Ahern's Larissa Clinard Talks Logistics, Driver Shortages, Team Culture, + More

COVID & Essential Business Status

Adam: That was — you know, trying to
keep the business going. Becca and I were working with — who were we working
with about the essential business status? Oh, that was WEDC. All over the
place. We were writing letters and mailing them out and emailing people, just
because no one knew.

Larissa: Nobody knew.

Adam: How crazy it was going to be. I
don't want to say we were panicking, but we didn't know if tomorrow they're
going to tell us to shut the doors. Did we need to explore a different avenue?
We were looking at public bid boards for other types of products that we could
make, because the whole goal was just keep people working — keep the machine
going, just do whatever we can to be safe but also keep things going. We were
looking at, well, in your industry, the piping — because we do a lot of welding
and machining on aluminum tubes and pipes — but there were all these RFPs in
Milwaukee for, they weren't quite light poles, but it's a lot of the variation
of the same thing. It was certainly an interesting time. The operations side at
Ahern, I'm sure, has been similar. So what did that kind of feel like two years
ago when a lot of this stuff started to happen?

Larissa: We went through the same
question marks. Fortunately, the leadership team there is fantastic, and we're
very transparent, saying the exact same things — a priority is keeping people
safe, and then doing what we need to do to service our customers, life safety
industries who we manufacture for. So it was this balance between, what are we
going to be able to do, and what still needs to happen so the customers can
function? It was very interesting to see how much of it was going to happen.
There's so many people who can't do their job not at the workplace, or on a job
site, or servicing a customer. How many of those are going to remain open and
accessible versus how do we keep our people safe?

Adam: I think that's been one of the
interesting things to try and wrap my head around. If you're not in
manufacturing, if not in construction, a lot of people have this idea that
everybody on the planet can just work from home, and products are going to show
up, fire protection systems are going to show up. That is just not the way —
things are made somewhere, and then sometimes it's a printer right there, and
then somebody's got to install them or service them.

What Ahern Does

Adam: You guys really do it all. We've
used Ahern in our facility for a long time on the fire protection side of
things. I didn't realize how much manufacturing you guys do. So it's kind of
interesting — we're in the manufacturing/construction business, but we're
typically just sourcing, or we're providing products, we're not doing the
installation. But you guys have a fabrication team, a fabrication department,
and you're doing the installation.

Larissa: The way I love to describe it
to people who — unless you own a building, or you're in construction or a
municipality that uses our services, you probably don't have any idea what we
do. So when I talk to people in fleet or logistics, and just try to explain
what industry I'm coming from, so they have the context of that, it's —
anything that runs through a pipe, we either design it, manufacture/fabricate
it, install it, or service it. Then people sort of start to get their head
wrapped around: okay, that's plumbing systems, that's HVAC, that's industrial
process wastewater work, that's fire suppression, and then all the little stuff
that goes with it. Then they go, oh, okay.

Adam: So is mechanical contractor kind
of the umbrella term on the construction side?

Larissa: Mechanical contractor, fire
protection contractor — depending on which lane, which geography, who you're
talking to, people will be very dialed into various versions of that. But that
would be the big broad umbrella tag for it.

142 Years of Family Business

Adam: I know Ahern is a
multi-generational family business. Was it always that vertically integrated,
or did you guys start out on the construction side, or start out on the
manufacturing side? How did that evolve?

Larissa: 142 years ago, downtown Fond
du Lac. 1,500 employees — close to that, when you ball up all of our field
staff around the country. They total up to about that on any given day. It
flexes depending on what we've got for projects. We came from residential contracting
actually — when hot water heating systems were first a thing. It's interesting
— as you look back, you can tell that this has been a very strongly
family-oriented, family-initiated business that has survived over the course of
142 years and has really evolved to not handle that residential stuff anymore,
but made a distinct turn into, hey, we're in the construction, industrial
applications.

Adam: So residential, and then to
commercial or industrial contracting, and then the fabrication side — or kind
of all happened at once?

Larissa: I would not be the expert to
speak on all of that. But for all of my time, certainly many years, we've been
manufacturing, really servicing those commercial clients, not in the
residential world at all.

Victaulic & Fire Protection

Adam: What's the brand of the pipe
fitting that you see everywhere? A friend of mine that I race with over at Road
America — he runs the sales department. Is it Victaulic?

Larissa: That is a very well-known,
very commonly used fire protection system.

Adam: So is it the whole system, or is
this the casting that holds the pipes together?

Larissa: A little bit of both. And
again, definitely not the expert at that. Mike and my counterparts in the fire
protection channel, who deal specifically with fire protection, can talk your
ear off about Victaulic couplings and pipes and who we get what from. But
that's a name that definitely —

Larissa's Career Path

Adam: What is your — I know you've had
a few different roles at Ahern — what does that evolution look like, and what
are you in charge of now?

Larissa: I have been with Ahern for
almost 15 years. My current role is the Director of Fleet and Logistics, but
over those 15 years I have made a lot of pit stops, which probably makes more
sense of how I ended up doing what I'm doing. When we moved back to Fond du
Lac, my husband and I — I said, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, I don't know what's
there or what it is or where should I try to apply? I was following my husband
back here. I said, oh, Mercury Marine, and some place called J.F. Ahern
Company, let's try and see what they've got. I applied for a position to be an
assistant in our accounting department, of all things. Lo and behold, it was
probably one of the best opportunities I could have started out in, because you
get to see the fundamentals of how the operation — when you understand how
money flows through an organization, you understand so much more about their
business. It was a real undiscovered or unappreciated blessing at the time.

Larissa: From there, I moved into
several different roles around the organization. When they had reorganized the
way we serve customers about a decade ago, I was able to be a part of
supporting some of those transition things that the senior leaders were doing.
Part of that was understanding that, hey, if Ahern was going to grow, they
needed to maybe centralize some of their support functions, like supply chain,
like manufacturing, like fleet. They did not have that before. Where I started
to go down this lane was — it was actually trying to help hire somebody to be
Ahern's first fleet manager. They interviewed various folks who had some actual
experience in that lane, got through that process, and for whatever reason, the
person that they were hoping to bring on board said, you know what, that's not
the right fit for me, and I'm going to decline your offer. They said, we think
that probably, if you want to learn fleets, we can get you through that piece
and be patient about it, but you've got, you know, maybe the rest of the skill
set — how do you feel about that? I said, well, you know what, there's an
opportunity to build something if you can be patient and help me learn.

Adam: That's been basically my career,
it sounds like — how we're learning stuff.

Larissa: Phenomenal opportunity,
because everything I've been able to do, everything I've been afforded the
opportunity to do since, has been just that: take something and go build it. To
help make the business better, to help support the operations better. Not that
things were broke or weren't getting done — obviously, companies not around to
get better every day, right, unless they've got some things figured out — but
it was, hey, there's an opportunity for somebody to get a single set of eyes on
processes that are being done in multiple places throughout the organization,
and, hey, what would you say if we tried it this way?

Fleet vs. Logistics

Adam: So on the fleet side, is it
input parts for manufacturing? Is it output parts for the construction side? Is
it coordinating everything?

Larissa: The way that Ahern looks at
fleet is literally the trucks, the vans, the pickup trucks, the delivery assets
that you see on the road. It's all of their vehicles.

Adam: Their vehicles.

Larissa: We've got about 550 of those
scattered across the country.

Adam: I hope you have a big map where
you can see where they're all located at one time.

Larissa: Beauty of technology. That's
one of the first things that I tackled — when you're asking somebody to get
their arms around that, you need some tools to be able to do that. So that's
where that was born out of. As I spent about six years in that, one of the
things that naturally sort of dovetails into that is, okay, the delivery of our
product — yes, they sort of helped with those vehicles, but not the process of
doing that. Each of our manufacturing shops was kind of doing that on their
own. We said, how about if we looked at doing that all together? So if we had
multiple trades' worth of product going to a single job site or a single area,
we wouldn't be sending multiple trucks there, which sounds simple but is really
actually pretty hard to do, especially the larger you get. About two years ago
I said, hey, if you are willing to give me another team member to start to dig
into this, I really think that we could do some awesome stuff, but it's going
to take a few reps. That's what we've built on the logistics side of the house.
So now my umbrella covers both the fleet side and logistics — how do we
actually get the stuff we manufacture to where it needs to go?

Necessity & Invention During COVID

Adam: Funny, they say necessity is the
mother of all invention, and the last two years for us there's been a lot of
inventing because of the COVID era. You guys have done that as well — freight
and logistics and trying to get parts here, and then trying to figure out a way
to get a 35-foot chunk of metal across the country to a job site. That has been
an extreme challenge. We have, because of that, built out some really cool
tools as well. For a while we kind of put together our own little logistics
team here in Wisconsin. We were driving around to all of our vendors to help
them coordinate with their vendors. If we have a metal fabricator that sends it
to an anodizer that sends it to a powder coater, their systems were plugged, so
we actually went and did their job for them. Everybody's teaming up, trying to
make the — spirit of keeping the wheel moving.

Larissa: Keep that cadence to the
supply and make sure stuff's arriving.

Adam: On the output side, having to
ship large chunks of metal — carriers don't always like that, so you have to
eventually own more of that process. We've become our own truckload broker now.
We have truckloads that we schedule every single week to certain geographies,
and we really don't use a lot of LTL carriers. From a mapping standpoint, our
sales team can actually see a master map of all of our truckloads that are
scheduled the next couple months, and they can start to go after business and
support customers that need things going to that area. So it was very
challenging, but it's cool to see how inventive you can be during a period like
that.

Larissa: And being in control of your
own destiny, rather than at the mercy of whatever the environment is kicking at
you, is huge — always, but especially over the last two years.

Execution vs. Invention

Adam: How much of operations do you
see as executing on what is already known, versus this inventiveness? I think
during the last couple years, it's probably shifted towards inventing every
day, as opposed to just executing what is previously known. When you think
about operations, how do you break down those two things?

Larissa: That is a really interesting
question. Over the last two weeks, I have been trying to work mostly in that
latter piece that you mentioned — we're executing things that either were
handed to us as a process, or that we've said, alright, this is getting the job
done today with the resources that we have today, but it might not be the way
we want to do it for the long haul, or the best way. Let's maybe take a pause
and ask some questions about, could we do it differently, or hopefully better.
That's so hard, because it takes time, it takes energy, it takes the
willingness of other folks — because you've already kind of promised people
directly or indirectly, this is how the way things are. Then people expect that
to always happen. It's difficult at some times just to say, you know what,
these were the marching orders on a Tuesday, but Thursday we're going to go the
opposite way.

Adam: It's a culture — getting people
to come along with you on that first journey, even if it's just answer the
questions, or have the open mind. But oh my gosh, isn't it so worth it when you
get to that point? And it's not a, “okay, look what we did,” it's more of,
“hey, look what — how much better this could be for everybody, when we're all
running in the same cadence in the same direction.” It just feels so much
better. I think it very much depends on how much time passes from the initial
big idea and the big change until they actually see the fruits of the labor. We
made a couple huge changes last year, and I knew people were quite skeptical,
which a lot of times that's just the way it is. But if you can really speed up
the implementation, it's like, oh, that's what you're getting.

Larissa: Because it feels so good when
you go, oh, I get it, and I don't have to worry about it, and they've proved it
and made my life easier.

Adam: Exactly.

Larissa: We've been through various
iterations of that over two years, and it does feel good to get some of those
successes. You're right — it takes some folks longer than others, it takes more
effort in some places than others. There's a critical mass of people that have
to get behind it.

Army Background

Adam: So you spent some time in the
Army too.

Larissa: I did. That's where I started
my — I'll call it my real job.

Adam: Your college? Have you been able
to take a lot of what you learned — because you think of operations, you think
about military, you think about the ultimate operating role — how do you see
similarities between what you learned there and now what your role is?

Larissa: Many did not appreciate it at
the time, and I'll tell you that. Backing up a little bit — I went to school, I
went to Marquette University for advertising and marketing.

Adam: Big fan. A similar career path —
did not go into the Army, however.

Larissa: Really because I was doing
ROTC there, I was sort of like enjoying learning about stuff, but knowing I
don't have to do an internship, and guess what, I'm not going to do this for at
least a period of time, because I'm going to join the Army after this — that's
how this path works. I have not used that degree a day in my life, I like to
say. But it has shown me that, okay, that means you can just go after whatever
it is, learn that, do that, find something that you feel passionate about or
that you believe in, and then just learn how to do that. I think that's what —
honestly, as I left school, got into the real world — it was nonstop, hey,
you're just supposed to know how to figure this out. As a leader in the Army,
they don't tell you that part when they're grooming you, but you're not the one
taking marching orders if you're on the officer side of the house. It was like,
you're expected to kind of know what you're supposed to be doing. While — I'm
being a little bit facetious about the training, yes, they're preparing you to
lead other soldiers — but some of the mundane things, like one of my first
assignments at my first duty station was, you're in charge of this unit's
budget. I haven't balanced my checkbook in a little bit.

Adam: It helped with your future
accounting role, though.

Larissa: That's what I mean when I say
I didn't appreciate it at the time. My whole adult career, so to speak, has
been an exercise in going, I don't know how to do this, but I've got to figure
it out, and I've got to go find the people who are smarter than me who can tell
me maybe where I should not misstep, and where to go find my resources, and
then put my own spin on it and make it mine and just go.

Comfort With Ambiguity

Adam: Do you think that's a
personality thing? Like some people are more comfortable operating in that
environment, and some people want the clear marching orders of —?

Larissa: Absolutely. And now later in
life, as a manager of a team — a great team — we've been very deliberately
clear about the type of people — for my team, because we're building things.
There is no instruction manual. If I come in and try to tell somebody, well,
I'm going to be able to on day one give you the process map for all the things
we do — if you need that, you won't be comfortable here. You will be stressed
out, and you'll probably not enjoy your job at all, and quite likely be very
frustrated. But if you're somebody who is okay with a little bit of ambiguity,
and knows that there is a lot of runway ahead of you — if you're willing to put
in the work, if you're willing to keep an open mind, if you're willing to be
transparent about where you're stumbling and what things you are uncomfortable
with — then game on, I want you on my team, and you're going to build some
amazing things that feel really good when you get there.

Adam: It's interesting — you see that,
because that's very much how myself and a lot of people operate here. I think
acknowledging that not everybody operates that way is important. But also, if
somebody's going to be on a particular team with a particular person, they kind
of got to have some of those characteristics, can be comfortable.

Larissa: You need all of those kinds
of people in most organizations for it to run. You just have to be really,
really clear about, hey, this particular role needs this skill set. It's going
to be a little chaos.

Adam: Yeah.

Larissa: I've just found over the
years that you're doing a huge disservice to everybody involved if you're not
really transparent about that. So it's always served me pretty well of being
blunt to the fact of, hey, you could be the most talented, smartest, well-educated
and experienced person, but if this isn't the right fit, you won't enjoy it,
which means you probably won't be super productive, and we'll all not be happy
about that.

Adam: You're speaking our language.

Larissa: Yeah, they had a conversation
like that with me in this very room.

Adam: Except there was no furniture.

Larissa: There was no furniture. We
just — they just moved in, I guess. Well, not me yet, but yes. I think Adam and
Tyler had a very similar conversation with me about three years ago, which can
be so uncomfortable, right?

Adam: It is, if you're not — I was
losing my mind, I'm like, I think I'm giving them false expectations.

Larissa: Big leap of faith on both
parties, definitely.

Plans vs. Adaptability

Adam: From my view, just kind of the
way that we all operate — or a lot of us operate — it seems like it's better to
get moving and get learning and get adjusting than it is to write out this big
long plan. You've got to have some idea, some architecture, some structure. But
as long as people can adapt as new information is provided, and everybody's
comfortable with that, that seems to have a better outcome.

Larissa: What's the adage — the only
constant is change. So you can build the best plan in the world, and it will be
null and void in 24 hours. So let's take your energy and focus it on the skill
of being adaptable, the skill of foresight and trying to stay ahead of things,
and not a rigid business plan.

Adam: Exactly. Some structure.

Larissa: Yeah, a little bit of
structure.

Adam: Don't look at me like that. I
love the structure.

Larissa: That's true. They're pushing
me outside my comfort zone.

Adam: It's good for me.

Larissa: And you push me out of my
comfort zone too. It absolutely flows at different points in your career and
your life, and depending on what you've got going on in the work world, in the
home world — there's appropriate times to say, hey, I need that level of
consistency and structure and process versus, man, I'm ready for all in,
running at this thing, using the creative side of my head. There's definitely
not a wrong way.

Adam: Absolutely. Like you said, it
kind of swings back and forth.

Lean Manufacturing

Adam: Do you guys do, or have you
gotten into, lean manufacturing, lean process flow? I would imagine in that
world it's a lot more batch process and batch manufacturing. We've gotten a lot
of lean initiatives over the last couple years, and it's accelerated the last
six months. From an operations standpoint, do you guys dive into that at all?

Larissa: Again, not necessarily where
my world is focused, but from what I do know of the efforts — we don't make
widgets. Everything is a one-off, everything is custom, every system is
different. So some of the inventory and the components, some of the things, are
going to look the same, feel the same — that kind of thing — that's probably
where the lean and the trying to just-in-time and trying to level stock, those
types of things, that's where that takes place. But also maintain the
flexibility, because every building's a one-of-one.

Adam: Yes, exactly.

Larissa: I think it's a different
version of that, given the type of manufacturing that we do. There are places
that that can be applied to try to make the work environment as conducive to
good management, good process flow, but less about the actual product itself
and applying that principle. If that makes sense.

Adam: No, that makes a lot of sense.
In our world — as I may have mentioned before — we use a lot of pipe, we're
producing light poles, and we also do electro-mechanical assembly. On that side
of the business, it's a lot easier to implement lean process flow. But on the
pole side, for whatever reason, that's a little bit more difficult. But there's
still a lot of cool concepts, and a lot of those we've implemented.

Hiring Drivers & The CDL Stat

Adam: So what else do you want to talk
about?

Larissa: Gosh, when you said logistics
— I was just having an interesting conversation yesterday with some of our
other senior leaders about what the blanket question to everybody in their area
of operation. We've got folks scattered all over the country doing their small
piece of what makes the Ahern machine run, and just hearing people talk about
what's the big on-the-horizon thing that they're concerned about. My
opportunity to talk is — hiring drivers is hard. My team consists of delivery
drivers, and there are so many different versions of them, but I have to figure
out a way to make my version of that sound attractive enough that somebody
wants to come work for my team and deliver our materials. There's nothing new
in that — you've been hearing, you know, driver shortage, you can drive down
the road and see 10 billboards saying, hey, have you had a CDL and you want to
come work for me? I've only got 20 grand for you.

Adam: That's pretty hard to compete
with — sign-on bonuses.

Larissa: Interestingly, as you look at
it, talk about it, hear other people, read stuff — there are some crazy stats.
Something along the lines of there are like three times as many credentialed
CDL drivers as there are assets that actually need to be moved. It's just a
challenge of fit.

Adam: Interesting.

Larissa: When you — I'm going to nerd
out on my stats here — but when you consider that in the United States, I think
it's something like 70 to 75% of all cargo that's got to go somewhere does it
on the roadway at some point in its journey. When you think about it, maybe
that's not so surprising, but when you put a number to it, you're like, yeah,
that takes a lot of trucks, it takes a lot of drivers. But if we have so many
drivers, why is everybody talking about, I can't find them, and that's why it's
so hard to get freight from one place to another and why it costs so much.
You're like, well, it's because you need to find the right driver to get into
the right position. Because not everybody wants to stop just driving either —
you have the loading, the unloading, you have the size of the freight, is it a
simple skid or is it a bulky tube? Do I want to unload? Do I just want to be
somebody who hooks up to a trailer and goes and drops? Do I want to be away
from home, or do I want to be home every night? Do I like early mornings? In a
market where you can do a lot of things right now —

Adam: A lot of options.

Larissa: They say, oh yeah, I do have
that skill and that credential, but by the way, I don't like any of the job
opportunities that are right there for me, so I'm going to do something else.
That to me is kind of mind-blowing of, like, that's what we're up against.

Adam: That's some good news, I guess.
There seems like there's a lot of supply — it's just a matter of finding the
right fit. Maybe people have to get open to moving. I know in Fond du Lac here
— Envision Fond du Lac — there are certain incentives that the county is
putting in place to try and get relocations. I had no idea there was that big
of a supply. Is it CDL?

Larissa: Generic statistic of the CDL
credential, and I'm sure that includes everybody who's done this as a hobby or
hauls milk on the side or has absolutely no appetite to do that for a full-time
profession. But just knowing that the skill set — if you were to tap into that
market, there's actually probably quite a few folks out there. It's just the
challenge — and this isn't unique to certainly this profession, but it's a very
visible one right now, and has been in this conversation for quite some time — it's
creating a lucrative enough career out of that where somebody isn't like, oh
man, there's too much regulatory compliance, I'm not dealing with that, I'd
rather go do something more enjoyable and shoulder all this responsibility at
the price point that somebody is willing to pay me for my work. So — just
mind-blowing to wrap my head around. Wow, and it's still so hard to find
somebody to do that. That's one of the things that in my world is a concern,
hey, I don't get to tell my folks, hey, we're sorry, we just can't pick up your
load today. It's got to get to our customer.

Hot Shot Drivers & Regulatory Compliance

Adam: Do you see the rules and
regulations shifting at — like in our industry, we're using a lot of, they're
called hot shot drivers, so it's like an F-450, and a 40-foot open trailer,
gooseneck trailer. I don't understand it fully, but that's a way to work around
some of the compliance. Do you see other things happening in that realm?

Larissa: I think people have been very
creative in where they can. There are still some limitations no matter which
way you get around stuff, unless you get to a real small load, and then you
talk about efficiencies and whether or not that's actually the way you want —

Adam: A lot of economies of scale.

Larissa: In some applications it's
been, hey, we know that this exists, so we're just going to operate underneath
it. We talk about that for our field teams all the time — being aware of what
those are, no different than making sure you're safe on a job site with
regulations, things like that. It's just understanding your environment,
staying inside the boundaries. The regulatory compliance one is so complex,
because you have people who are attempting to do their level best at applying
regulations and rules and boundaries for the safety of the greater population,
but are using that with a very broad brush. Sometimes the end user goes,
unintended consequences, made that really difficult for me to get work done,
and you might not understand. Hey, well, if this makes sense for an
over-the-road driver who does nothing but drive across the country back and
forth all the time, you now are applying that to people that fall outside of
these boundaries once or twice but now have to play by all these rules. For a smaller
company or a company that has a tiny team that does that, you've really put
some pretty big handcuffs.

Return Freight & Back-Hauling

Adam: Absolutely. What do you guys do
with return freight? I would imagine you can schedule loads that are full in
one direction. Do you ship across the U.S., or is it Midwest primarily?

Larissa: We split them. There are
folks that drive an Ahern logo truck — a semi or a state truck or something
like that. We would do that inside pretty much the boundary of Wisconsin,
because that's where financially that makes sense. We've got enough physical locations
where we're going out and back and have enough things moving in multiple
directions at the frequency we would want to do that. Outside of that, we're
calling somebody else, because they can return with a full load from another
customer. We're not big enough that we are back-hauling from Washington or
California or Texas.

Adam: So part of your team's
responsibility is the outbound from your facilities, and also stopping by
another facility on the way back to home base and making sure the loads are
optimized?

Larissa: Yes. In our internal
footprint, there's usually enough stuff — hey, there's a stage at our shop,
this needs to get back to Fond du Lac to home base, all that kind of stuff.

Mythbusters & Left Turns

Adam: Have you ever seen that
Mythbusters episode where they try and prove if it's faster to do only left
turns — like the UPS driver?

Larissa: I have not seen it, but I've
heard of that.

Adam: For whatever reason, it ended up
being a certain percentage faster to — it was either only left or only right —
depends on the city. And then there's a huge safety factor that has dialed into
that.

Larissa: I had not typically heard of
it from the optimization way, but that makes absolute sense, because typically
— so say if you're not crossing traffic, so it would be a right — a right turn,
I would think, would make more sense then?

Adam: Yeah.

Larissa: A huge safety factor, which
in my fleet side of the brain is always dialed into — people are talking about,
this is what we prohibit for our drivers to do, and that's a huge one in those.
I don't know if it's UPS or FedEx or one of the other big ones, but they were
known for that's a policy because it prevents so many collisions that we just
take that out of the equation. It's no different than the utility company puts
a cone there — it's not because they think anybody's going to see it and not
bump into their truck. It's so that person goes and sees what's around their
vehicle before they take off.

Adam: Draw attention to it.

Larissa: Forces them to go and be
aware of the situation and what's changed since the time that they parked their
vehicle there.

Adam: Very smart. My wife's cousin is
an IT systems manager for FedEx, and we've kind of geeked out a few times on
the algorithms and custom software that they've developed to optimize things.
It's wild. I think if you could peek at the back side of Amazon — I can't even
fathom. At some point it's so optimized that the only — the next level is to
create your own FedEx, which Amazon is doing. So it's mind-blowing.

Wrap-Up: Army Reflections

Adam: Anything else you want to run
through? Your Army days or any —?

Larissa: School — I'm so very grateful
that I did. Wouldn't trade it for anything. I have friends, lifelong still.
Actually I was on a Zoom call with some of them last week, of the very first
people that I met. Very clearly early on — it did a little over four years of
active duty — it was like, that's not my career path. I don't know that I have
it in me to have this much patience for the long haul. But for all the reasons
that we talked about — create some pretty strong bonds. You just have people
that have a like mindset for better or worse. You know what you signed up for,
and you kind of know what the stakes are, and that sets the tone and gives you
some perspective pretty quickly. It also taught me all of these things of, hey,
there is no “sorry, I don't know how to do it,” you have to figure it out.
You're literally at some points talking life or death, which is not popular to
think of it in those terms, but it forces you to say, hey, “I don't know” is
not an option, and you decide and you move on, and hopefully you made the right
choice. If you didn't, you hopefully learn from it. It was a great context, a
great way to start out my adult life. It also taught me right away, like,
that's not what I wanted to do — there are people that have dialed into that
and have made a career of it, and god bless them. It also taught me that, okay,
I'm going to take some of these things that I learned, and go apply them and be
perfectly happy in a civilian version of something else.

Adam: Well, freight and logistics and
operations and contracting and manufacturing — that's all super important. It
makes the world go around.

Larissa: It does. And there is no
cookie-cutter version of that. All the things that we talked about — your
version of that looks so much different than our version of that. But they all
are similar enough that you can appreciate what somebody else is going through.
We share some of that.

Adam: For sure. Well, thank you very
much for coming on.

Larissa: It's a pleasure. That was a
lot of fun.