Performance And Cultural Alignment Expert Andrew Rush On How To Predictability Increase Your EBITDA (#51)

Steve Wells: [00:00:05] I'm Steve Wells.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:00:06] And I'm Jeffrey Feldberg. Welcome to the Sell My Business Podcast.

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Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:01:35] Welcome to episode 51 of the Sell My Business Podcast.

Andrew Rush has a history of improving financial results through optimizing the collaboration of teams and developing more effective senior leaders by focusing on the culture and behaviors required to be successful. Andrew has been a consultant and a leader in turnaround situations and led companies that were recognized as being one of the top 50 best managed privately-owned companies.

Andrew does professional speaking and training engagements for small and large groups across North America, covering the topic of performance and cultural alignment: aligning your team to increase the predictability and profitability of your business. Some of the groups that he has been asked to speak with include the Chief Executive Network, TEC, Vistage, Mackay CEO Forum, Industrial Exchange, Business Transaction Forum, and Presidents of Enterprising Organizations.

Andrew has been interviewed for Forbes Magazine and appeared in numerous webinars and podcasts for North American and European audiences. Andrew started his career with Carpedia in 1997. From there, he went on to various companies in the building materials, aluminum, and construction industries as Vice President of Operations, Vice President of Sales, General Manager, and President.

He has held leadership positions in companies with 25 to 1,200 employees in unionized and non-unionized environments for both publicly traded and privately held firms. He returned to Carpedia in 2017.

Andrew also focuses a large amount of his time trying to align his three children aged 17, 15, and 11. This audience is usually his most challenging.

Andrew, welcome to the, Sell My Business Podcast. It's such a delight and a pleasure to have you with us today and thank you for taking time out of your schedule.

So, Andrew, before we do a deep dive into how you help companies grow and become more profitable and all those wonderful things that go along with that, what's the story behind the story of how you got to where you are today?

Andrew Rush: [00:03:52] I'll start with University because it was a turning point for me. I almost failed at a university in second year and in retrospect the lesson that taught me the discipline that I applied to learning changed with that experience.

And that set the stage for me through my working life. I had a lot of great experiences. First of all, with Carpedia, the company I'm with now doing consulting, work all over the globe for four years. The lifestyle caught up to me so I left went to work for an ex-client, but loved the work that Carpedia does.

And I don't want to sound like too much of a fan here, but it's part of the story because I eventually came back after 16 years of working in different manufacturing companies and construction companies and leading them through different situations. But four years ago, wanted to come back into a business and a culture and a business model that I'm a passionate fan about.

And so that's my story going back 25 plus years.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:04:59] Wow, Andrew, to leave Carpedia, and then to find yourself back there 16 years later, that's a testament to just how you view the company and how the company viewed you. So, what’s Carpedia, what's this company all about, and what brought you back?

Andrew Rush: [00:05:15] The company is all about unlocking higher performance and an improved culture. And we're one of the few companies that I'm aware of in North America that we'll actually have a pre-committed estimate of what that's going to be so that the client that hires us understands that there is going to be an estimated savings to the money that they're putting into an engagement.

A lot of companies will talk about that after the fact, but very few will state upfront this is the value that we're going to unlock for you in what is typically a five-to-six-month engagement.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:05:58] What will be of interest for our listeners in the Deep Wealth community they're going through the Deep Wealth Experience and are learning how to prepare for a liquidity event, ultimately from when you start preparing and the preparation work itself to the liquidity event, the name of the game is to increase your enterprise value, which is going to come from growth and profits and market disruptions.

And I know you're in the center of all of that. So, why don't you talk to us of what that looks like and what your secret sauce is? How do you begin to do that for a company?

Andrew Rush: [00:06:33] Well there are really two things in our approach. One is that unlocking of enhanced or improved profitability. So, every business runs into problems, challenges, opportunities, depending on how you look at it, where the company can be doing better than it is currently. And as a third party, we come in with unbiased, unfiltered viewpoint as to how to do that. How do we look at processes? Figure out better ways of doing thing. Figure out how managers can be more effective and figure out do we have the right tools, meaning how we budget and forecast and how we measure whatever it is that we do. All of those things combined lead to an increase in the bottom-line performance of a business.

So, that would be the first approach.

The second one for people thinking of selling their business is that what we're seeing and you would see this as well as those with the foresight to see three to five years down the road that there are things that they can be doing now to better prepare their business for sale it's still not common, and that there is a realization that if you can have that foresight, there are things that you can do to increase the number of buyers and the enterprise value, the multiple that you may get.

And where we factor into that side of the equation is improving the levels of effectiveness of the management team.  A lot of our work is focused on not just how do we improve the process, but how do we leave an organization with executives and managers who can continue to build upon that process.

So, the owner in exiting is going to be asked most likely to stick around for a period of time. If they are the face of the organization if they're involved in all of the day-to-day thinking that runway is going to be extended to a much longer period of time. And the buyer of that business is going to be thinking, not just of what is the value of that business today, but they're probably thinking two or three acquisitions on. And if that management team isn't strong, then that's going to drag the organization down. They're not going to be able to work on these growth initiatives, if they're just trying to figure out how to do whatever it is, they do day in and day out.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:09:17] That's interesting, Andrew because you really bring home a key point at Deep Wealth. One of my favorite questions to ask every business owner, it's a simple enough question. But the kinds of answers I get that would amaze you. And the question is, does your business run without you? Because as you alluded to if your business doesn't run without you, you've got no business to sell.

And in other words, the stronger your management team, the higher your enterprise value, the more profitable your company is going to be the more desirable it's going to be to a future buyer. So, I know for the benefit of our listeners, you and I have had a number of offline conversations and you have shown me the most incredible charts and graphs and what you track when you go into a company that's down to the smallest of details, but why don't we start with the management team?

So, when a company engages you in and you begin the process of going into that company, what are you doing on the management team side to identify the people who should be there and identify the people who aren't there and then the people who just shouldn't be there?

What does that look like? And how do you do that? For some takeaway points for our listeners in the community.

Andrew Rush: [00:10:30] Those charts and graphs that you're referring to are part of a two-week diagnostic process that we do before engaging with clients. So, it's a way that we figure out what value it is that we think we can unlock. And it's a way for both parties to feel each other out, to see if there's a fit. And with the management team, we go into any company with the belief that managers can be better than they are today.

If we don't look at it as good or bad. Studies, Gallup does one that would suggest that seven out of 10 managers are incapable

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:11:10] Wow. Seven out of 10.

Andrew Rush: [00:11:11] Seven out of 10 and it's not far off. I think what's what we see, but it's beside the point because there isn't a pool of these great managers waiting to come into businesses, they're already working somewhere else.

So, it's the acceptance of the fact that if that statistic is true, then the work that needs to be done is how to make them more effective. How do we make them more capable? In our studies what we do is we spend a day in the life of frontline managers. And we see all of the things that are getting in the way of them actually solving problems to make the business better.

And typically, 40 to 60% of any manager's day is caught up in dealing with the reactivity of what's in front of them, the problems that keep cropping up over and over again. But they are so mired in the vortex of it, all that they can't remove themselves and actually get themselves out of it.

So, these studies are meant to highlight, okay, this is the current reality. And we do this at a variety of levels. We do this in different departments and it begins to paint a picture of just how much opportunity there is for the organization to be better. If you can take some of that reactive time and converted into proactive time.

The other piece then is in an engagement, not just figuring out how to give managers back that time. But as I said earlier, operating under the assumption that they've never been trained how to be good planners and good problem solvers. They haven't been given tools. They don't have the capabilities of developing forecasts of what the future may look like.

So, that doesn't mean that you're underperforming managers are going to become superstars, but if you can give them the right tools and you can coach them on how to be better planners and problem solvers. Then a rising tide lifts all boats. Managers, if they can become incrementally, better lifts this weight off the organization.

So, that VPs don't have to be as involved with managers. The owner doesn't have to be as involved with the VPs. And now you're freeing up the capacity from an owner's perspective to figure out how to position. The business for either sale or growth and to a buyer of that business, they're going to see that drag isn't as prominent in this business as with others.

And it becomes a more attractive business to purchase.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:13:59] Now, Andrew, what's interesting is you look at leaders and managers, people who lead the organization.  You shadow them and you really are looking for a whole number of things. But one of the things that I understand you look for is how much of their time in a given day is actually effective. And I suspect that your answer is going to shock our listeners.

When you look at a particular leader or manager, or how many minutes of the day are they actually doing work that you would consider effective?

Andrew Rush: [00:14:28] There are various categories that we look at. The answer to the question is that 1% of their day is spent on average being proactive. So, either setting expectations with employees, so they know what's expected of them, or following up on those expectations, or fixing the root cause of a problem so that it doesn't occur again. We know in any manager's day that there's a certain amount of administrative time.

That maybe depending on the nature of their position, they will actually get in and do work on the activity. So, I don't want to say that those things aren't part of their jobs because they are, but that 1% of the proactive time versus the 40% to 60% of reactive is really where we center most of our focus.

And even by carving out an additional 5%. If you did that on all of the supervisors and managers and directors time, a fivefold increase just in the effort spent in solving problems, layer on top of that, if they could be more effective, if they were actually trained to do it better, you can start to see how the effect to the organization can be quite significant.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:15:53] And so Andrew, when you talk about a fivefold increase for our listeners, we're not really talking about a lot of minutes or a time. Because when you're saying 1% of a leader's day is on proactive kinds of activities. Rough math, what are we saying? Less than five minutes a day,

Andrew Rush: [00:16:10] That's 1% of most people's days, seven minutes. So, we're again, I'm using ballpark averages, but if that can be. 30. 35 minutes a day. Huge difference.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:16:20] What you're saying, and for our listeners, please listen up. Andrew is saying that your leaders, your managers are on average are spending perhaps seven minutes a day on proactive kinds of activities. And if you can bump that up to 30 minutes, dare I say, 40 minutes a day, tremendous results and change happens.

So, what happens when we get our right leaders and our managers focusing on 30 to 40 minutes a day, what kinds of things are we seeing? What does that mean?

Andrew Rush: [00:16:50] Well beyond the impact it has in processes improving, which means that the company is becoming more profitable. The biggest effect and the one that owners of businesses will often point to at the end of an engagement is the change that it has on the culture. So, the frontline people who have come in to do the same job for a year, 10 years, 30 years, have felt the same frustrations and seen the same problems occur.

And when those problems start to be picked off one by one, one, they feel better about it coming into work. They're more engaged in what they're doing. If it's done well, they can actually be the catalyst behind some of these changes. As the supervisors now have more time to go out and engage with employees and get their ideas.

And all of these wins across an organization are really what is at the epitome of culture. Culture is not one big thing. It's a whole bunch of little things. And when there are more good things happening in a business, the feel of it when you walk through the office or the plant. Just the buzz that gets created when an organization starts to solve more problems.

People listening, can't see me moving my arms around, but I've felt it before. I felt both sides of it before when it didn't exist. And when it did, and to me, that can be as powerful as the bottom-line improvement. And certainly, from an owner's perspective or a CEO's perspective, the way that can impact you from a stress relief perspective, knowing that the business can operate without you. I don't know how to put words to that feeling but there's a relief in knowing that the culture of the business because it is so strong could be sustained. Even if as the owner weren't physically present all the time.

I think that it's most powerful. And as I said it's what is most talked about after these successful engagements that we have.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:19:02] So, Andrew, if I'm listening as a business owner of what you're saying at the surface, it sounds terrific. Culture, you're going to come in and improve that you're going to make my managers more effective on proactive kinds of things. And that really lifts everybody up while they're doing that and getting a good vibe or flow in the company. When it comes to culture, though, culture is a lot of art and science combined.

So, how do you as an outside organization come into a company and begin to help boost that culture or repair it, or even create it depending on what the case may be?

 Andrew Rush: [00:19:39] It's a whole bunch of little answers. But the first thing is the recognition that the culture of a business is something that has become what it is over a long period of time. So, thinking whether it's as a consultant or as a leader that it's going to be easy to undo or reset is naive, but it doesn't mean it can't be better. You know, I've talked a lot about the grassroots level of having more wins of getting employees engaged in the process of problem-solving. All of those things can go miles. And a lot of our engagements, we look for ways to recognize employees and groups of people for their contributions, because that tends to fuel more of that kind of activity when there is some sort of recognition for it.

But some of the time it starts with the owner. So, you know, and then some of them are not sitting and openly embracing a message that we may need to deliver.

And so that can become tricky because we can get hired to unlock increased levels of profitability. But sometimes the owner has to become more humble in the process. They have to recognize that they out of everyone in the organization. The words that they use, the non-verbal emotions that they emit intended or otherwise can undo a whole bunch of good that is being done in other parts of this organization.

And I'm not saying this happens all the time, but some small actions that owners can take can either undo a lot of good or can perpetuate the business forward. And so, in an engagement where we're cognizant of the work that we're doing at the front lines of the organization, but we're understanding that the owner has to be involved and be, supporting in a lot of different ways, this initiative, because if we go into an engagement and we're only dealing from the bottom up, the likelihood that it's a going to be successful and going to be sustainable is much less. And so, there are times where we will have that kind of conversation with an owner before engaging.

And if the owner is unwilling to bend to some degree, then we're not going to put our reputation on the line.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:22:23] Andrew, that's really interesting because you bring up a relevant point. And at Deep Wealth, part of our preparation in our nine-step roadmap is we're asking business owners to identify, we call them skeletons in the closet.

Some people call them blind spots. You can call them any number of things. But it sounds like when you're going into an organization or into a company, part of what you're doing is identifying what may be the skeletons in the business or the blind spots in the business that are visible to you, but they might be invisible to everyone else.

So, if I'm a business owner, who's now looking internally at my business, I would imagine that you see from business to business likely the same kinds of blind spots.  Each business is probably going to be specific and have its own unique set of situations. But I would also think that you're going to see some common blind spots from one business to the next. What would be two or three-blind spots that as a business owner, I should be aware of?

Andrew Rush: [00:23:23] It's what I talked about earlier, which is those intended, but more often unintended things that are said, emotions that are shown, and how that can have such a huge ripple effect throughout the organization. I don't think any business owner truly appreciates how a smile or a non-smile, how having the worst day on the outside brought into the office can move a hundred people to wondering if they're going to be employed the next day.

And I'm being somewhat dramatic, but not overly. And I've been a part of businesses where that was the blind spot of the owner. And unless you're down in the weeds, no one's ever telling you that, hey, you came in and we heard you and your son, your wife, whoever arguing on the phone, and everybody walked away, on pins and needles.

So, I think that one, the blind spot in terms of the impact is number one. The second blind spot is that if seven out of 10, that statistic is true, then it also applies to owners. Just because your title is owner and not manager doesn't mean you don't fall into that seven out of 10.

You've been successful as an owner, despite it and you've probably got some good qualities as a leader, but you'll definitely have some things that could be improved upon to make you an even more effective leader. And how many people who are in a position of ownership have had one of their team members give them feedback on where their blind spot is?

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:25:13] It's interesting Andrew, because really what you're talking about, it's like the emperor with no clothes as the business owner that people just aren't gonna put themselves out there to tell you what they may be thinking, or probably what everyone is talking about. And it also sounds like as a business owner, and I know we see this in liquidity events, you know, those type a high-strung business owner, entrepreneurs, founders, and a lot of us are like that, that it can be difficult to let go. And so, you have a world-class team of liquidity event advisors around you. That's step number six of our nine-step roadmap, but you're telling them what to do when you think you're the sun, the moon, and the stars, and everything revolves around you where you just got to step back and let the professionals do what they're going to do.

It sounds like in these businesses that you're walking into that oftentimes as business owners, we need to let our team run the business and do what they do best.

So, Andrew giving us some hard-hitting advice. This is close to home. As business owners, we don't often hear the truth. People are afraid to tell us, but you come in as an independent third party and your eyes are wide open. You're seeing the blind spots and the information that you have are better for us as business owners, for our companies, for our employees, our profitability, our liquidity event ultimately.

Are there any stories that you can share with us of what you've seen in a situation like this and how your process and system has helped?

Andrew Rush: [00:26:42] There is construction company that we worked with where the owner didn't have a specific timeline for a sale but knew it was in the next five to seven years. And he was the face of the business. He had five divisions, each run by an individual who were a lot of them brought up in the business capable of getting the work that was in front of them done but could be better leaders if the business was going to grow.

And he recognized that to any potential suitor his runway would have to be three years because of his level of involvement. They were profitable, but there was still lots of opportunity to be even more profitable. And for him, we dealt with the profitability piece, figured out, how are they executing the construction jobs and to do it in a more efficient manner?

But we spend a lot of time at that. They were divisional, I think GMs or VPs, they were called making sure that they were figuring out for their own businesses, almost like running your own business, how to be better leaders. So, we coach them in terms of how to conduct meetings with their people, how to deal with people.

One-on-one we helped revamp. The metrics that they were using to manage the business we bought, brought in a little bit more financial literacy to people at the managerial level. So, they understand the impact of what was going on the operational side of the business. And again, it wasn't just one single thing.

It was a combination of pulling these different levers that eventually. Got us in the door and helped us execute a project for this business owner.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:28:37] Andrew, you were brought in and you began to analyze this business. You put it under the microscope. From a business owner who was the face of the company, but said, hey, I want to be out of here in five to seven years, help me figure out how the company can run itself. So, when the dust settled, all was said and done, what were some of your key findings of what this particular business owner needed to do to have the business run without them?

Andrew Rush: [00:29:02] A large part where those five leaders, they were operators. And I hesitate to say the word leaders because they were still leaders, but their leadership capability was lacking. And again, no fault of their own, no one had invested the time to figure out, okay, how does my management team underneath each of those leaders become more capable so that my time can be spent on the business, not in the business. Figuring out how to grow it, figuring out how to make it better.

So, that layer, that top layer. The level of visibility they had on a week in and week out basis as to how were projects progressing was enhanced. So, rather than waiting to the end of the project to find out, they had all of these late charges and liquidated damages. We could tell, week two into any given project that things weren't lining up.

And this was in jeopardy, even though we were so early in the project. So, part of it was creating that visibility around the budgeting aspect and on the scheduling aspect so that they were talking about things from a proactive perspective rather than waiting until things were in dire straits to intercede and get things back off the rails.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:30:23] So, it sounds like Andrew, like in so many businesses, we start out, we bring on a team of people that they're great people that help the business grow, but the business gets to the point where the people may have the title, but not the skills to support that title. And it sounds like in this case when you walked into the situation, this is what you found and you helped to streamline the process.

And put some measurements and some statistics and some data in there for people to look at for benchmarking to begin to figure out what needs to be done on a project-by-project basis. And so, when all was said and done how did things work out for that particular business owner? 

Andrew Rush: [00:31:00] The business owner went to market pre-COVID and decided to pause in the sale process. And at this point in time is in a holding pattern hoping that through the recovery that he'll be able to go back out to market and get the price that he's looking for.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:31:20] A really interesting point as we record this interview, we're still in the midst of the pandemic, which doesn't seem to be going anywhere quick, although there is light at the end of the tunnel, that's for sure. So, how has the pandemic affected businesses from what you've seen and the clients that you're working with that as a business owner, I may not be aware of?

I mean, we have the obvious things of what we see and what we hear out there, but what would be an insight scoop perhaps as not being talked about as much that as a business owner, you can share some insights and tips with me on what I can do in my company.

Andrew Rush: [00:31:55] I think culture is being talked about, but I don't think business owners are doing as much as they could be to maintain a culture where you've got people who are no longer face-to-face with one another. And I think that's going to be a real challenge. I know in our business we've onboarded people that we've never met.

So, how do they absorb the Carpedia culture? We hope that it's ingrained to enough of a degree with the people that they're working with, that it rubs off. But when you're not, across the table from somebody in a building that has a feel to it, it's hard to replicate.

There are businesses that haven't really sat down and said, okay, it's never going to be this the same, but that doesn't mean we still can't perpetuate a culture. And so what are the things that we have to be doing day in and day out to keep that same feel amongst the group of people who are now no longer physically interacting with one another.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:33:05] You know, Andrew, you bring up a point of that is becoming talked about more and more in the sense that there's probably going to be a situation where perhaps some employees will come back to work or some employees will continue to work remotely. It would appear as though remote work isn't going anywhere.

So, it's still relatively early days. But what kinds of advice or strategies would you have for business owners on how do you take your culture that was in-person and now have that for the work-at-home people virtually?

And how do you build that culture on a go-forward basis?

Andrew Rush: [00:33:39] I have two pieces of advice. One is, I don't think we're measuring the right things. So, personal productivity, depending on the article you read is either up or down for working remote, but what about the actual output of whatever a group would collaborate on and deliver to a client? If that wasn't part of your measurement system before I have just through conversations with other CEO's heard them say that lack of collaboration, that ability to just walk down the hall and bounce an idea off someone has affected the output of that work.

And I don't know when that will show up, but I do know that if all you're looking at is well, we've saved X amount of office space. Travel and entertainment is down and all you're doing is looking at the cost side of the equation and not the quality of actually what's being done.

You may be having some negative outcomes that are flying under the radar. So, that wouldn't be my first piece of advice. The other one is as much as possible to create places where small teams and big teams come together. We started doing this right after COVID where once a week, every Wednesday.

Somebody would volunteer to host an event completely optional, but we were seeing people and we were having fun. And to the point where we still do it, we've elongated the cadence. So, it's every other week, but for a group of 60 or 70 of us, 20 or 30 on any given Wednesday night or every other Wednesday, get together, see each other.

And have fun and it's not the same as all being together, but it's better than nothing. And w we'll stay doing some of the things that we're doing remotely even when COVID is gone, but we'll also hang on to some of these things as well because they're in way of perpetuating the culture as our consulting teams are remote all-over North America.

And I think that's the key is that we're very intentional about creating times and places where the organization can get together so that the culture doesn't get lost over this pandemic.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:36:01] Andrew, that's interesting because what I'm hearing you say is there's always two sides to every coin. That's what I like to say. And certainly, the pandemic has many negative things that it brought. On the flip side, though, on the positive side, it sounds like just through the technology and having virtual get-togethers with some of your team members who are across the country, that this has now become your culture. This has now become a bit of a ritual every other week that you'll likely continue. Once things get back to normal and embrace it as part of your culture, which is good to hear of how you're pivoting internally to the changing environment.

So, it's been interesting as I look back here, you've shared with us how, and this is hard advice for many business owners to swallow, how a business owner can often be the blind spot in the company at the center of some of the challenges that a business is going through. And you've shared how, if we can take our 1% of proactive time, which is seven minutes, and bump that up to 30 minutes, 40 minutes, the impact on that is tremendous because it'll go through the entire organization. And then you've talked about culture and the importance of that. And so, it sounds like when you come into an organization, really what you're doing, it's not something that shows up in an Excel spreadsheet as a formula.

Yes, you do all the tracking and you have these metrics and the graphs that go along with it, but you're using that information, that data to make some inferences of what, as a company, as a business owner, we need to do to take the business to the next level.  It's whole art and science.

So, congratulations with that. And I know when we first started talking, that's really what got me excited of some opportunities that you can offer the Deep Wealth community in terms of taking a holistic look at your business. Asking the tough questions, getting the right systems in place to help you get from A eventually to Z on your path to your liquidity event.

So, Andrew, as we get ready to wrap up this podcast, there's one question I love to ask every podcast guest. I want you to think back to the movie, Back to the Future. And in the movie, there's a DeLorean and the DeLorean is this incredible car that will take you back to any point in time of your choice.

So, imagine Andrew, you look outside tomorrow morning and there's a DeLorean waiting just for you to go into it. And you can go back to any point in your life when you're a child, when you're a teenager, a young adult to where you are today, but you have to pick one point and you go back to that one specific point in time.

And you're sharing, it could be lessons learned or some wisdom, whatever you'd like to share for your younger self, what would you be sharing?

Andrew Rush: [00:38:45] Wow. You didn't give me this one in advance.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:38:48] Now No, you know why.

Andrew Rush: [00:38:51] Exactly. That's very sneaky of you. It's cliche, but I believe it that nothing, no adversity, no negative event that happens is insurmountable. That the amount of time we spend stressing over things that end up working themselves out, or that you can work out with some hard work and some thought. And I know personally, it's hard to self-talk the stresses that you're under professionally and personally, but if you can always be looking to the future, remember that you've been through similar events in your past and know that, at some point in time, whatever it is, that's getting you down in the here and now it's short term and you will be much more productive.

You will be in a much better mindset if you can keep your head above the clouds and focus on bettering you and bettering the people around you.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:39:56] Wow. That's some terrific advice and thank you for sharing that. Andrew I'd like to put this in the show notes, as we now wrap up the podcast. If a listener would like to find you and speak to you about what you might be able to do for their business, where's the best place online to reach you and talk about that?

Andrew Rush: [00:40:15] Sure. So, you can go to my LinkedIn profile. Andrew Rush Carpedia would probably be the easiest way to find me. Our website Carpedia.com would also have a contact me section under the people section there.

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:40:28] That's terrific. Andrew, once again, thank you for taking part of your day to spend with us and our community. You really appreciate all of your insights and your wisdom. And as we look to wrap this up, please stay healthy and safe.

Andrew Rush: [00:40:40] Thanks. Thanks for having me, Jeffrey.