even maybe the decision to buy?

Steven Lustig: I don't think it would have changed the decision to buy. It may have just, changed some of the terms agreed to in terms of you know, some cases when people could be let go or not. I think it would have helped more with the planning and the expectations of what we would need to do in terms of our, you know, the acquirer's resources, how much effort, how much time of the CEO. And the other

Bill Canady: Mm-hmm.

Steven Lustig: leadership positions would be needed to bring the acquired site up to the standards that the acquirer was expecting. And so understanding that, setting the right timeframe, setting the right the bandwidth of people who are already working in specific functions at the acquired company, acquirer, how do we make time for them? to spend with at the acquired site. I think we underestimated that. I think a lot of companies do. And I think knowing that and knowing, you know, what time would be required there allows you to plan and schedule that acquisition integration a little better.

Bill Canady: Once you knew about it, what had to happen in the first hundred days?

Steven Lustig: One, you needed to come up with a new plan, a plan that accounted for this. So I'm sure you're not you're not a stranger to having to change your plans on on short notice there. two, needed to get buy-in, buy-in from the CEO of the acquirer to lend his or her, you know, knowledge, but his or her inf influence, right, with the site that's acquired. and working with them to influence the leadership there. Because if the people at the if the people at the site, you know, the operational people, the buyers, the supply chain people, for example, are seeing their leadership not enthusiastic, not collaborative. If the site leadership is not seeing a strong emphasis from the CEO of the acquirer, telling like how important this is, why this is standard across the companies that we've purchased and acquired were set up individu or organically, then they don't see any reason to change. They don't see any reason to do

Bill Canady: They won't change at all.

Steven Lustig: more. Yeah. And so if it was good enough under the old leadership and that old leadership is still around and not pushing for change, why why put yourself through that?

Bill Canady: That's right. Who owned the result?

Steven Lustig: Well, I think that's a great question as well. you know, in in our case, it was often the functional leaders at the acquirer that owned the result. but I feel that left the CEO of the acquirer and the leadership of the acquired site off the hook. And I think a more shared responsibility is a better way to implement an implement an integration plan. To achieve the results that are desired and expected when you go into that, you know, that acquisition. The you know, if no one else has skin in the game, if the CEO is focused on asking the acquired site for other things and their time is spent on that, I mean it's quite it's quite easy. If the CEO is asking them to do X, Y, and Z and your your CFO, your supply chain person, your engineering person are asking for other things. You know, the people who report to the CEO are asking for, you know, things that actually the CEO is asking you for. which one are they going to do first? Ultimately it's all coming from the same place, but they're

Bill Canady: They're gonna Yeah.

Steven Lustig: getting it through a different channel. And so, you know. It's it the consistency, the setting of priorities is important from I would say just from the acquire the acquirer's leadership role and everyone being aligned. Okay, the most important thing is this. This is what the CEO is going to communicate. We've also liked to do some other things here. Everything can't be the top priority. What is the

Bill Canady: Mm-hmm.

Steven Lustig: top what are we expecting? What are we expecting from the leadership at the acquired sites? What are we expect expecting from goals? accomplishments for the executive team of the acquirer and how this all fits together well with the priorities that are being communicated.

Bill Canady: What was the first sign the integration started working?

Steven Lustig: I think the first sign, and I'll say the first sign I would say from the operation supply chain side was after we did a couple of a commodity-based requests for quote, we came back with substantial cost savings. in the case where there was a preferred supplier, the preferred supplier Did not lose all their business. I think to their to the surprise of the site, they came back and somehow miraculously were able to lower their prices now that they had competition. And so you saw you saw buyers observing this and seeing this, and not seeing that there was a negative side to this, right? That they're still going to get supply from reliable suppliers. Their preferred supplier is still has a lot of business, but the company is saving a lot of money. And so that what And we had told them in terms of what we could achieve, turned out to be true. And when you started showing results, those quick wins, that

Bill Canady: Mm-hmm.

Steven Lustig: was one of the ways. I I remember an example from one of the acquisitions where our IT director spent a lot of time working with them, getting some planning modules up and helping them with that. And they could see the benefit of having her support. and how she can help them use their systems better. And so a lot of it is these quick wins. or not so quick wins, but hopefully not too long-term ones.

Bill Canady: You also help family companies establish their first boards. what made one of those families decide it was time to to get a board?

Steven Lustig: Yeah, in one case, the first generation founder w had already come up with the plan to step back from the CEO role and turn it over to a non-family member inside the company. And at that point, he and the family were looking for independent help, board governance to help with that succession. But also to help the new CEO once he took over. And so that was the trigger. And fortunately, it was not done weeks or months before, but almost a year before that scheduled transition was to take place. but that gave the board the opportunity to get to know you know, the successor as well as everyone else before that successor took that, took the reins, and it gave the board the opportunity to provide them some. Some guidance, some feedback to prepare him for that role. And so that was a good trigger. the other company, I think the trigger was you know, growth. I think it was also the advice of a family business consultant that said, Okay, you're now at a size where you would benefit from this, especially as we're starting to look at different options and possibly expanding business. an independent board can help you with all of these things. And so that trigger. was maybe external advice from that consultant.

Bill Canady: What had the owner been carrying alone before that now the board was going to help him?

Steven Lustig: Yeah, I would say we get a lot of feedback from the CEOs that they've got somebody to bounce ideas off of. and I think that's probably the key thing. I mean, yes, we provide guidance and advice in other areas, but in general, the CEO having a challenge or coming up with some ideas or reviewing like the strategy, having board members that They can reach out to even informally, not necessarily part of a board meeting. certainly in the board meetings, we review a lot of these things and we provide them questions they didn't think about so they can go back and refine, you know, their budget, their strategy, their approach. But also having those, you know, off the books, informal discussions with board directors where they can ask questions. You know, in my case. Board directors who can reach out and ask questi CEOs reaching out and ask me questions about operations, about continuous process improvement, about inventory and how to go about doing some of these things. And is this the right approach? Is this are you seeing the right information from some of their reports? Are they the level that they should be at? These are things they had to help, just basically discuss in their own mind before. And they really have communicated their appreciation that now they've got this extra resource to talk through these issues with.

Bill Canady: How do you decide who should sit on the

Steven Lustig: Yeah, that's a great question. And there's a, as I'm sure there's a pretty formal process you can go through of identifying your needs, how putting together a skills matrix, identifying your future needs, not necessarily your past or current needs, seeing what your current board skills are and where those gaps are, and and then looking for those people to fill those gaps. I think. And there's a lot more to it than that, right? You want people who can understand the industry that you're playing in. And this does not mean that you're a specialist in that exact industry. I've seen people look for very specific board director experience in very narrow niches where they would actually benefit from people with broader experience, right? You're not you're not hiring your VP of sales. For a chip company, and you want somebody with sales experience from a chip company, you're hiring a board director, one who can share their experiences across different industries, things that may have already occurred at in other industries that are just occurring or not yet to have occurred in your industry. And so I think the ability to understand the industry is important, which is why I'm sitting on manufacturing distributor type company boards. When I joined the boards that I'm on, I knew nothing about their particular industries. And I was clear about this, and they knew, and they were fine with that. It was my ability to understand how they conduct their business, the operations, the international aspects, my governance certification, those type of things were very interesting. And so I would caution boards about getting too narrowly focused. as you alluded to earlier, you know, somebody who is understands the board governance role and is not going to, interfere with the CEO's or other officers' responsibilities. And somebody shares the interest, somebody shares you know, the vision, the culture to some extent that's going to get along. You know, being able to get along with the board and the officers is important because you're going to be working with them on some significant issues. And you wanna be able to do so in a collaborative way, not an adversarial way, but in a way where you can still ask the questions that need to be asked.

Bill Canady: Mm-hmm. How do you separate ownership decisions, board oversight, and management decisions?

Steven Lustig: Yeah. And there's even a you can throw a fourth one in is family decisions, right? There's four. I've heard it describes

Bill Canady: Mm. Yeah. The family council.

Steven Lustig: family council, right? So I've heard it described as four different rule rooms. And so one of the things you need to do is when you are, especially in a family run company where you could have a family ownership, family board members, and family executives, always making sure everyone's aware which room you're playing in at the time. and this is, you know, no, this is not the place for the family council discussion because we're in a board meeting. the board needs to know things that come out of the family council meeting, like what their goals are, but every there's different discussions that go in there. I think you know the adage for boards you know of nose in, fingers out is a great starting point. That will vary by company. What the company needs, what the company expects will vary about how strictly you interpret that. but if it's if it's execution, if it's operating, those are CEO roles, right? is not the board's role, right? If it's personnel issues, that's the CEO's role. Yes, the board can have bad experiences with people and share that with the CEO, but it's ultimately the CEO's responsibility to handle that. If it's the CEO, Then that's the board's responsibility. So I think it's defining, and and we've done this early on, what the gov what governance looks like for that company. and you know, if it's things like succession planning, if it's you know, reviewing, approving the strategy, the budget, executive promotions, those are the rule roles. If it's providing guidance on, for example, guidance on. risk, guidance on AI, setting those guide get guardrails, the risk tolerance. A lot of that needs to come from the board, but then for the CEO and his or her team to go implement and show the board how they've implemented and not for the board to go implement that.

Bill Canady: What did the owner have to become willing to let the board challenge? they don't always want to be told what to do, it's their company.

Steven Lustig: Sure. Yeah. I and I would say for me the first example was I I think we surprised them the first year because we didn't automatically approve the budget.

Bill Canady: Yeah.

Steven Lustig: And I think that was a bit of a shock. And, you know, part of it we had questions because we were relatively new. We didn't ever understand everything that but part of it things didn't necessarily make as much sense to us in terms of the strategy that had been communicated and the goals of of the family ownership. and so we had question and I would say pretty much every budget since then has come come up and there's a review and then there's questions and then there's the final approval, which comes later. And I think we've gotten into that being a normal process, but that was not the case. And I think the owner, the CEO had to give up some of the rapid, okay, we're gonna do this right now. The budget's here, I've approved it, I I submitted it, it's approved, we can move on. And giving up some of that authority and also being willing to answer some more of those questions to go back and rethink some of the things that board members had concerns about, you know, was a change, but a change that they accepted.

Bill Canady: Yeah, what changed in the way that the important decisions were made for it ultimately to be successful with the new board?

Steven Lustig: I think it was less unilateral CEO decisions. And when there were ones, we would we would call them out on it, him or her. things that the board as part of that was the learning the governance process, but you know, decisions that were made that should have gone to the board for approval. and did it, we would remind them that this is the sort of thing that needed to be reviewed by the board and their governance responsibilities. And and they learned and when they had similar decisions, they would in the in the future they would come and ask the board. so I think some of that unilateral decision making is probably probably the biggest thing there. And you know that depending on the person, that can be difficult, right? The person who you've got people who are, you know, type A players and are used to just making the decisions and going forward and people implementing it. And now you need to stop and someone else is looking at that. And and that well, that does not need to be unnecessary questions. It does not need to be excessively long, but it is another step in the process that's taking place. and for good reason because they have, you know, strategies, budgets, decisions got modified because the board of directors as a whole found reasons that it was important to do so and the CEO like himself or herself had not thought that through. And it was for the best interest of the company to make those modifications, even if it took a little more time to do so.

Bill Canady: Makes a lot of sense. So if you're advising a a new CEO that they've got a thousand days to really create value, three years to get it going, what must that CEO understand in the first 30?

Steven Lustig: Yeah. I mean I think they need to come up with a plan. but I think they need to understand who's who at the company is doing what. What is the company doing well and not well? And then create the plans to address those, to keep supporting the things and people who are doing well to address through training, through guidance, or replacement if necessary, the things that are not going so well. To understand assuming the company has a board, understanding the board's expectations and the ownership's expectations. Right, what the goals are. If you don't know the goals of the owners, and that could be a PE firm, it could be a family, it could be the public shareholders for a public company, but not understanding that it makes it very difficult for the CEO to craft strategies, budgets, plans, hiring that is intended to meet those goals. You need to understand what those objectives are first. And I think understanding the people, the processes, and those objectives. are some of the first things they need to do in their 30 days. A lot of a lot of listening and learning and not jumping to action so quickly, but coming up with the plans that will lead to action later on.

Bill Canady: All must be demonstratably better by a hundred days.

Steven Lustig: Well, f first is the CEO's knowledge and and control of the situation. hopefully through that learning activity, they know a better, have a better feel and a better understanding, really not so much a feel, of what the current situation is and what the potential is.

Bill Canady: Mm-hmm.

Steven Lustig: I think that, you know, they need to have a good understanding of the key customers, their key team members, their board and their ownership. So they understand how to best work with all of those groups. I think they need to have a plan ready by a hundred days of what they're going to do to achieve those that hundred that thousand, sorry, that thousand day objectives, that thousand day terms, so that the board and the ownership can start looking at that and they can work together on guiding that. I think that's critical. You you need to look and listen, but At some point you need to start doing things or at least planning to do things and discussing those plans with the relevant parties. And so I think that needs to be, you know, if not finalized, far enough along that you can start familiarizing people with it so you can have those discussions and so you can fine-tune it. because otherwise now you've got 900 days left and then you have eight hundred days left. And how long, how long are you gonna keep listening and learning without a plan?

Bill Canady: Yeah, it goes fast. So by day one thousand, what should the business be able to do without depending on the CEO?

Steven Lustig: That's a great question. And that's especially true for you know companies that have been founded by individuals and are still led by individuals. the company should be able to operate with that CEO, that founder, on vacation off the grid for a number of weeks. and you can debate what number that is, and it's weeks, a month, whatever, or something. They should not be needed for day-to-day. The business development function should not just depend on that CEO, founder, and their relationships with people. Because if it does, you are really throwing a lot of risk in there. and if you actually want to sell at some point, that becomes a big challenge for the people looking to buy. so you need to have a sales process. A sales and business development team. You need to have leaders who are empowered to make decisions. One, if the person's on vacation or sick or indisposed. But even if they're not, right, delegating can be very difficult for founders of companies. It's their baby. They've made all the decisions from the beginning and letting those go is understandably challenging, but it's really important for the success. The leaders and the lead the leaders delegating to their teams are enabling one people to grow and develop but also you're moving these decisions down to the points where people are more familiar with the reality of the situation, the facts on the ground, the customers or suppliers that they're dealing with. And so that that delegation is is is is challenging, but is very important. And defining these things, right? Having a structure, having an org chart, Defining which roles are responsible for what areas and what levels of responsibility and decision making. Not saying, well, I'll let this VP and that VP go work it out together because we're all just, we're all, we're all grown-ups here. We are all grown-ups here, but we still need to have a structure. And I think the CEO just abandoning that responsibility is not appropriate. The CEO needs to be a part of defining what different departments do. where the responsibilities are, where those borders are, where that collaboration is and what the level of authority various people have.

Bill Canady: Where would you like people to find out more about you and your work at?

Steven Lustig: Yes, appreciate the question. So you can go to my website, lustigglobalconsulting.com. you can email me, Steven at lustigglobalconsulting.com, and that's lustig as in L-U-S-T-I-G. those would be the best ways. You can see some of the work I've done on the website. you can reach out to me. Obviously, I'm on LinkedIn as everyone should be. And those would be the best places to go find out some more and engage with me.

Bill Canady: Fantastic, Steven. This has been wonderful. Thank you for being on the show today. Everyone, you can reach out. We have Steven's links in the the bio below. Please follow up with him. He'll be great to help you. Steven, thank you so much for joining us today.

Steven Lustig: Bill, thanks. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I enjoyed it.