Larry Daniel of Sextant

This transcript was generated with the help of AI and may contain some errors.

Larry Daniel (00:00):

There'll be some things that we can't see today that are going to affect tomorrow, but let's get rid of as much of this noise as we can and get us in position to move as quickly as we can so we can react to the true dynamics, not to things we should have cured years ago.

John Gough (00:15):

Whether you're going to market through dealers, distributors, or some other partner channel, the mediated sale is complex. We call it B2B2X, but the leaders in the industry are the ones who are making it look simple. I'm John Gough, and I'm Kyler Mason. And this is Why You Win, presented by Element Three. Our guest today is Larry Daniel, the founder of Sextant. This episode is a little different than our typical one because Sextant is an organization that Element Three acquired earlier this year. Sextant helps OEMs build their dealer network strategies and then measure and optimize dealer performance. And on this show, we talk a lot about business strategy, about why you win, about the bets that we're placing. And here we're going to turn the mirror a little bit on ourselves and talk about what we saw in Sextant and the business overlap between these two organizations and the bet that we are going to make on how this is going to build our business in the future. Hope you enjoy this. Larry, it's great to have you on the show today. Thanks for jumping on to talk about all of this with us.

Larry Daniel (01:15):

Oh, for sure. Thanks, John. Thank you, Kyler.

Kyler Mason (01:17):

Did you have a choice though?

Larry Daniel (01:20):

That's where you start.

Kyler Mason (01:22):

That was the plan the whole time. You wouldn't come on the podcast for months, so we just decided to buy your business.

Larry Daniel (01:28):

Eventually it will work.

John Gough (01:31):

So this episode's a little different than most of the Why You Win episodes because instead of profiling another organization and their business strategy, we're sort of turning the mirror on ourselves and talking about this recent acquisition, why it makes sense. I think the right way to start that out, Larry, is probably for you to give us some recent history of Sextant. What you've been working on, the business problems that you've been challenged with and thinking about and really energized by in recent years.

Larry Daniel (02:03):

Gosh, there's so much going on, John. I'd be remiss if I didn't say I'm really energized by the acquisition from Element three. I think that's fabulous. But bigger picture, man, we are adjusting the dynamic time, man. There is so much moving in the industry, so much change afoot. It's sort of culminating right now and it is fueled by data and disruptive technologies. And now it absolutely needs some assistance from marketing communication support. And so the moment is really rich. Where we've been finding ourselves the last couple years is looking at changing equations for nearly all our clients. And that can include a greater emphasis on fixed ops and parts sales in some of our motor vehicle heavy duty and medium duty truck customers. In our power sport world, it's like the segmentation emphases are flipping season to season that requires a lot of analysis. The need to get out there to talk to customers is greater and to make sure there's alignment with dealers is especially high.

(03:14):

So we've been focusing on both dealer programs. We've been assisting a couple new clients. We're really excited about entering the United States, expanding their networks, picking where they want to be, understanding a strategic priority of where to be first, and then lining up a program with assistance to go after that. Some organizations are already stocked with the talent to go out there and roll out a program once it's conceived. Others are going to need different type of assistance. The assistance can look like beyond strategy. It can look like, okay, what do we need to keep metrics that make sure we know the KPIs as we go through it, that we're making pace with the plans and goals we're setting. They can look like different types of communication support, call center support, marketing technology. It's just a lot of things going on. So we're very excited by the marketplace.

(04:09):

Our team's been adding more technical talent, taking on some new formats. We're updating some of the things that we have done that came out in sort of a relational format that was current in the decade past. And houses big data, ingests big data has the best of those practices. And now we're applying some new front ends to make things applicable to mobile. Just take advantage of things ranging from QR codes to any other thing that can be incorporated into ways of collecting data. So there's a lot going on. That's a tough question to answer because recently it's just been a dynamic time.

John Gough (04:46):

After many conversations together, I'm starting to synthesize where the couple of doors that I understand the vast Sextant really playing in and over the many years that you all have been doing great work for your clients. And I think the most simple version of that for me is probably you all have this capability that's pretty unique to ingest a large amount of unstructured or structured data from your clients, whether that's sales reports and where are my dealers and what's happening in the marketplace. And you take all of that together and you're able to put together simple visualizations and reports so that the client, people inside the business are able to work on their own imperative, whether that's where does my next dealer go or what do my parts and service revenue look like for the last six months and the next six months, how I forecast that.

(05:47):

Whatever they are working on, these big questions that they have or these big mandates that they have in their role, you all are answering that by making their data make sense.

Larry Daniel (05:58):

Gosh, there's a few different points. I'll just kind of pick up from there. Or recent environments, data rich intelligence start. Data rich, intelligent start. So there's abundant data everywhere and you find organizations that know the data is going through the organization. They don't know how to contextualize it to really work with it and then interpret what does that mean and what's the next step? How do I make data more of a process future than just a background feature that everyone can choose how to look at differently? So our team has awful lot of background with data conversion, data management. A lot of times our first task is taking data that has been involved in corporate warehouses but not really leveraged. There may be legacy providers, there may not, but there can be a lot of data out there that the past paradigms don't really organize in a way that takes it to a task.

(06:57):

Yeah, I could find it out in that ocean of data, but then how do I organize it? And most business managers aren't set to kind of cross that bridge from we have data and how do I contextualize it the way I need to see it, the way I need to provide it to my teams, the way I need to provide it to my dealers. So that core competency of data conversion and then standing relational model, our team flourishes in that underlying sort of technology world of data conversion into relational data sets. We also have a tremendous background with geographic data organization. So our readiness to organize data from not just from a national perspective or mega trends perspective for really kind of ordinary perspectives like what's happening by state, but the ability to contextualize it to what's happening to different people in the field, what's happened to regions of the country, what's happened to model segments and all those things over time for a specific space and place, those are things that are inherently who we are.

(08:04):

And the last piece of glue there is we have a long history of working with motor vehicle providers. So over the years our team has served everything from all ends of the spectrum. I call it the motor vehicle spectrum. It's probably intuitive what it represents, but for us it's just a long wave from power e-bikes all the way through commercial trucks and heavy trucks. And we support all aspects, all the different sectors along the way. Along the way, we've seen a lot of overlapping business rules and usage among the industry. Sometimes the way that power sport organizations go and look at data is different from the way that truck companies will, but they're picking up something that truck OEMs can benefit from. And oftentimes truck OEMs will look at things more emphatically in different ways. Even the fix ops and the parts aspect is something that today is especially key to commercial truck.

(09:08):

But if you move way over to the other side of the spectrum in the power sport world, historically they've been focused on new vehicle sales, but they begin to recognize the ability to leverage accessories and power equipment, helmets and whatever might follow the sale, the aftermarket aspects. So the different industries have sort of a different topography and because we've worked with both of them, we can oftentimes spot when we can lift that data up a little higher for some of our clients just because of where they're operating and because of where their historical emphasis has been. So if you pull it all together, the conversion relational data is very applicable to making flat data begin to sing with business rules, attaching it to geography and then contextualizing into some of these problems, that's sort of where we flourish. That's what we understand and we're likely to move much more quickly than most technology support organizations.

(10:05):

A lot of what we'll end up addressing is the rationale and the organization of where to put wholesale product, who should be ordering which type of products, where there may be gaps in market representation, where there may be partnerships that could prove synergistic and a creative to a business interest, how to maximize value on existing customer sets and focus on greater retention possibilities. So we range from dealer development to performance metrics to, you can think of it as target marketing type of paradigms. And usually our emphasis is on optimization. So the business problem is, okay, which market should I be in? If I'm a new entrant, which market should I be infilling in if I've got another spot? How do I gauge my existing dealers and their performance? What do I need to emphasize for particular dealers? Where should be their action items? Where should be their focal point?

(11:14):

Then as we shift, keep on moving along, that performance aspect also can be organized in the context of how are my district personnel performing? How are my regional personnel performing and where are their opportunities for growth and enhancing the business? So performance metrics can be in the context of dealers and then our dealers is our heritage. And for most of the industry, the performance of regional personnel, district personnel is going to feed off how the dealers perform. So all these things are sort of interlaced, but by virtue of knowing how the dealers performs and what their limitations are and what their possibilities are, they can connect to what are the possibilities for upside and where should there be concerned from the area manager or from a regional perspective. So there's that whole connection of, if you think of rolling out motor vehicles as a full enterprise that engages both the OEM all the way out to the dealer, how they connect and their performance at different levels of geography, different personnel over time, over product is something that we can assist with.

(12:26):

That's going to be relevant to product rollouts, market rollouts, new personnel. Oftentimes we'll tackle issues like where should my people even be and how should I organize districts? How do I flag what should be the topics for each individual dealer? So another business problem that's very common is I've got a flank of field personnel and they're meeting with dealers and they've got 20 to 30 different dealer assignments, and that's a lot of activity. Most of the workload on those field organizations today is pretty heavy. You don't find too many of those individuals not remarking that their time sort of overloaded. And so we can help through the direction of the data identify where there are particular areas that each dealer might emphasize and where they're performing well. So when they get to their dealers, it can go directly and be relevant to here's where the attaboys belong and here's where we got to go at them.

Kyler Mason (13:24):

What do people do without Sextant? If they don't have the benefit of Sextant in their lives, what are they doing?

Larry Daniel (13:30):

This is where my first comments about we're in a sea of data, but we're kind of starved for intelligence is there are information stores that are out there that can be, let's just say there be a legacy formats that are uninspiring, difficult to interpret. And so it breeds random and somewhat spurious interpretations of what should I speak to a dealer? How do I regard his performance? A very simple type of format would be it's also easy for a motor vehicle OEM to regard top dealers as those in their hypercharged urban centers because those guys are flush with demand. But unless you weed through some of the underlying issues and you look at penetration rates, you look at segmentation at a pretty deep level, it's tough to identify where they're really flourishing just because of volume and where they're flourishing because of really getting sales efficiency and effectiveness in the marketplace and competitive edge.

(14:32):

So there would be interpretations that are going to be raw and they're going to be more based on scaler functions as opposed to more relevant analytics and ratios and penetrations and geographic computations that take into account the density of competition, that take into account the density of demand and those type of things and sort of bring this into more of a multifaceted. So if I had to say what they would do is they patch together oftentimes a sense of any available data that shows some measure of performance and then start to pair up with that a lot of tribal thinking about how do I account for that? Sometimes that trouble thinking I wouldn't be disrespectful to it. There's a lot of senior individuals, a lot of people early in their career who are real good instinct, but the reality is that's going to be limiting.

(15:25):

That's going to be limiting to spot the outliers, the real exceptional opportunities. It also will be slow and it won't be as systematic as the ability to apply deeper analytics. So there's methods that are in motion for nearly all our OEMs of looking at data. Unfortunately, they're not the type that give them confidence in really leaning on analytics and they're not the type that breeds sort of a crisper, sharper dialogue that allows someone to say emphatically, "Hey Kotler, you really need to focus on this aspect of your business because we can see very clearly relative to the ratios of how your performance is, it's an under leveraged piece for your dealership." And that type of conversation may be had, but with a lot less confidence with people not armed and substantiated by all the background data. And more often than not, it's not even going to be addressed because there's a lack of certainty about how is the dealer actually performing.

(16:25):

So the alignment between the corporate goals and the dealer goals kind of goes unchallenged and unexplored. It's presumed the relationship is what matters and it does of course, but it doesn't challenge the two parties in the relationship to examine and say, how do we maximize the business benefit of working together? So you've got dealership in Indianapolis and we've got a corporate center that operates out of Colorado and we examine all our different locations and we can see dealers flourishing from opportunities that your dealership in Indiana might not be doing so. Well, a lot of legacy organizations need to address this relatively softly or in a relationship fashion that just is suggestive that maybe we look at these things, but it's not armed with data that's going to be compelling to that dealer. Most of these dealers want to have strong direction about where they want to go.

(17:26):

It's something I've commented to you, Kyler, is I've been a small business owner for years, so I relate to a lot of these dealers. Part of my background is I've done different relationships as an expert witness in different industries. I've had the chance to serve on both sides of the court, which is a little bit unusual, both as an OEM expert and as a dealer expert. A lot of these dealers are just yearning to understand where their opportunity is and how they maximize these opportunities. And so without that data, it's like going to college without ever getting your grades. You don't really know how you're performing, where you need to study harder, where you're really already strong. And so the more analytics we can provide them, as long as they're solid and coherent, the more the dealers flourish and the whole enterprise flourish, the OEM flourish, the whole thing can be a better oiled machine.

(18:18):

So there's the use of data, but sort of limited application, less penetration into it, and as a result of that, less responsive organizations to market dynamics.

John Gough (18:28):

So I think my example of this is a conversation I had yesterday with a large dealer group, and I was on the head of marketing and the head of sales, and they were showing us how they were using S&P data. We use S&P data. S&P data is a great data source. There's lots of really important, interesting things in there. And they had built a BI tool about a year ago that let them click through it and pivot around the data. And I asked them, "Who's using this and how are they using it?" And they were a little bit like, "We would like people to use it this way, but a little non-committal." And then VP of sales is like, "Well, I use it this way." And he pulls up an Excel spreadsheet that he had made for himself that is not in the Power BI tool, but he had pulled it out and was using it to understand his own RSMs and their sales territories and their expectations around his expectations around what sort of performance that he could get out of them.

(19:24):

And I think that what most organizations are doing is they have these little pockets of individuals who have some either data competence or some bootstraps, computer guys who are enthusiastic about the data and believe in it and are willing to spend a Saturday with a drink in their hand and a spreadsheet and get something out of it. And a lot of what they get is really good, but it is not systematic and it relies on that one individual to maintain their own data source and their own visualization surface to actually make that meaningful. If that one individual ever walks away, then all of that institutional knowledge walks with them and their Excel sheet will never be updated again.

Larry Daniel (20:11):

I think be tapped into just a really valuable word there, systematic. So in a world that moves with technologies, there needs to be reliable indicators of what triggers the next activity or the next business rule, the next business process. And if you have not leveraged those things that can be systematic, you're inherently giving up speed of execution, awareness of certain facts and so forth. So there's another word that I couple with that is a lot of companies respect those individuals who are sort of swimming in the data early, those who've got the proficiency to say, I can make some sense of this and encourage to get out there and go into something like a Tableau or real large data front end to examine what you can do. And the challenge with that is it breeds different types of interpretations of exactly what happened. Two individuals who are very bright can look at the same report and unless they've met together and thought through the subsequent, is that a strong measure?

(21:21):

Is that a little measure? Is that an indication of opportunity or is that an indication of deficiency? Unless they've belted out all those different sort of partial understandings of how the data all triggers together, it breeds something of a random interpretation from different parties. The accompanying word that I reach to a lot is discipline. So ultimately, if we're training for athletics, we can each go to a gym and we can each do something in that physical fitness environment, but those who understand the discipline of outlining a program and executing this with consistency are going to be more prone to reach results than those who are sort of experiencing that fitness center a little bit different every day. You might feel just as good going out to that center, but your results will probably be more limited unless you dedicate yourself to some sort of consistent and disciplined program.

(22:17):

In a similar fashion from an organizational perspective, it's really necessary to get the team members associated with the discipline. There may be different ways of looking at data, but the only way the whole team can march together with consistent messages to the dealer base and consistent follow-up thought through of how do I therefore act on when data suggests different opportunities? The only way to do that is to establish a discipline. And this is the way we'll look at data, this is the way we'll interpret opportunity, and therefore everyone in our team can run with that. Now I can educate those secondary people who maybe weren't the first ones swimming around the data, but they know what the data means. And if they get the report, we can flag it green when it's positive, we can flag it red when it's negative, and it's not my personal interpretation.

(23:10):

It's one we're attaching our business rules, our corporate goals, and our corporate strategy. There's a few things, systematic discipline, those are additional pieces that because we're familiarity across the industry, we oftentimes can help organizations say, "Therefore, how do you interpret these things? And how do you act on this?" So a very simple, perhaps almost beginner-like example is for a lot of companies we manage the primary market areas or the areas of responsibility for different dealers. And many upstart organizations not exposed to the underlying theory and discipline of market area analysis and trade area analysis might reach for a method of carving out territory that reflects their first opportunities at hand. Like who did I start? Who are my first dealers? What makes sense for them to cover? But they're indirectly setting a precedent that will affect them downstream and hamper their long-term growth in terms of identifying a geographic area that should be associated to all the inevitable dealer base that will downstream unfold.

(24:22):

So those type of things, because of our exposure across the different industry, some of our heritage in the industry, we can advise and implement programs that will both match some of those present priorities, certainly the company's emphasis, but also arrange it in such a fashion that is bound to be a discipline that can be repeated so that all across the country as we evaluate dealers across the country, as we evaluate the area managers and so forth, we've already got a consistent fabric that ensures consistency and ease of interpretation and speed of execution.

John Gough (25:00):

I think that is a great example of how what we talk about on this podcast, this idea of business strategy runs up really hard against these questions that can be answered with data or they can be answered with relationships. So your example of we haven't been around for very long as an OEM. We need to know where to push this next dealer. We're going to either go on gut or go on relationship or the way we've always done it, we are maybe at a point where we have to make a new decision about how we make these choices, how we put these dealer organizations in place. And I would say that when you as an organization, you, an OEM, a channel manager, whoever, start to make that decision and say, "I need to evolve from the way that I've done this in the past to the way I'll do this in the future, I need a new paradigm, a new way of thinking about this." It's the kind of question at its base, a business strategy question.

(26:01):

And am I going to be an organization that does this through handshakes and relationships or is there another layer that I need to add on to that? I think how you fit that in together is interesting. Kyler, I want to turn the spotlight on you for a second and say why you win. We talk a lot about other people's business strategy on this podcast, so for maybe five or 10 minutes, you as the CEO of Element Three looked at this and said, "It's time for us to make an acquisition that is a big business bet. Where did that come from? Why now? What did you see in Sextant and why would a marketing agency buy the thing that Larry's been describing for the last 20 minutes?"

Kyler Mason (26:42):

Kind of going back to the growth plans for the company we've had on our bingo board and our business plan to acquire a company and grow both organically and inorganically, we had in our three-year picture to make an acquisition. So timing lined up really well. I think the story of how we met Larry fits nicely into this. I've been very focused on serving the manufacturers that sell through the dealer channel, kind of the where we play of our business strategy. You were out at AIMExpo and ran into Larry at a booth that's at a booth, right?

John Gough (27:18):

We were both failing to sell something at the same time.

Kyler Mason (27:21):

Right? So that's how you go to market as a service provider. You go into booths and you give a pitch and you get their card and you email them later. You and Larry were in line to give your pitch. And you're

(27:32):

Like, "Hey, we can commiserate about this." No, then we got to talking, like you said, a lot of things that are relevant to what we do, Larry. And I think you guys ended up grabbing a drink or something and talking business. And you gave me a call afterward, John, and we're gushing. You're like, "This is the coolest thing. We got to partner with this guy. I want you to talk to him." I think you might've even been like, "We should see if he's on the market." Fast-forward a handful of months, and Larry, we're on a call, actually, we're pitching a prospect together as partners. There's just such complimentary services across the spectrum of go-to-market and channel management and strategy for these manufacturers that sell through the deal channel. And the way that we were offering what we had to offer to this prospect made a lot of sense from a comprehensive set of solutions.

(28:18):

But then yeah, we ended up on the phone. You talked about having some interest in some M&A activity, and boom, here we are. But why does this make sense? Why do this? We've been positioned as a marketing consultancy agency service provider for a long time, and we believe that one of the routes to growth and being more important to clients and bringing more value is through the data we have access to. And really big business decisions are made at our client's level with the type of data, Larry, that you have inside of your platform and that you collect and make sense of for your clients. So that's all around dealer development and dealer performance and strategy and location and co-op usage. The list is long. If you take all that stuff that the OEMs care about at the go-to-market level and the operations level and the dealer intelligence level, and you think about how you can use that to make sense of marketing decisions, felt like a really interesting pairing of services and competencies that make us stronger for our clients.

(29:27):

So if strategy is about placing bets and why you win is about where you're playing and how to win, making the acquisition of Sextet made a lot of sense to make us stronger in a competitive set. If one of our clients is looking out or prospects is looking to see who should I work with to help with launching my product or managing the dealer channel or running my media, I like our chances because of the way that we've brought together a set of service data and solutions that I don't think many in the marketplace can compete with us in the same way. So I think the acquisition really overnight made us stronger, more competitive, and increased our how to win proposition. How'd I do, John?

John Gough (30:17):

Yeah, I'm sold.

Kyler Mason (30:18):

Do you want to work here?

John Gough (30:19):

Yeah, I guess I'll sign up for that.

Kyler Mason (30:22):

Larry, what's your reaction to that?

Larry Daniel (30:24):

Well, we were considering working together. It was a lot of logic. We recognized there was an extension of services we weren't providing to our clients, and we recognize we compliment a marketing agency background that probably doesn't have the full technology capabilities that we have. That would pretty much run the course for any agency that we work with because we're in niche technology working with motor vehicle data. But what the epiphany here was when you start to fill in spots, again, using the fitness analogy, sometimes you don't realize, you get yourself fit. Oh my gosh, I feel so much stronger. I wasn't just filling a void. There was so much more that I didn't anticipate about how strong I've now gotten. I understand, we understand on our side, the path is there and we're already kind of breathing in this additional layer of understanding of the marketing comm side, the same as hopefully we're breeding this better understanding of the dealer network and analytics for the rest of E3.

(31:29):

And so we're collectively getting stronger in the functions we performed, but then it also puts us in this area that I think is going to be very relevant to OEMs in years ahead. And there'll be a battery of these. We can look in the current administration. I find myself commenting that no matter what you think of this present administration, it's likely to be a turnover the next few years and a change in tariffs. So likely change the dynamics for a lot of import export activities, probably create a format that invites more competition in the United States, encourages more directionality of US firms competing overseas and overseas firms competing in the US, particularly in light of that inevitability in years ahead. And then on top of it, the inevitability of more vibrant EV market, all these different dynamics are out there. The dealer network's going to be challenged and the strategy is going to be necessary to get in place.

(32:29):

And so to have the strategy in tandem with the execution and the communication, I think it's just going to be a major offering. It is today and it's bound to be even more so tomorrow. So I think we've created a pathway for our company to become more relevant by better understanding all the sides that are element three's proficiency. And I think we've created more relevancy to element three by introducing some of the things that we have knowledge of. And what we've also identified for all of us is we're kind of landing on some additional capabilities because of our awareness now of this additional creative layer of potential value to clients that's uncommon to find out there in industry. So very excited how this keeps rolling out. Every step's been both logical and then surpassing. We really have benefits. We're stronger for our clients and stronger for us internally as we keep growing.

John Gough (33:24):

I think the thing that I'd add to all of that is as we mapped out our strategic choices several years ago and we said, great, if we're going to occupy this position in the marketplace, what must be true? We have to win against these other kinds of competitive agencies in these kinds of environments. When an OEM is making a choice between different providers, how are we going to win in that moment? One of the things that we just absolutely pointed our flag on was expertise in the industries that we serve. It's just unacceptable for us to not get this at the deepest level. And I think that element three over the last several years has exerted enormous effort to make that true. Research, individual training, hiring industry experts, bringing on a team of industry experts and looking at their capabilities and saying, does this lead us towards that strategic outcome or farther away from it?

(34:28):

Absolutely towards it, absolutely more towards expertise and capability that you wouldn't find under a different roof. That is just the marching order for us to continue to go down this road and say, what makes it so? It's not really an OEM. It's a person who works for a manufacturer who has a responsibility, a business responsibility to say, I need my dealers to be my competitor's dealers. I need to be in the right spot at the right time. How will I know? I need to launch a product and my product launch has to win market share. How will I do that? And I think our ongoing effort is to say who do we put around us? What data sources do we need? Who do we hire? We partner with to find that group of people who can answer that question better than anybody else.

Kyler Mason (35:19):

Strategy, baby.

Larry Daniel (35:21):

I affirm that from outside. What strikes me about element three is I'm very impressed by the fabric of a strategic culture and getting ahead with tools that keep on challenging individual productivity and growth and also company growth. And so we're practicing what in essence we're recognizing is necessary the industry. We have a business public that's forced to be very reactive to a lot of circumstances, but that is becoming increasingly to do. There's just not enough hours in the day and there's too many calls, there's too many data points, too many dynamics. So we have to be strategic at the same time, leverage technology as best we can to keep us moving at the speed that the market demands. So what I see from the three side is a strategic mindset that's recognizing that the data elements is key for itself and key also for its clients.

(36:21):

So it's very much this synthesis of philosophy. It's not a practice that's expressed to the clients. It's something that's practiced in its own house in element three and cultivates this mindset of saying, we're doing much of what we believe in for clients. We're not changing our rules here where we do this in-house and now we're going to suggest something for another party. It's not that at all. It's recognizing that we operate in an age, we've got to align ourselves with the tools, the environment, the coherency, the consistency to really execute smoothly so we're not wasting time on decisions that we then have to retract or remediate. We're able to move ahead in a way that's well planned, very strategic. And if there's going to be errors, it's really probably going to be governed by some of the market dynamics or the trade winds that we can't affect.

(37:17):

But to the extent that we can set our ships in the right direction and make planning, that's something we can own and we should be dedicated to. And I see that from the company and it's the same sort of assistance that we want to give to our clients, which is to the extent that we can see this through the data today, let's give our best interpretation. There'll be some other factors. There'll be some things that we can't see today that are going to affect tomorrow, but let's get rid of as much of this noise as we can and get us in position to move as quickly as we can so we can react to the true dynamics, not to things we should have cured years ago.

John Gough (37:54):

Larry, this has been great. Thanks for walking us through where you've been and I'm glad that we got to put our cards a little bit on the table here today. Our next episode will be back to our normally scheduled programming, but this was worth kind of exploring a little bit more about the alignment that we've seen between Sextant and E3 and what's coming up.

Kyler Mason (38:12):

We're talking about everybody else's strategy. We got a chance to talk about our own.

John Gough (38:16):

Oh yeah. Every couple of years we should do that.

Kyler Mason (38:18):

Every couple, maybe every year. We'll see. Maybe there'll be a new big thing.

Larry Daniel (38:23):

Spending the chat with you guys.

Kyler Mason (38:25):

Yeah, thanks Larry.

John Gough (38:26):

Why You Win is presented by Element Three, a marketing firm focused on modernizing go-to-market strategies for manufacturers that sell through complex distribution channels. We help leaders solve problems across demand generation, sales channel support, and brand development.

Kyler Mason (38:42):

If you'd like more from myself or John, connect with us on LinkedIn. And for more from Element Three, visit elementthree.com. That's element, T-H-R-E-E.com.