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Nate Cross & Ben Kowalski answer your freight brokering questions and discuss:
Support Our Sponsors:
QuikSkope - Get a Free Trial: Click Here
Levity: Click Here
Bluebook Services: Click Here
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DAT Power - Brokers & Carriers: Click Here
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Freight Broker Basics Course: Click Here
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Welcome back for another Q&A session here on the final mile. You guys send us your questions, we're answering them. These are coming from YouTube, comments from our Facebook group and sometimes you guys email them right in. So keep doing that, share us with your friends. Check out the other content on our website, including the Freight Broker Basics course, and check out the sponsors in the description box. That's Quickscope, levity, bluebook and DAT to help support this channel. Ben, let's get right into the questions today.
Speaker 2:Oh, first of all, let's wait a second.
Speaker 1:Go ahead I was going to say shout out to the guy who keeps telling it, like he leaves a YouTube comment of like on our podcast and it's like eight minutes, whatever timestamp is where the is where the episode actually starts, because I don't think we had timestamps back on those ones. As steven says, his name's leo. Um, hey, this is good for many reasons.
Speaker 2:He's helping other people and he's helping us engagement exactly thank you leo, here was something I found out very recently. It's a follow-up from a conversation we had about ch laying off a bunch of their sales staff, right, oh, oh yeah, and we were talking about, like how is that possible? Like, what tech are they actually using that allows them to have less human beings? Right, and what I found out, at least anecdotally, from some people that maybe either know some people that work there, maybe formerly worked there they weren't employees that I spoke to but some people that were kind of familiar with how CH rolled this tech out and developed it and they'd said, well, long story short is, it's exactly what Levity does. It's exactly the same thing. So the same software, right, that CH is using to be able to reduce headcount and save money on people is literally the same thing you could use levity for at any size brokerage.
Speaker 2:And again, for anyone out there, is it basically not? Basically it does this right, like, so if a customer emails you and you need to get a quote back, like you set up the parameters for that customer, how you want it to respond, it will literally just email the customer back with a quote based on whatever you tell it to. Like, hey, this customer's at this margin, quote these at this right. It will literally and it will also ask them a question. So, like sometimes, if a customer sends an email and goes I need a quote on this, but they didn't put the delivery, for example, or they didn't put the equipment, that will then just send another email and say, hey, like, please make sure you specify the equipment, the pickup times and the delivery times. It goes directly back in, is integrated with DAT, grabs the rate and then, based on the time, we'll send them an email back with the price. The customer can then say, hey, I accept it. It will literally then go back and build the load in the TMS.
Speaker 2:The same thing that any company out there can use right now through our sponsor levity is what larger companies are also doing for more efficiency. And again, like this doesn't necessarily mean like you need to let people go or not hire as many, but we get this question a lot from lots of listeners is like I can't get the quotes fast enough. I'm working on covering a load, I'm talking to a customer and I miss this. This is a great tool for anyone out there to use to capitalize on the business that is literally falling at your feet that you're not able to catch in time Right Again. That was a really good shout out to our sponsor and also really made a little more sense as to how and what they're actually doing, because CH doesn't really they don't.
Speaker 2:They don't, like they don't play in the high service area Right, they play in the cheap, transactional. They will give back lots of loads when they can't make them work Like they don't typically have a high service rate. So like that makes sense, it all kind of adds up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll have Tilo from Levity on an episode sometime later this summer or in the fall to talk more about automation and AI and things like that, so that'll be good. All right Question here. Someone wrote my understanding is that FOB is the origin of a load. So what does that have to do with using, or with using or not using, a broker? All right, so this question is the common my freight is customer routed or our freight is FOB is what you hear a lot of times and we're going to explain why that matters. So the technical term for this and I wish people would use it more often is may have heard the term FOB when it comes to balance sheet. Is that the right phrase? Balance?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's when you would. Well, it's probably going to be. Well, it would probably be on both, because you're going to book the revenue, possibly, or you're going to move the goods to your balance sheet with the purchase and the expense.
Speaker 1:So here's what it means. So FOB obviously oh, I shouldn't say that A lot of times we just call it freight on board. It's actually technically free on board, but either way, fob origin or shipping point is when the possession and responsibility for the freight shifts from the shipper to the receiver immediately upon when it's picked up. Right fob destination, or fob constantly, as you might hear it called sometimes, is the opposite. It's what we're normally used to. Our shipper has responsibility and possession of that freight until the receiver actually gets it and signs a BOL. All right, now why does it matter who's booking the trucks? So if, in the case of an FOB origin or just FOB, as a lot of shippers will refer to it, as in the case of that, if they're shipping out, we'll just say, well, ben.
Speaker 2:I'm just putting that to you.
Speaker 1:I'm your customer.
Speaker 2:You're the shipper right, I'm buying from you. I'm your customer. You're the shipper right, I'm buying from you. I'm the vendor. I'm buying from you. It's shipping from your location to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let's say it's shipping from Buffalo down to you in Boca Raton, florida, all right. So if, in the case of Apple, the origin, as soon as it leaves my dock, it's your responsibility, right? If there's a claim, it's on you. My dock, it's your responsibility, right? If there's a claim it's on you, I'm done with that. I'm free and clear. For that reason, you are going to want to pick your truck to come, send into my facility to pick up your freight to bring to you. That is why it works that way. Now, conversely, if it is FOB destination, which would be, you know, shipper routed, if I'm sending it to you and it's my responsibility until it gets to you down in Florida, it is in my best interest to find and select a truck to then send it to you to make sure that, if you know, if I hire a bad truck and it breaks down, that's on me. But if it's your possession as soon as it leaves my dock, you don't want me vetting carriers for you. So that's the real general understanding of why this happens. And then, if you go to the accounting side of it, literally as soon, in the FOB origins instance, where it's yours as soon as it leaves my dock, it's also on your books on the accounting side. So like if you're $100,000 worth of product is now an asset of yours and it's off my books, right, and in turn I could then say I've got an account receivable from you for that, if you want to go to the accounting standpoint instead of inventory. But that's why it works that way.
Speaker 1:There's always exceptions, right? The truck falls off, or maybe some receivers aren't responsive. You know, fob doesn't have to always be the exact same for every customer for every shipment of theirs. It is an easy excuse to use to get people off the phone oh, it's customer route, it's customer route. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but literally every single shipment you send out of there is really routed by your customer highly unlikely. And what about when something happens and you've got to step up and take the baton from them and get a truck? This stuff happens, so that's anyway. We won't go to the objection side of it. But that's the understanding and the explanation of what is FOB. Fob origin specifically, and why is it that brokers are not, don't really have a good use, or even you know we're calling the wrong. Calling the wrong company is what it comes down to, because you'd want to call the receiver who's actually booking the trucks.
Speaker 2:Correct. I want to add a little bit too For some of these definitions and I pulled this too right. This is also very common in international shipping because, think about it the transit is very long. If it takes 45 days to move product from one country to another, that is a month and a half where that commodity is sitting on one company's books versus the other, and that's a month and a half worth of cashflow that you can invoice sooner, which is a big deal. Like that's 10% of a year, almost right, yeah, so and again, like those terms are defined by what it says are the international commercial terms, encode terms, I guess, and it says you know these laws use specific terms outlined in detailed contracts to define delivery time, payment terms and when the risk of loss ships from the seller to the buyer.
Speaker 2:Right. Some key takeaways worth mentioning FOB free on board is a trade term that indicates whether the buyer or the seller is liable for goods lost, damaged or destroyed during transit. A free on board shipment point indicates that the buyer is responsible for loss or damage when the goods reach the shipper. A free on board destination indicates that the seller retains liability for loss or damage until the goods are delivered to the buyer.
Speaker 1:Which is our standard shippers that we always try to deal with. Yep.
Speaker 2:An FOB shipping point is usually paid for by the buyer, while FOB destination is usually paid for by the seller or the shipper typically is usually paid for by the seller or the shipper typically. And you know it goes on to say like and the thing I want to add right is we're not going to go into the objection side of this, but what is really common in commodities, things that ship that are like very base raw materials, like I saw this a lot in tankers, for instance, like marathon that ships a lot of corn oil outside of even just regular oil, like every month they determine which is going to be handling the transportation and they determine that, based on two companies, one company is buying something from another company. They look at two prices. They go how much does that good cost? Just the good, just the glycerin, just the corn oil, how much does that cost per gallon? Then they say okay, give me another cost for it delivered. They look at that, say one is $1 a gallon and delivered it's $1.25 a gallon. They then go back to their transportation department and go okay, this month can we ship the glycerin here for less than $0.25 a gallon? And if they go, yeah, we can ship it for $0.15 a gallon. Then they say, okay, well, this month we are going to arrange the transportation. And they negotiate to purchase that whole month's worth of glycerin, for example, or corn oil, where they handle it. And then that whole month they negotiate. The next month they go okay, we feel like we have this many sales for this amount of commodity, we need to buy this much next month. They then go do the same thing with all their vendors.
Speaker 2:Give me two prices. What does it cost to buy it? What does it cost to buy it? What does it cost to deliver it Right? And like when I've explained this to people, I'm like just think about it like a pizza.
Speaker 2:There's always two different prices. What does it cost to pick it up, what does it cost to deliver and what is your time to get it yourself Right? Because you can do it, they can do handle the objection. The big point is you want to ask more questions to understand how they determine and when they determine what is free on board, because it's very unlikely that throughout a whole year, a whole bunch of logistics personnel that work for this company don't arrange any transportation. Maybe they're arranging the inbound, maybe they're arranging 10%, maybe they arrange it one month and not the next month, like there are so many different ways that this plays out in practice and in the real world that you can't just take oh we're FOB and move on and not think there's an opportunity, because there probably is. You just need to learn more about how they're deciding, when and who arranges it, to see if there's a fit to work with them.
Speaker 1:Totally Great. That was a great breakdown. I hope that helps clarify for a lot of you guys. All right, next one.
Speaker 1:So this was a response to a video about detention and someone said what about when the shipper approves and signs the detention pay amount but the broker says they do not pay that amount and they only want to pay half of what the customer is paying? So for example, customer approves $200 in detention, broker says no, I'm only going to pay you $100. If you're a broker, don't do that. First of all, but this would come down to probably a lot of of variables. Does your broker carry your agreement? Have a set schedule of, uh, accessorials or detention policy in there? Um, is there a detention policy listed on the rate confirmation? Um, because a contract in word, like in writing, is going to supersede anything. Really, because a brokerage might say here's our detention policy and we don't do this at Pierce. We don't have a detention schedule. It's load by load based on what the customer does. But let's say we have a detention policy that pays $200.
Speaker 1:I'm just making this up. There might be some loads where the customer doesn't approve it but we still pay, pays $200. I'm just making this up. There might be some loads where the customer doesn't approve it, but we still pay the $200. And there might be loads where the customer approves $300, but we still pay $200. And that's a company policy and you're allowed to do that. I don't do that personally. So what happens if a shipper approves more than the broker's going to pay you and you find out about it? There's probably not a whole lot you can do. I wouldn't use that broker again. And if you're that broker, don't do that, unless you have a set policy that was agreed to outside of the customer's approved rate and the carrier agreed that this is the amount I'm going to accept if there's detention, even if you find out that the customer paid them more. So that's my personal take on it. I mean there's probably some debate there, but what would you say?
Speaker 2:Two things I would say right.
Speaker 2:I think, like a brokerage should have kind of like a policy of they'll pay every carrier based on these terms, right, like larger companies, typically do you get two hours free. It's this number after, regardless of where they pick up or deliver, right? The reason why smaller brokerages are different on customers is, like many customers, to your point, have very different detention policies. Some won't approve any of them and we pay it anyway. Some do and pay more. But the other thing to consider, right, and I can understand, like, if I'm a driver and I found out that like a broker got paid $350 in detention and only caught me the $250, right, the thing that happens in practice and in the real world doing business like this is very often a shipper might not be able to get detention on another load because of their customer. And they say, okay, look man, I had this happen to me a few weeks ago. We could not get approved detention because the one receiver just never approved it for our customer and technically that customer should have paid us anyway, just like we said. But they didn't because they said, look, this really hurts our books to be able to claim a loss on this load. Can we pay you a little more on the next one.
Speaker 2:So the reality was like I might've got paid 300 on the next attention when I was only owed two, but it's really just my company's reference and customer that, like they just gave me the extra a hundred. That wasn't even associated with this load, it was really associated with the one from last week. It just looks better for their books for them to move the hundred to the next time it happens Because that other customer it's not as big of a deal. They made more money on that shipment of whatever it was.
Speaker 2:Widgets Like hey, we got more money in this load, we can pay you that detention we owed you from last week. And this is really a common value freight brokers provide to shippers is we can have that flexibility where we can allow them to make honestly their stuff look a little better for reporting and just move the money to a different load and again on a per transaction basis. This might appear as if somebody stole money, but the reality is we're just getting paid a little more on this one because they couldn't pay us on that one. Yep, and that's why you also see this in practice.
Speaker 1:For sure, exactly it's the same. I mean it's not totally the same, but we're talking about bids in the podcast and it's like there's times a year when you make money and there's times a year when you lose money on an awarded lane, and it's just at the end of the day, the money is it all. It all kind of evens out, Shakes out. Next one how do you do intermodal brokering? This is a fairly vague question, but I'll do my best. You and I can both do our best to answer this one. So here's what I have never mastered is booking directly on a rail line.
Speaker 1:So I've always gone through the rail lines brokerages, just for simplicity. It's not an expertise of mine by any means. I don't have a lot of understanding of rail pricing. I just like being able to go and say I need a door-to-door price from here to here, through you, it's going to go on, you're going to send a truck in, and here's the good thing about why they're a brokerage.
Speaker 1:So if you go to a company like Ship, csx, the brokerage for CSX. The reason that they're a brokerage is because, sure, csx owns the rail car in a lot of instances, right, but they don't necessarily own the truck that's going to pick it up and bring it to the rail yard. They're going to usually broker that portion out, which is why they need to have an authority. So I've always done it through a co-brokerage, never booked it directly. But intermodal I mean in its basic sense, it's more than one mode. Right, if it's going to go on a rail, it has to get to the rail from a truck and then it has to get from the destination of the rail to its delivery point on a truck.
Speaker 1:So you have rubber rail rubber, rail rubber, that's a good way of putting it, and you know there's different ways that the rail moves can work. So sometimes you'll see a container, containers loaded, it's moved onto a train and then it moves back to a truck and chassis to get delivered. And other instances you'll see like piggyback trailers, like, literally, of a dry van gets loaded I've ever seen that before loaded on the on a flat rail car. So, yeah, uh, what's your take on this? What's the best way to do intermodal? Um, you ever done anything direct? I don't even know how you would go about doing a direct.
Speaker 2:yes, so I'll give you a, I'll give what's the best way to do intermodal. You ever done anything direct? I don't even know how you would go about doing a direct yes. So I'll give you a little bit of a story as to also how I learned what you can and can't do and why so when I first did a lot of volume with, like, the shipping lines.
Speaker 2:We also do a lot of work with the railroads because they work hand in hand, right, For obvious reasons, containers coming off the boats hand in hand, right, For obvious reasons, containers coming off the boats go on rails at the highest volume, Like they're the railroad's largest customers. So, like we I was in constant contact with CSX and you know, for example, like Maersk Now, even when we had and we were responsible for the rubber part of these, like we would literally pick up the containers from a port and take them to the rail to get on a train to be taken somewhere else. Right, we were providing the rubber right In the instance you said, when I had spoken to the railroads because I worked at TQL, then we had some volume and we used an intermodal brokerage I can't remember the name of it, but that's exactly what we did. You would call them, they'd give you a price from pickup to destination with rail transit. And the time when I looked into seeing if we could do this direct with the railroads because we were already servicing them and we could provide the rubber on each side because that's what I wanted to do I wanted the trucking business on either end and to just pay them for the rail piece so that we could either make a margin or manage it.
Speaker 2:Here's why it never worked in practice. We didn't have the volume. It's a train. A train does not have the people and the infrastructure and the personnel to negotiate one container or one trailer, or five or 10 for that matter. They do business in volume to fill trains. So the reason brokerages exist that work directly with them is they pull together all the volume they work with to get better pricing.
Speaker 2:It's easier now for CSX and railroads to do business with one person that gives them a bunch of business than a lot of people giving them few loads here and there. It's just not feasible for them and it's not profitable. So they want to work in the market but they can't work because of the lower volumes.
Speaker 2:It's similar to LTL, Like they pull together all the capacity from everyone they work with and then they work directly with the rail to get better pricing. If you try to do this and I've literally had that conversation I'm like the price would be ridiculous. You wouldn't save any money and we technically could probably do it for you. But like you wouldn't want to do it because your pricing is based on three trailers, our pricing is typically based on hundreds or thousands of trailers, so it's the volume aspect as well there you go.
Speaker 1:So you, you can't like, given our license, you can do it, but it just would never make sense to do it. So, exactly, gotcha and do the rail? Here's a question I don't know if you know the answer to does the actual rail carrier have? Because they wouldn't be under the FMCSA? They're under like the. Yes, there's another, I can't remember the agency that does it, but I think it's under the Department of Transportation. It's like the rail, because, yeah, it's the rail version of the FMmcsa. So, anyway, okay. Last question what are some reasonable sops for dealing with late payments from a shipper?
Speaker 2:so sop standard, let me add one thing too, just for that last question. That doesn't mean you can't do intermodal brokering. You can still broker intermodal, just in the same way any freight brokerage can do LTL. You just the Federal Railroad Administration is the governing body. Steven put that in there. But what I want to say is like it's very common for lots of brokerages, big and small, to do intermodal. You just need to find a brokerage that specifically works in that space, and there's at least a handful that I know I've come across and been aware of CSX and Loop are the two that I use.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so find them, establish a co-brokerage agreement and now you can provide and this is a great differentiator for a freight brokerage, because if you're moving commodities that aren't perishable and they're like lumber and things, it's great to be able to be like, hey, you got this thing moving from Norfolk, virginia, over to Oregon. Here's the transit price for a truck. It's five days and it's four grand. I can put it on rail for $3,500. It'll take nine days.
Speaker 2:You choose and, to be honest, most people, if it's not important to get there fast enough, will choose the cheaper. And we would make more money when we would broker to Intermodal because we saved the customer money. They didn't need it in the five-day timeframe, they had no problem waiting to save an extra thousand and we would make an extra margin on it because, well, we saved them money. And then the added benefit is you don't have to do anything. You literally just send the load over. They pick it up, they update you when it's picked up, they notify you when it's off the train and going to delivery. They're the easiest loads to move, just in some ways like LTO is you get the details, you get the pricing, that's it no coverage, no trucks to talk to, no check calls. It's a really good option and it also helps you differentiate yourself from other brokers with your customer For sure.
Speaker 1:Thanks for clarifying that part. We should have Next or last question, reasonable SOPs for dealing with late payments from a shipper, so SOP, standard operating procedure. We did an episode on this a few weeks ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I actually dealt with this. We got a lot of good feedback on that too. By the way, I've had at least a dozen people reach out to me or speak to me since then and say they heard that, appreciated it, and we're working on that right now and really like the context and content yeah, I'm literally building out a very similar thing right now for peers, um, but anyway.
Speaker 1:so specifically late payments, and we dealt with this last week, um had a customer that we set up on 60 day terms because they told us up front volumes there and at 60 day terms they deliver like so some of their customers are like Home Depot Menards who have them on like 60 or 90 day terms, so that's the kind of cashflow business that they operate in. And we're like, okay, it's fine. Well, they fell behind on a couple. So we have a meeting with the customer and address it and they're super open about what happened. They're waiting on payments on X, y and Z, but they're transparent. And we're like okay, we've got a customer who's very transparent with us, we're going to agree to work with on this.
Speaker 1:How should we go about dealing with these late payments? And I think it depends on the situation. But what we kind of came up with is hey, now that we've got this cleared up, here's what we're going to do. And we said, um, and this doesn't have to be a 60-day term customer, it could be 30-day, you can put in place, um motivating factors and deterring factors to encourage a customer to pay faster and discourage them from paying slower. For example, 30-day terms, 1.5% fee if it's late after 30 days, or 1.5% discount if it's paid within 10 days or something like that. You can get that discount if you pay early or a penalty if you pay late, and you can increase that penalty if it goes even later and later and later. So I think it is not a bad idea to have some sort of a late policy on your invoices. It doesn't mean you have to impose that penalty on day 31 if it's a 30-day terms customer. That's been great for so long but they missed a check run or whatever. It's just a good kind of cover, your butt type situation.
Speaker 1:But my whole thing is late payments. You should have a clear, cut and dry collections SOP. So here's how we do our invoicing. Here's how we follow up on aged invoices. Here's when we make that phone call. Here's when we get the broker involved whose customer it is, if it's not just a one-man show. And here's potential penalties. And here's our worst-case scenario. We signed a collections-type deal. That's my take on it, but I'm always flexible based on the customer's feedback. Why was it late? When can they reconcile it? Things like that. What's your take? I mean, you've literally helped build multiple businesses. What's been the range and vision or view on late payments by customers and how to handle them?
Speaker 2:Honestly, I do the same thing you do. I've always liked your process and protocol and I've mirrored and done almost things exactly like you. Which is funny because Steve and I were talking about our accounting at Free360 and I want to do the exact same thing and it's something that all three of us needed to talk through too, because I'm like I like the way you handle it and you know what. Honestly, like I think this is also a good takeaway or just like a side note, like I know what I feel, like I'm good at and I also know what I am not good at.
Speaker 2:And the funny thing is, like I majored in accounting and I hate it. Like it makes me anxious. I can't stand doing it. Like it is like my least favorite thing to do in the world, and I think that's one of the reasons why we've always worked together is because we have different strengths versus each other that complement each other. Because for me, doing just accounting work and I don't know what it is about it I've thought a lot about it, but I don't know it just bothers me, it makes me anxious.
Speaker 1:I like to focus my efforts.
Speaker 2:And again, I'm a sales guy.
Speaker 2:I focus on the growth side Like I rarely ever am thinking about the expense side and I should like that is definitely one of the weaknesses I need to work on, because this is a huge deal, like if you aren't on top of like getting your receivables and it's costing you a lot of money, like I'm seeing this with some agents that work for us right now that have a lot of things in, almost about to go to collections and trying to reign these things in.
Speaker 2:It's something we all need to work on, because if you don't collect the money you earn I mean, what good was earning it? Obviously, and when they pay you is just as important as if they pay you. Sometimes I've had customers that were I've literally gotten invoices cleared up a year later with large customers, because most, because most of them are like 120 day pay terms. So if there's like an issue, sometimes like it literally becomes almost a year before you're resolving it and like that's why details are super important and having these SOPs and yours and I think it's worth you telling too like what do you do that leads up to this process, cause you have really good procedures in place where you reach out at like what 30 days? And then you reach out.
Speaker 1:So I'll give you an example of a standard 30-day customer. Um, and some of this might be like overly redundant, but we have it in a way that if, if a invoice is truly slow paid, everyone's already going to know that it was about to happen. So when we set customer up on 30 day terms, every single week the who the broker whose customer it is gets an aging report that tells them every invoice that they have out for this customer and how many days old it is. So they can. And it has it in a bucket like zero to 30. Those are current invoices and you have your 31 to 60, or maybe it's 45 and then like 46 to 60, whatever, but it shows how aged the invoices are.
Speaker 1:When day 30 comes or day 31 comes, we're not calling the customer yet or reaching out about that, but we already know that the broker has seen it and we're aware of it. If it gets to 45 days, now you're two weeks past due. That's when we're going to initiate our collections process of calling, emailing, getting the broker involved to try and find out hey, what's going on here? These are past due, right, and we're just trying to figure out what's going on with it? Is it a big project where they're waiting for a payment? Are they in a bad financial situation? Did they totally just miss this invoice? Somehow it's up through the cracks and then we'll go from there and that's how we handle it.
Speaker 1:And then it's got to go a long time like probably 120, 180, before we're writing this off and sending it to a collections company. But we're going to make every ever possible to get our money paid in full. And again you try to prevent all this on the front end by doing proper credit vetting. So that's, you know, that's our standard SOP. I guess the S and SOP is standard. That's our SOP.
Speaker 2:Um, well, redundant but you can right.
Speaker 1:You can always flex this stuff, uh, but I, yeah, I'm all about having like a pretty well oiled machine on that, and then you make exceptions and adjustments where it makes business sense. But that's that's kind of the way we do it. So, good stuff, man, Good questions. Keep sending them our way, we'll keep answering them. Final thoughts. And hey, by the way, shout out to our producer, stephen, for throwing a go Bengals in the last episode where I was out, so caught that.
Speaker 2:Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.
Speaker 1:And until next time go Bills.