The B2B Podcast Index
Over The Air Podcast

Leading Digital Transformation in Industrial America ft. Nick Petersen

Over The Air Podcast · 2025-11-24 · 34 min

Substance score

48 / 100

Five dimensions, 20 points each

Insight Density9 / 20
Originality8 / 20
Guest Caliber12 / 20
Specificity & Evidence11 / 20
Conversational Craft8 / 20

What our scoring noted

Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.

Insight Density

9 / 20

There are pockets of genuine operational content - 21 work streams, a 21-month build timeline, 10-year battery requirement driving edge compute, and tariff movement from 15% to 145% - but they are heavily diluted by leadership clichés, meandering anecdotes, and metaphor-heavy filler ('riverboat captain,' 'row the boat,' 'iron sharpens iron') that consume significant airtime without adding substance.

we went through the entire process of starting from scratch in less than 24 months to a viable enterprise ready industrial IoT solution and digital platform, not just the hardware. We built out mobile applications, we built out client user interfaces, we did everything. And to be exact, it was 21 work streams
We've seen tariffs go from 15% to as high as 145%. They now have levied back down around 50%

Originality

8 / 20

The edge-compute-for-battery-life rationale and the nuanced Mexico-vs-China manufacturing comparison offer some genuine practitioner texture not often discussed together, but the management and leadership content is standard consulting-speak and the episode produces no truly contrarian or first-principles arguments.

one of the core tenets of what we did was software defined hardware, we knew that if we needed to make those changes in the long run, we could
people come into a factory to work and they're, they're great people, they know what they're doing. But then next week they're gone because there's so much new business down there

Guest Caliber

12 / 20

Nick Petersen is a credible operational practitioner who genuinely built an industrial IoT platform from scratch in a rugged environment - not a thought-leader or career podcast guest - but Division Director at a small, private-equity-backed division limits seniority ceiling, and his self-described non-technical background occasionally keeps discussion at a surface level.

I've got Fortune 500 utility experience working with tech. I've been, you know, digital consultant and led external teams of 50 to 100 people
I'm not technical, I'm not an engineer. But what I thought we did well was we brought not only those technical experts to the table

Specificity & Evidence

11 / 20

Specific numbers appear with enough regularity to be useful - 10-year battery requirement, 21 work streams, 4.5 - 5 months of RFI, 14-week ocean transit from Shanghai, dock position counts by facility type - but customer names are deliberately withheld throughout and many macro claims (near-shoring boom, tariff risk) stay at a general narrative level.

that was a culmination of four and a half, five months of RFI work
you're 14 weeks by boat out of, out of Shanghai to the US

Conversational Craft

8 / 20

The host shows some genuine curiosity and lands a few useful follow-ups (pushing on the COVID ambiguity, probing the edge-compute rationale), but the framing is largely flattering and collaborative rather than challenging - no claims are stress-tested, the guest is allowed to meander at length, and the finale is openly sentimental rather than substantive.

one of the things I really admire about the approach that you brought
I had a follow up, but we'll talk about it over beers

Conversation analysis

Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the verbal tics along the way.

Share of words spoken

  • Speaker B70%
  • Speaker A30%

Filler words

you know72like61so57right36I mean31kind of13actually8sort of1obviously1

Episode notes

For the final episode of Over the Air, Nick Petersen, Division Director at FortifyIt, joins to share how he transformed a traditional loading dock equipment company into an intelligent IoT platform - in just 21 months. Learn about choosing edge computing for 10-year battery life, managing hardware development in rugged environments, and navigating manufacturing through COVID, bank failures, and tariff uncertainty. Nick offers hard-won lessons on insourcing vs. outsourcing, the future of Mexico manufacturing, and leading digital transformation in traditional industries. Essential listening for anyone building IoT products or driving innovation in industrial settings.

Full transcript

34 min

Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.

Welcome back to over the Air, AI Connected devices and the Journey. Today I am joined by a very special guest, my good friend, Mr. Nick Peterson, Division director at Fortify. Correct. Nick, thanks for being on the show. Yeah, excited to be here. So, as I'm sure you know, and folks at home are, I think, just beginning to learn, they're discovering this podcast looks different. What's going on here? This is actually the final episode of over the Air. So we're honored to have have you be here with us today. Honor's all mine. I'm excited. So fortified. Not exactly a household name. No, not at all. Tell, tell the folks at home. You know, what's Fortify? What are you guys up to? So Fortify is a division of a really great loading dock equipment and services company called duraserve. We are the main industry's first intelligent platform for loading dock insights and health analytics off of things like overhead doors. So imagine your garage door at your house is an overhead door and a loading dock leveler. So levelers, they extend, they go on the truck and then goods move across them in and out of big stores like Target, Home Depot. Everything you think of or the clothes we're wearing, they've crossed a loading dock before. And we provide the insights that drive better outcomes for our clients. So, folks, stick with me. If you're asking yourself, are we really going to talk about docks and doors on the last episode? So we've had, I'll call it 500, 300 guests on the show. The reason. So I picked Nick Peterson for two reasons. One, way back, all those years ago, for episode one, we had my very good friend, Mr. Keith Nothiker on the show, CEO of BackTrack. And I wanted to end all these years later with another very good friend. And of course, I've made a lot of good friends on the air, but most of the guests are new to me. The audience is learning as I am. But the second piece, the thing that I thought the audience would find very interesting is the journey that you have taken. This whole Fortify thing, including naming it. Right. It didn't start out as Fortify. No, it didn't. And this was a soup to nuts reboot in every way. And so for folks out there, my gift to you, parting last episode here, parting gift is if you've been tasked with either internally at your company or some kind of spin out, you've got to take a totally offline thing and drive technology into this thing, like innovation, compute at the edge. Folks, this is the episode for you. So I'd love. Why don't we start question one? You know, let's back up to T minus 30 days. So, you know, you're 30 days from starting at Dura. You haven't even come in yet. Give us the situational analysis at that time. So at the time I was doing global technology consulting, I had worked across many different industries, many different verticals, was consulting and guiding them through their own technology journeys. And. And I knew I was going to be coming into this organization. And all I knew at the time was they had a fledgling or a development of a platform. They had some clients that were interested. The beauty of where we're at is we work for the industry leader in our space and the clients were already validating this idea of what we were going to do. So the idea had been proven, the outcomes were in alignment with where they wanted to go. And that's all I knew. And so coming in eyes wide open was, we're going to build this and we're going to supercharge it. So oftentimes new folks are not brought in unless it's a huge challenge. Things aren't looking great. Like, what were some of the big rocks, the big initiatives where you were like, okay, look, we're going to have to stop doing that, start doing this. As you looked at the landscape, what. What were some of the big. Potentially this even came out in the interview process, I think, where you were like, to do this right, we're going to have to start doing or stop doing xyz. Yeah. So when. When evaluating what. What drove me to it, right, Was big opportunity, big challenge. Their aspirations were high, which I love. Big aspirations, big challenges, sign me up every day. But after being on the ground for about 72 hours, what I realized was the idea was great, the shell looked good. But what we were going to be missing or the gap was to scale our existing product, platform and partners, they really weren't cut out for the journey. We were going to take them on to scale to the enterprise level. We don't deal with, you know, Acme client who has a single location in, you know, Nashville, Tennessee. We work with the biggest names, the biggest brands and the expectations that they have as individuals and organizations. The bar is set really high. So to be able to get from where we were to where we needed to go, it was going to be a big lift. And we knew that immediately. We were. We were a very small team at the time. So when I looked at it, it was really about one. We need to evaluate the platform and the Solution, Is it fit for purpose for what we want to achieve and what our clients want to achieve? Two, do we have the appropriate funding and strategy model? We didn't. Three, did we have the right partners in place to help us achieve what our goals were? And I felt like we, there were better options that we could bring to the table that would help us accelerate our journey. I mean as, as you know, we went through the entire process of starting from scratch in less than 24 months to a viable enterprise ready industrial IoT solution and digital platform, not just the hardware. We built out mobile applications, we built out client user interfaces, we did everything. And to be exact, it was 21 work streams continuing in that kind of like day zero or just before day zero kind of analysis. What were some things that were off limits where it was like, look, I'm going to have to operate within these constraints. You know, the environment is rugged. I mean it's really about what we have to work within. Right. And some of the things that were important to us and to our clients were one, fit for purpose for, for the rugged environment. Two, we are a strong believer in not interfering with the operating environments in which our IoT devices live. So having a long battery life, being able to have our products soak in the field without power, we knew we needed to drive the foundational elements as well as the potential next generation data insights that we were going for. So it needed to be expandable, it needed to be able to graduate up with us as we went. And ultimately at the end of the day we just needed to be able to surface the data insights as accurately and timely. We needed to be able to not interfere with our clients, you know, day to day operations. And ultimately at the end of the day is we needed to be reliable and be trustworthy in what we were providing to them. Trust is so important, especially with a device that sits in a remote operating environment where our clients or us are not sitting in. So we have to be very reliant, almost a fly by radar technology when you have no visual rec, you know, the ability to visually recognize where you're going. Yeah, you guys, I mean a famously difficult operating environment for folks at home and we're I think trying to avoid some of these customer names, but if you have purchased anything at any big box store, you know, the names that you visited or the types of names we're talking about here. Right. So, and so you think about a big box store and you know, connectivity is a challenge. Right. And just the operating environment itself is a difficult challenge. Hardware innovation is much more difficult than people realize if they've never done it before. So if you were speaking to somebody in the audience out there in Iot land and they are listening to this episode, trying to get a sense for their own journey that they're about to jump in, what were some of the hardware wins and losses in this development process? What did that journey look like as you're going through the design process? You know, the thing I liked about the design process, and I always say this, and people do push back. I'm not technical, I'm not an engineer. But what I thought we did well was we brought not only those technical experts to the table, the mechanical engineers, the electrical engineers, the data scientists, but we brought subject matter expertise to the table. And so as we designed, we actually took a step back and we did a series of design thinking workshops to first identify who's going to use it primarily, who's going to use it secondarily, even tertiary, who are the users and influencers. And then we started mapping them all together so that we could understand who's going to use it and at what points do they touch point with the assets or the equipment, when don't they and lifecycle map out the assets and all that. But that drove in our opportunity to be able to sit back and say, this is a good design, this is a bad design, this is a design we're not sure of. And everything was open, everything was fair game. There were, there was nothing off limits when it came to ideas. But ultimately, at the end of the day, as we kept going back to is what is our North Star and what's the end in mind we want to accomplish. And I would say that while it felt like we were in this brainstorming phase for a long time, we had a number of people on it who you'd get messages at 10 o' clock at night. I had this idea. I was out sitting in my garage looking at my garage door, or I was looking at the operating environment, or I did this research. And the, the beauty of that was, is while we were focusing on hardware, it didn't feel like that. Like I've talked to a number of people who lead lead hardware development, or they're on the client side and they develop their own product to take to market. And their journey sounds so technical to me. And that to me, that's always a surprise because I, I would never be able to make it in those environments because I'm not technical. But I understand what good looks like and I understand how to sort out where those pitfalls may be. And that's probably just my consulting background. But I thought we had such a well rounded group of people and people who were invested in the outcome. I mean, we've all been on teams where people are just there because their boss signed them up. Every single person, whether they were on the consulting side of it, whether they were internal, whether they were third parties that we brought in, we did a tremendous amount of research. They heard about what we were doing and it was a spark. I mean, they were, they were invested in where we were going and they wanted to contribute. And so that was my favorite part of this entire process. I don't know if that answers your question. I feel like I've kind of meandered through the whole process. No, it does. And just to dive into it, because that spark definitely came through on our side of things. The team that we had attached to it was very excited to be attached to it. And one of the things that I think caused them to feel that way was one of the engineering decisions that was made early on. And oftentimes the difference between genius and bozo is a decade thing that looks crazy, ends up looking crazy like a fox 10 years later and what is now fortified Durasense. At the time you, I should say you made the decision, we're going to do the compute at the edge because it's the only way to get the battery life we need. So, you know, for the folks at home, and correct me if I get all this wrong, if I get anything, whatever, but like a giant big box store, okay, Like a really big one is going to have how many of those, those sliding doors? You know, if you look at the different distribution models. So that, that's end of line, right? So anywhere from 3 to 10, you can go up to midpoint or last mile. Delivery could be 20 to 50 dock positions. Then you move up to distribution centers. 50, 100, 200. I mean, they can be massive, right? And so you, you can't be, you know, you can't be putting hands on all the time. There isn't a plug to plug it into, you know, so you need, you needed ultra long battery life. I think the engineering requirement was eight years. 10. Okay. Started at 10. Okay, 10 years. And to get 10 years, the decision was made to do the compute at the edge. And that was a pretty revolution. I mean, yeah, it was a pretty revolutionary decision at the time. Compute at the edge. Because everyone was in the cloud at the time. It was like cloud, cloud, cloud. And this was like no, we're going to do compute locally at the edge. I know that you don't want to get probably too technical, give away too much secret sauce, but can you talk about that? Because at that, you know, whatever it's been two, three years later, that decision has aged really well. You know, now everybody's talking about compute at the edge. But Nick Peterson was very early to that, I thought. And I just wonder like, what were some of the things you were thinking about as you were weighing that decision? Well, I appreciate it. Those are kind words for somebody who made that decision. Just de risking our entire business process. For us, it wasn't done in a silo. Right. The compute at the edge wasn't. It was actually a multi factor decision that took into communication protocols into the data we wanted to collect. Whether I don't want to go too much into it, but at certain points versus other points, what we were actually going to surface back to the cloud and what we could do on the edge. And it really was a byproduct of the fact that we needed to be able to put a piece of hardware into the, into the environment for an extended period of time. And we wanted our clients to trust the information we were putting out there, which really drove that. So the compute at the edge almost became a necessity. But to me it was very logical. When I lined up our hardware team, our firmware team and our software team and we stacked hands on. Does this make sense? What are the risks associated with it and are we willing to accept it? It's, it's all a statistics game at that point. And understanding that one of the core tenets of what we did was software defined hardware, we knew that if we needed to make those changes in the long run, we could, but it wouldn't necessarily handcuff us or put us in a position where we had to stop the train we were on and that we could go back and make those changes and give us the agility to move what we needed to into the cloud, but also leave on the edge or push more to the edge for us. I mean, I'd like to say that we saw the future before we did. We didn't, but we knew what options we had out there. And I had a really capable team that, that I trusted and they trusted me to be able to sit down. Iron sharpens iron and good. There's no good ideas, there's no bad ideas, there's only ideas. And then we force ranked them into what made sense and that that's really how we got There. But, and I think we're the benefactor of that, that decision now, right? We, we were ahead of the curve when we made that decision and it is playing out rapidly for us. So, you know, one of the things I really admire about the approach that you brought is you took a company that has a history of innovating and you said, okay, how can I, like, force multiply its ability to drive, you know, tech into some of these products? And your solution was, you know, you went out and built a really strong team of external partners. And what, you know, for folks at home, obviously very, is that external partner for a lot of people, but that's not for everyone. You know, sometimes it makes more sense to build the team internally, sometimes it, you know, doesn't. You're just not geared right to be able to manage an external firm. So definitely don't do that. What would you say to someone that's out there? They've been tasked with managing a technology initiative at their company and they're looking at, do I hire externally, do I build a team internally? Like, what skills do they need to have to make either one work or that suggest they can't make one work? It's a big, that's a big topic, right? I mean, we could talk about that for an hour. So I think first and foremost is you have to start with the culture of the company. What's, what have they done, what type of skill sets do they have? And at the end of the day, there's no right or wrong answer when it comes to insourcing, outsourcing, hybrid, whatever, whatever you might want to do. For me, you know, in my experience, I've, I've got Fortune 500 utility experience working with tech. I've been, you know, digital consultant and led external teams of 50 to 100 people and been a part of transition processes, moving it back internally and externally. What I will say is it all starts with a plan and a strategy and being able to effectively communicate that strategy to your internal team, whatever it is in, whether we're going in or out. Because just like anything else, whether you're asking for budget, whether you want to do a capex kickoff, you're doing a project, whatever it might be, you have to be able to articulate what it is you want to accomplish and how you're going to do it to gain that buy in. If you don't have alignment, nothing will ever, will ever succeed. You know, we use the term on the project. Row the boat. Come from Minnesota. PJ Fleck, up at the University of Minnesota uses that with his football team. But it's this idea of being on a crew team that when an ore hits the water, every oar hits the water. And when an or exits the water, every, you know, every oar exits. And it require requires this really tight coupling and fit and alignment to being in the same direction, hitting at the same pace and all moving at the same direction. Long winded answer but if you're going to go internal one, you need to have make sure all your stakeholders are in line and they understand what the hiring process looks like, getting the right caliber of talent. It's not as simple as just posting a job posting and hoping you get the right people. Same goes for looking outside. You have to write, find the right partner. We didn't just stumble across our partners. That was a culmination of four and a half, five months of RFI work. Interviewing down, selecting, qualifying through other people asking really hard questions and having really deep conversations. Not about the good stuff. Tell me why this partner's great, but more importantly is tell me why they're not. Tell me when they stumbled because the things I might be feeling or maybe starting to validate, I want to know what they are to decide. So if I do go with a partner, I know where the weak spots are and where those gaps are. But then ultimately is, is when you make a decision to go internal or external, it requires a tremendous amount of fortitude because there's good conversations, there's bad conversations, there's project plans, there's direction, there's strategy decisions to be made. And it really requires a high level of accountability to yourself, to your team. But ultimately making sure that everybody who's in that room, internal or external, they understand where you're going and can't deviate from it. Because one of the biggest issues when you work with external partners is one, you need to justify that spend upwards to leadership, which is acceptable, you need to be able to do that. But you need to hold them accountable to what you're trying to achieve for the investment. I mean you've been entrusted with a high level of investment. You need to multiply the value out of that. And that's, that mentality has saved me, has guided me and I think, you know, we did this extremely fast. I think we did this in probably about 30% of the time it would take most companies. And I'm, I feel as if we, the value of investment we, we received for what we did is, is far, far greater than what we actually put put down. One of the challenges you had to solve within was or is, I guess these bookended kind of unique moments in, in history, I guess of on the front side, Covid, you know, so easy to look. Everyone looks back at Covid and they're like, oh, it was so obvious that you should have done this. Never do that. It's like, guys, none of this was obvious at the time. Yeah, you know, it wasn't obvious that it wasn't a zombie apocalypse. You know, like, I mean, looking back, we all chuckle and of course it wasn't. But at the time, you know, it was kind of a scary or at least extremely challenging, with no obvious precedent. Now Trump is going through and there's this kind of tariff economy effect that is making supply chains kind of difficult to predict. For folks like you that have a global supply chain, I guess one of them is a historical question and one of them is an ongoing question. But blend it however you want to. How have you solved from, you know, within those kind of unusual set of circumstances? That's a good question. So we were, we've really been, you know, impacted by, influenced by really everything that's been going on. And it's even broader than that. I mean, Covid impacted the world in a, in a very serious way. I mean, a lot of lives were impacted in one way or another. But it also, on the flip side, almost supercharged the American engine of consumption. I mean, you look at distribution centers, investment in supply chain and logistics, we realize that while we are probably the number one consuming nation in the world, it was amplified during COVID because people were at home so often and now they had more time on their hands and they were consuming so much that the supply chain and logistics ecosystem had to keep pace and keep up just to be in the game. And then you have things like Amazon that are driving that home shopping experience. But then as we move through it, then you have geopolitical risks in the world. Things were happening around the world that were impacting decisions on manufacturing supply chain. You look at barge capacity coming from Southeast Asia into North America, that impacted us. You're right. Tariffs now are also on the front burner. We've seen tariffs go from 15% to as high as 145%. They now have levied back down around 50% with the most recent changes we've seen. And then on top of it, you can take into changes from, you know, nafta, the USMCA that are also impacting us. Near shoring of manufacturing facilities is massive right now. That also poses its own challenges I mean, I can go on and on. You can talk about interest rates. I mean, there's a significant number of external forces that are impacting our business, but maybe not in the way that most people would think. It's, it's really about, you know, I, I look at my, my position in the company and what's being asked of me and, you know, I'm a riverboat captain. You know, when you drive a barge down a river, a lot of people don't know this. They steer one to three miles ahead of the, on the river. They're never steering for where they're at in the river. They're looking far, far ahead. And so while we have to be nimble and agile in a business, we also need to be looking at what these impacts are. It's interesting, actually. I want to go back to the COVID era and just poke at that. You talk about what's in the best interest of the business, some period of time, you know, three miles down the river, to use your example. You know, I wonder what did it look like for you at that time? Because what I hear from a lot of business leaders is it wasn't even obvious what to optimizing for. You know, it was. It was almost like steering down a river that's completely covered in fog that you've never been on before. You're not even sure if it bends to the right or the left or goes straight. Yep. What did that look like from your vantage point? To be, you know, the. I'll give you an example. You know, in our business and maybe many others at home, our bank failed not during COVID but shortly after. You remember the. There's a tremendous amount of consolidation in the fcc, but we had the, the Silicon Valley and the First Republic bank failed. And you know, I remember thinking, are we going to get hit with like bubonic plague next? Like, these are things that when I went to business school, they had stopped teaching and talking about because they were settled. This was like polio. We have, we have cured that thing and we don't even, you know, so there is no playbook for what you do when your bank fails. You know, for example, just curious, like, you know, what did it look like to steer down the river when you can't see the river? You know, it's funny, I don't know if I looked at it that way. My career has been filled with ambiguity and unknowns. I've taken on a lot of, you know, big challenges and carve new, you know, we call it, you know, we're going to carve ice, right? We're like an icebreaker in the North Sea. Sometimes you don't know where you're going, right? And, and so my career has been, has been kind of highlighted by, you know, situations like that. And so dealing in ambiguity, unknownness, you know, carving a new trail. To me, it just, it's natural. You know, we're out on the wilderness, we're, you know, planes, riders. So when I looked at, like, what, what does this mean? Or where are we going? I didn't look at the, those external factors like that and say, well, I don't know what's going to happen with retail. I don't know what's going to happen with logistics. But what I did know was, is that the application of our, our solution on top of an ecosystem, dock doors, dock levelers, they're not going anywhere. We still have to buy things, we still have to move them. The American engine is going to churn, and products and goods are always going to be needed. Now get rid of the economic factors, things like a downturn or a crash, right? I mean, that's, that's all things we haven't seen in 100 years. But when I looked at it is, it's, you know, we're almost too big to fail, and those things have to happen. People need food, people need pharmaceuticals, people need building materials. I mean, so to me, it wasn't really about, you know, being fearful or scared of what those, those outside forces could do to us. It was really about put your blinders on, focus on what you can fix. Now, I used to have a boss of mine and, you know, we sold big, big tech deals, and he used to say, he's like, you know, how do you cut down a tree one hack at a time? And that's really the mentality we had to take. We knew the problems in front of us, we knew what we were going to solve for, and we had that fortitude to just keep pushing forward despite everything that's going on around you in a burning house or in chaos, right? And it probably, I mean, frankly, like I've told you, right, I didn't work in Iot before this. I've never done hardware manufacturing. Almost this, this blind faith that, you know, I can figure it out. You know, I'm an intelligent guy and, and I can make, I make good decisions, and that's what I had to fall back on. I don't know if it's probably a good or bad thing, but, you know, send the first guy in and we'll see if he makes it back out. Right. That was me. So one of the things about your career that has always impressed me is like, you're the guy that gets parachuted into hotspots, solves problems, rolls up his sleeves, does the thing. I'm curious to hear your take on manufacturing. You know, relations with US and China continuing to not be so great. We've got this neighbor to the south, Mexico, that just kind of hangs in there and takes the punches. What's your take on where this is going? What are things going to look like in 10 years? And it seems like we're seeing a lot of, I don't know, a manufacturing boom in Mexico. I don't know if that's your observation as well. It is. I know you do a fair bit of manufacturing in Mexico. You know, paint us a picture of 2035 or 2030. It's going to be a much better place in Mexico from a manufacturing perspective than where we are today. And that's. It's not a reflection on anything other than. And it's funny, I get asked this question a lot because we were kind of new into it. Much like everything else we're breaking new ground on. We were. Were down there evaluating manufacturing partners at a time when everybody was, you know, full transparency. There were calls I made where I was laughed out of the room because everybody took their minimum spend in Mexico and raised it, knowing that people were moving from China to Mexico and we're not that big yet. And so there's Tier one manufacturers who wouldn't have the conversation with us, and they're doing great. I mean, Tier one is Tier one for a reason. Right? And we evaluated. We didn't just talk to them. We went down, we toured facilities, we talked to clients, we walked through them all. But the one thing that stood out to me about Mexico, that really got my attention was they do really good things there. Like, we've been manufacturing in Mexico, all kinds of things. But when it comes to ems, it's relatively new, especially at these lower tier levels for people who maybe don't have the spend, are growing a business like we are and haven't graduated into doing a million units a year or spending millions of dollars. And when you start to step into those, the. The difference between there and. And China really starts to stand out. And I think it's ultimately because in China you have generations of people who have maybe even worked at the same plant, but they have this. EMS is in their blood. It's like talking to a Midwesterner whose family has farmed or raised cattle for hundreds of years. You just know it. You're brought up in it. You're, you're acclimated to it. You're, you're, you know, it's just part of who you are. And there's this sense of pride. Mexico's on the verge of that, but right now there's, there's just a lot of risk and there's a lot of, there's a lot of competition, which doesn't help. I mean, people come into a factory to work and they're, they're great people, they're highly intelligent, they know what they're doing. But then next week they're gone because there's so much new business down there, it's hard to keep people. And so fortunately we've, you know, we've had the opportunity to kind of watch and the strategies they're employing, they're coming along, but they are, they're years behind China right now, but they're saving graces. They're super close. They're competitively priced, especially now with the tariff implications. Shipping charges, time to market coming out of China. I mean, I think as of right now, you're 14 weeks by boat out of, out of Shanghai to the US Air cargo is expensive, right? I mean, they have all these really great things for them. The usmca, you can go through the list, but where I think it is, is, is you have to de. Risk. You have to evaluate the risk of are you willing to take that risk, be more hands on, be more involved, be down there. Good thing. It's easy to get to, right? But when I look at 2035, I think they're a power player. I really do. I mean, the overland trucking is super simple. I think the ports, the land ports coming into the US for importation are getting much better. They're busy. But everybody's starting to figure out, what does this look like? I mean, I talked to customs brokers who. They've been doing this for 25 years. And at one point I was talking to a gentleman and he's like, I don't know. I mean. And you could hear it in his voice, like, I know what I'm doing. I've been doing this since I was, you know, was a young man. And he's like, I don't even know what this means. But everybody's in it together, right? We're holding hands, we're trying to figure it out what I think 2035 actually looks like from a manufacturing perspective. Not In Mexico. But even from Central America, I could see that shifting even further south in Central America because from Central America you're still not that far from the US and as this, you know, as manufacturing develops, as markets change, I mean, even as like a country like Mexico starts to become more consumeristic, right. And they're driving demand, I actually think it, it's, it becomes a pretty big power. There's factors that could influence that. Right. And there's geopolitical risk in anywhere you work. But I do believe, I mean, it's going to start humming in the next five years because more and more people are taking on the China plus one or just simply manufacturing down there. The facilities, Every time I go down there, I'm amazed at the facilities that are going up. I mean, we're not talking about 10,000 square foot fab facilities, talking half a million square foot large scale industrial facilities that are going up. And the names you see on the side of the building, they're not unknown, right? I mean, everybody's in. I talked to a. It'd be like a recreational vehicle company. At one point they were flying in 150 people every single week because they were standing up four new lines. This was last year that were coming in from the US they had been doing manufacturing and production up there. They had built out their supply chain to be different. But every week 150 people would drop on the ground in Mexico, work on the line. Then they were going to go through training and changing. I mean, everybody's in and I think everybody's excited about it. It's just how do they de. Risk it? Because there's still a lot of, a lot of hand holding that needs to take place. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's not a knock on the manufacturing. It's just the maturation of the process, people and technology. I had a follow up, but we'll talk about it over beers. Let's do that for sure. Nick, we got to leave it there, man. I love the. I could go on and on and on. I can't believe we didn't have you on the show until now, but I am sort of glad. It's great. This is what an amazing way to play over there out. And I just want to thank you for being on the show today. I appreciate it. I appreciate you having me on your last episode. You know, congratulations. It's a heck of a run. Five years and I'll be tuning in for what comes next. Thank you. And thank you for listening and thank you for listening for all these years and it's meant a lot having you on this journey with me. I'm very excited for what comes next. I hope you'll stick with me. As over the air now transitions into the Dispatch, which is going to be an amazing journey out of the factory and out into field service. So that's it for today. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dispatch.

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