Five Trillion in Lost Productivity Do to Poor Leadership Ep 402

The fastest way to change a P&L might be the slowest skill most leaders avoid. We pull back the curtain on a $5.5 trillion problem—how poor leadership quietly bleeds companies through turnover, broken processes, and missed opportunities—and show how emotional intelligence and self-awareness become profit engines when practiced with intent.

We kick off a five-part profitability protocol by reframing “soft skills” as the ultimate superpower. Instead of hiring in a hurry and tossing people into roles to sink or swim, we make the case for selection: aligning values, temperament, and mission before day one. Then we connect the dots from real causes of turnover—lack of recognition, weak advancement paths, and disengaged managers—to hard financial outcomes. You’ll hear practical ways to replace firefighting with clarity: build simple roadmaps, reduce rework, and create feedback loops where front-line insights shape better decisions.

Along the way, we ask bigger questions leaders actually wrestle with. Could better leadership dent national deficits by boosting productivity and taxable profits? What happens when we pour billions into AI while neglecting the humans who must lead it? And how does a culture of selfless leadership ripple beyond one team, into families and communities? We close with a challenge you can act on today: identify the single biggest profit drainer you control, write it down, and own a plan to fix it. Then, start building the vitality variable—develop leaders, document processes, and bank trust—so when you pass the baton, the organization accelerates.

If this conversation sparks a shift, tap follow, share it with a leader who needs it, and leave a quick review with your biggest takeaway. Your feedback helps more teams stop the bleed and start the feed.

Transcript

Leadership’s Ripple And Turning Sixty

John Ballinger 0:00

I've heard so many leaders say, well, we'll just put them in that seat and let them sink or swim. If they sink, we'll just put somebody else in that seat. What are they doing to the organization and the people in their departments that they're working with?

Announcer 0:12

Welcome to First Lead You, a podcast dedicated to building leaders, expanding their capacity, improving their self-awareness through emotional intelligence, and developing deeper understanding of selfless leadership.

John Ballinger 0:27

Hello, America, and welcome to First Lead You, where we believe selfless leadership is essential. America is suffering a leadership crisis. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence is the key to developing selfless leaders.

Announcer 0:44

Now, here is personal growth coach, John Ballinger.

John Ballinger 0:48

Hello, America, and welcome to First Lead You. My name is John Ballinger, and I'm here with my trusted co-host, Mr. Douglas Ford.

Douglas Ford 0:55

Good afternoon, John. How are you today?

John Ballinger 0:57

I am good, sir. How are you?

Douglas Ford 0:59

I'm good. You uh had a little celebration recently.

John Ballinger 1:02

Man. I did have a no, you can't call it that little. I mean, I'm just gonna say what it was. It was huge. Um for well over a year, there have been people working behind the scenes to um set up me set me up, I guess, to uh come in and celebrate my 60th year on this earth. Yeah. It was how does that feel? I tell you, when I walked in the room, it was um it was mind-boggling because seeing about 125 people in one room, and you have touched all their lives at some point, and there were interconnectedness between people in that room that didn't know people in that room. And so I really I walked in and I felt like I could see all the threads that connected all these people at one time, and I was still vibrating on Sunday the day after. I mean it was it shook me that much. And I think as I reflected on like, why did that shake me so hard? And then why did it why did it make me want to set up there and connect all the threads for I think someone I heard someone say an hour and a half. Was that probably a It was a pretty good time?

Douglas Ford 2:17

You spent some time making all that happen.

Defining The Profitability Protocol

John Ballinger 2:20

But but I was connecting the people in that room to the people, and you know, but I was like, why did that affect me like that? Because it was almost like I had got uh in the in the in the basic training a pugil stick. If you remember those where they took two ends of them and you're just beating a hound out of each other, I felt like I had got hitten in the chest with a pugil stick because I remember getting hit with one by the drill sergeant because he I he voluntoled me to be his dummy and he hit me so hard it sh it took my breath away. And I was just sitting there, I was actually standing up trying to suck air in because you know it sucked it out of me. And that's what it felt like. I mean, it literally felt like the the air got sucked out of the room, and I saw these uh threads together, and so here I am thinking the next day, like this is the impact leadership can have. There were people in that room that sent me letter, wrote me letters, sent me videos, and the recurring word, if you read the letters, read the cards, listened to the people, and watched the videos, the recurring word was leadership. They were thankful for my leadership. They were thankful of the leadership that they had gotten from me. They were thankful of leadership I had taught someone that had then taught them. So it wasn't just me directly, it could have been indirectly with someone that I had worked with from a leadership standpoint. And I thought, man, what so what if, talking about this conversation we're gonna be talking about today, what if leadership, people that were the ones and the twos, actually leaned into leadership development? And I think that room is what I saw the results are because that was just a small scale of what this is what leadership and the multiplication or the ripple effect could be in people's lives and families, right? So it was uh yeah, it was definitely a shock and a surprise.

Douglas Ford 4:16

Well, it was well deserved. So I'm glad uh all those people were able to get together and uh spend some time with you and uh giving you that opportunity just to reconnect with some of them and um making those connections uh for for some people that they may have heard about uh you know a person or or didn't know that they were connected to a person, and so that was uh it was a good time.

Soft Skills As Profit Drivers

John Ballinger 4:37

It was it was a really good time. And this this is to this episode or these episodes we're getting ready to do is a series, and we mentioned this on our uh first episode for season four, is a five-part series on the profitability protocol. So, how does quality leadership turn into profitability on a PL statement? Which is the most listened to podcast that we have out of all three seasons at this point, is the profitability side of leadership. There's a piece of leadership that I do not think gets taught today, and that is soft skills or interpersonal people skills. I've attended MBA classes where they're talking a lot about the financial numbers, where they talk about a lot on how to put a spreadsheet together, how to do analytics, how to um take numbers and then do projections. There's a lot of things like that, but I don't see a lot of time spent on soft skills or interpersonal people skills. The reality is those are leadership skills that are needed in today's time frame in order to increase profitability in an organization. Because we're gonna, as we go through this first episode, we're gonna see that not doing these soft skills or these interpersonal people skills or caring about your people, how it actually affects the bottom line of the organization.

Douglas Ford 6:04

Yeah, I saw an article uh not too long ago that uh was wanting to rebrand the soft skill to the superpower skills uh because they really are, and we've talked about this before. Um, you know, it's your IQ that uh usually gets you hired, uh gets you uh gets you a job, but it's your EQ that gets you higher in the job, you know, promotions and uh gives you advancement in the job. And so uh this uh article that I was reading is you know, for too long we've called those soft skills, uh, which seems to diminish them in some way, uh, but they're really not. It's actually they're the skills that we need the most because there's a lot of jobs that you can learn to do if you have the right attitude and you have the you know the aptitude to do it. Uh but uh sometimes it's very difficult to teach someone the emotional intelligence if they're not willing to do it, right? I mean they these are certainly skills that can be learned just like anything else, but um the problem is people don't want to do it, they uh are um they limit themselves, uh they don't see the need for it, and that really not only impacts them, but it impacts the whole team.

Bleed Or Feed: Trillions At Stake

John Ballinger 7:16

Yeah, so this series, we're gonna we're gonna uh label this series how leadership bleeds or feeds the bottom line. Which made me think of this statement that I read. It's it's uh by Anonymous, and I don't think that's the anonymous, the hackers. This is just they didn't know who to attribute it to. But I'm telling you, this is so true. And leaders, if you are someplace where you can write this down, please write this down and just kind of reflect on it. If you don't heal what hurt you, you'll bleed on people who didn't cut you.

Douglas Ford 7:54

Hurt people, hurt people.

John Ballinger 7:55

They do. And when we look at leadership, so we're on this journey of wanting, does desiring to help leaders be better leaders. But what we're finding is that leaders can't be the leaders that they can be because of hurts that they've had or lack of leadership development in the past. So when we say how leadership bleeds or feeds the bottom line, if you have a hurt leader trying to lead hurt people, you're gonna bleed a bottom line. And we're gonna talk about how much bleeding goes on in America, Mr. Ford, because it's a lot of bleeding.

Douglas Ford 8:34

It is, it's uh significantly more than you might think.

John Ballinger 8:37

Yeah. So we we talked about this just uh just a tiny bit on the the uh last podcast, but the leak we're gonna call it the leak in profitabilities in corporations annually is five point five trillion dollars. That's with a T, not a B. Five point five trillion dollars.

Douglas Ford 9:01

Yeah, that's definitely a big number. And you know, we I think we kind of get numbed to that number, yeah. Uh, because we we hear it thrown around, especially when you're talking about U.S. government, the GEP, different things like that. Trillion gets thrown around a lot. But uh to uh help put that in context, and we've we've talked about this before, like how long does it take to count to a trillion? Uh well if let's just go with the bottom end of the range that uh they think that it uh is going to um that uh leadership and poor leadership costs us, uh, which is three billion, uh three trillion dollars. So if you counted again the one second per number, it would take you ninety-five thousand plus years to get to three trillion. That's that's a long time.

John Ballinger 9:54

That's a significant amount of time. Some people would say that's longer than we've been around.

Douglas Ford 10:01

It very possibly could be, yes.

John Ballinger 10:06

Mr. Ford, I've got a question for you. Why are these numbers not talked about at MBA school, at PhD schools, and corporations? If that if and those are because these are out of reports, these are true figures that are out there. Why are they not discussed?

Douglas Ford 10:25

I don't know. I think it's hard to um tabulate on a calculator.

John Ballinger 10:32

You think okay, that possibly what about we don't know how to fix it?

Why We Ignore The Cost

Douglas Ford 10:38

Well, that could be the other answer.

John Ballinger 10:40

You know, what I've seen in society when we don't know how to fix something, we do two things. We act like it's not there or we throw money at it hoping it fixes it. Those are the two things I've seen in my time. I think we've thrown money at this and it's not worked.

Douglas Ford 10:56

Yeah, we've thrown a significant amount of money at this. We've talked about that before. Billions of dollars.

John Ballinger 11:00

Yeah, billions of dollars annually. Now we just don't know what to do. And the reality is people that are in leadership positions are so broken, they have no idea on how to put a plan together that affects change and what we refer to as the four pillars of society. I'll make this statement. The money's here to do it. It's not like we got to go create more money and raise taxes and do all these things. The money's here to do it. We're just not using the money appropriately to develop and train leaders so that we can take that$5.5 trillion and flip it around and put it into the profit side, where right now it's in the debit side of business.

Douglas Ford 11:44

Yeah, no, I think I think you're completely right on that in terms of like not properly deploying the resources to get this done because um, you know, there's so much focused on the bottom line, increasing the share price, and you know, what we've talked about, what we'll talk about during this uh kind of five-episode series is that you know, the realization of the fact that good leadership actually does, as you said at the beginning, does it either feed or bleed the bottom line? But um the other thing that I think hampers this is we've gone through kind of a quote unquote generation or maybe two of management and leadership that didn't know how to do it. And so to kind of turn the ship around, it's going to take another, you know, it's gonna take a group uh of leaders waking up and then starting to demonstrate good leadership and bring in number twos, as we've talked about, bring in those who are educated, can be educated to lead, so that the ripple effect that you talked about earlier uh at your uh 60th birthday party, um, that ripple effect can actually start to take place again in society. So we we've kind of gone through this period of time where leadership, true leadership, has not been emphasized for the sake of the bottom line, which is now creating a bigger problem for the bottom line. Yeah.

AI, Trades, And A Leadership Academy

Selection Over Hiring

John Ballinger 13:06

I'm gonna throw another curveball in here, not in our notes. Here's what leadership says we need to do because we can't effectively develop leaders that develop leaders. Let's invest in artificial intelligence and robots. I don't know what the number of investments in artificial intelligence and robots is, but I can promise you it's a significant number. And instead of taking that number and saying, Let's let's take a portion of this money, because we're still going to need quality people leading, regardless of robots and and uh technology and artificial intelligence, let's take a significant, let's take a portion of that money and set it aside and create a development program like blue-collar trade programs have been in America. We most people have heard of the pipe fitters. I mean, I grew up knowing what the pipe fitters were. Uh the plumbing uh unions, um, the electrical unions. There's not there's nothing like this that in that uh in America that teaches a leader, oh, you want to be a leader in the federal government? Here's what you need to do. You can't run for elected office until you go through this leadership development course. Now, I've seen some things this weekend from people that are elected and overseas conversations that embarrassed me. I was embarrassed for them as they were attempting to answer questions on a national, no, excuse me, a world stage, a world stage, and it was embarrassing. I was like, I can't I Douglas, I was embarrassed listening. And I'm like, how do you put yourself in the position of being a leader on the world stage and want somebody to ask you a question? You even know what the questions are before you go, because they give them to you. And then when you get asked that question, you have no idea what to say. Would you be embarrassed by that? Yeah, that would be um you know, I like to be prepared when I know you like like you're not an off-the-cuff, uh let me just kind of swag it kind of person. You want to be prepared when the questions are asked. This person was giving the questions, but it's obvious there was no preparation done. Is that the first time we've seen that? No. It's sad, but we've not. That's on the political side. What about on the business side? What about on the big church side? What about the family side with dads? You you get to be witness of some of the family issues that I have to mediate and how how I mean they're I mean we're talking about literal families that are ripped apart for failed leadership of dads, of men in the family. So it's no wonder we have this huge sucking bleeding from profitability, and everybody's just like, let's just not even look at it and make you know like it's there so we don't have to do anything about it. Now, let's put some context into your 95,000 years. The top five excuse me, the top three drainers of trillions of dollars turnover. We hire instead of select. Had a meeting last week, had a lunch meeting last week with an attorney, and uh he kept saying, I hired this, I hired this, and every time he would say it, I'd say select, select. And he got he got looking at me and he's like, Select. And I said, But think about it. Think about taking the time to select a team member versus because you hired someone that doesn't fit the culture and the mission of the company, now look what you're having to do. It's wrecked four or five other attorneys in the office. Now you're having to get re-engaged and figure out what to do with it. And guess who hired quotations hired that person? He did. So now you've got to go back and fix it. And you've got people looking at you like, why'd you put that person in here as the managing partner? So selection of people is critical. If we just started that, look what we could do to that one trillion dollars as just an example.

Douglas Ford 17:42

Yeah, and I did a little bit of research on that uh to try to find out, okay, so if turnover is the number one uh leader, or certainly one of the top leading uh elements of driving that uh three to five trillion dollars every year, uh, what are they? And in the top five, out of probably 15 different lists that I looked at, different people had done the list, conducted different studies. But out of the top um out of the top 15 that I looked at, in the top five uh categories of why turnover occurs, uh, the thing that has showed up more often than not was poor leadership, poor advancement opportunities, which speaks to poor leadership, and poor recognition. Uh and so and all those things are kind of addressed in in the charts that we talked about last season. Uh but uh I thought it was interesting. I mean, pay was certainly in there occasionally, but uh there was two or three that would bounce in and out of the of the top uh five, depending on maybe who did the study or how it was positioned, but uh consistently uh lack of leadership, lack of recognition, and lack of advancement opportunity were in the top five.

John Ballinger 18:55

Yeah, and so you've got this other sucking uh inefficient processes of$1.2 trillion annually because you don't have good solid processes. So you select someone. Let's say we get you bought in on the selection process and you select them and you come in and you tell them, All right, there's your job, and you don't give them the roadmap that's needed, now you're starting to lose profitability again. Because they're like, What'd I do? Well, just just figure it figure it out. I've heard so many leaders say, Well, we'll just put them in that seat and let them sink or swim. If they if they sink, we'll just put somebody else in that seat. What are they doing to the organization and the people in their departments that they're working with? Yeah, total frustration. And before we go to break, missed opportunities. So if you don't select the right person and you don't give them the roadmap, how many opportunities are going to be missed? That's$1.3 trillion annually that are missed because people aren't effectively looking internally inside the organization and say, what's next? What can we do next?

Douglas Ford 20:00

Yeah, if you're uh if you're constantly trying to figure it out, you're not able to see the big picture and the opportunities that are coming your way. So you're costing yourself and the company money. So yeah.

John Ballinger 20:10

So we're gonna take a break and we'll be back and we'll uh go through a few more costs that are bleeding uh in companies. And I'm gonna ask uh Mr. Ford a question um that I I'm sure he's prepared for. We'll be back.

Douglas Ford 21:15

Uh John opened up with uh saying does leadership bleed or feed the bottom line? Meaning that uh does poor leadership bleed the bottom line and reduce profitability, and does good leadership feed the bottom line and thereby increase profitability for the company? And we looked at a couple things before we went to break, talking about the fact that$5.5 trillion is uh lost every year uh due to poor productivity, uh, for poor leadership and poor management. And uh we uh are going to get into a couple other elements here before we get started, but uh John teased us with a question that he had for me before we went to break.

John Ballinger 21:57

Are you ready?

Douglas Ford 21:58

I'm ready.

John Ballinger 21:59

If we're losing.$5.5 trillion a year. Is it fair to say that we could balance the U.S. budget by simply fixing leadership in corporate America?

Douglas Ford 22:10

Simply fixing maybe. I think there's a lot uh that goes into that. But yes, I believe that if you start correcting leadership, uh then you start increasing profitability of companies, they're gonna pay more taxes, there's gonna be more uh products generated, there's gonna be a lot uh that uh while we may not uh if we could wave the magic one and fix leadership tomorrow, we may not totally erase that five trillion dollars, but we're starting to make a big cut into that and we're starting to move in the right direction.

John Ballinger 22:41

Yeah, there's a term we could start chiseling away.

Douglas Ford 22:43

Yeah, exactly.

John Ballinger 22:45

And if you don't start somewhere, you'll never get anywhere. And what we failed to do, even though we recognize it, the great resignation, the great renegotiation, all these things took place, but we didn't do anything to say, man, what if that happens again? What do we do to take that team member and bring them back in and tell them, no, we mean it this time because there is a level of trust that's been eroded over the decades you talk about that the leadership is going to have to earn back. And another thing that leaders don't like to do, they don't like to humble themselves to earn that trust back. You should just do it because I said.

Douglas Ford 23:30

Right.

John Ballinger 23:31

And that's the wrong type of leadership that's needed in America right now.

Douglas Ford 23:34

Yeah, I was uh listening to something the other day and they were talking about uh the way America kind of operates, and it's usually in big pendulum swings, right? Like we we very rarely make micro adjustments along the way to kind of uh stay the course or correct a course. We like to have something go all the way one direction and swing back the other direction uh at least two or three times before we find out how we're actually going to move forward. And so if you think about the Great Resignation uh being one swing to uh one side and then coming back, and now we're almost uh back, I think, to kind of our pre-COVID, pre-great resignation days where uh management is now starting to push back on all that. And uh we've seen certainly in the last year, uh emails that have gone out from executives that said if you're here thinking that this is a a family-friendly culture and that we're all just one big team, uh then you should probably go look for a job somewhere else. And so, you know, what's it going to take for us to kind of get back to that happy medium where uh leadership recognizes that yes, if we do a good job of of leading people, which is sacrifice, it's understanding who your people are. It's all the things we've talked about in previous episodes of actually being a servant leader to your team and in order to help them per progress so you can help the company progress. And um, I think that uh it's uh it's certainly going to take another swing of the pendulum to start uh counterbalancing this in a way that uh brings good leadership into true focus in mainstream uh leadership circles.

Can Better Leadership Balance Budgets

John Ballinger 25:13

Yeah, so when you when you talk about uh the fact that we throw trillions around like it's not that big a deal. When it is that big a deal, right? So we're we're talking about is is five point five trillion, isn't that about a quarter of the GDP? It's pretty close. Pretty close to the so a quarter of it is lost. If you're running a business and a quarter of your profits just go so we'll say the US is the business, and a quarter of your profits are going out the back door because of an issue. Wouldn't you think it would be important to figure out how to solve that issue?

Douglas Ford 25:50

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Especially if you're running on thin margins.

John Ballinger 25:54

Which a lot of people are because we're having to be more aggressive, right? Where we used to say, Man, I'd like to make 30% margins on this because of the competition, whether it's international or national, you know, it's like, man, I'd really like if I could get 12% margins, that would be good. Now you throw a quarter of that out the back door, now you're really struggling.

Douglas Ford 26:16

Yep. Well, and just um, you know, inflation uh over the course of time. I mean, we've talked about that before as well, like how that's just driving up prices. So as inflation drives up prices, you can't continue to get that that extra margin on top of it all the time because then you're pricing yourself out of the market.

John Ballinger 26:34

Yeah, dare I say in healthcare increases. That's a whole nother topic, isn't it?

Douglas Ford 26:40

That'll have to be another episode for another day.

John Ballinger 26:42

Yeah. So think about profit drain. So I want the business owner, the leader in the organization, to think about this. Identify the single biggest profit drainer in your organization and write it down and say, what am I going to do to effect change on that profit drainer? Make sure that you put people as part of the assessment of profit drainers because our natural bend is to go to a supply of something or a vendor or even payroll. We'll go to payroll, like I'm gonna cut payroll, or one of your famous things that companies do, they cut marketing and advertising cost. Right? And you'll be like, so we're gonna stop telling people who we are, what we do, and how we benefit them, and hope that they buy more.

Douglas Ford 27:29

Right.

John Ballinger 27:29

Yeah, so but that's what that's that's those are knee-jerk reactions. Right. But I want the I want the leader, I want the business owner, I want the government official, I want someone that's dealing with other people's money or your own money to say, what are the what's the single? Just one. And then own that one so that you can start affecting change. Because I'm I'm sure you're gonna find more than one. As a matter of fact, I know right now leaders know more than one that's going on inside their company that's draining profits from the bottom line that they've not addressed because they didn't really know how to. But make sure you consider the people aspect of part of it, and guess who part of that pointing that pointing that finger goes to? Comes back to you. The leader themselves.

Douglas Ford 28:19

Yep.

Pendulums, Trust, And Servant Leaders

John Ballinger 28:19

Yeah. Make sure you take a hard look at yourself and saying, Am I doing everything I need to do to effectively lead this team of people and this organization to profitability to ensure the future viability of this company? That's a long statement, but reflect on that statement. Am I doing everything possible to be able to lead this organization, myself included, to profitability for the long-term viability of this organization?

Douglas Ford 28:48

Well, when we talk about um lead and LEAD, uh, which is one of the things that we've talked about a good bit on First Lead U, uh, when you get to the D part, that's the disenfranchised, disengaged, disinterested uh team member. And let us remind everyone that we get to D because the L's, the born leaders, the people in the number one position have not done their job effectively. That's what's creating the disenfranchised uh team member. And you know, solving that problem could be as easy as you walking out onto the floor where the disenfranchised and disengaged team members are and asking them, what can we do better to help you do your job?

John Ballinger 29:31

Yeah, I just I just jumped on uh internet real quick while you were saying that and looked for uh the top five profit drainers for a company, and there's a CPA report from the CPA association. Guess what number one is? Poor leadership management. Number two is supply chain market. Number three is legal costs and regulatory. And you're thinking, so we know what they are, we even see them, but we act like they're not there because those are tough things to address. Those those top three, those are tough things to address. But what happens when you do address them? What's gonna happen to the organization?

Douglas Ford 30:12

Gets stronger, gets healthier.

Thin Margins And Profit Drainers

John Ballinger 30:14

Yeah, stronger and healthier. Um also I want the I want the leaders to think about this. As you're reflecting on this podcast and you're reflecting on the next five episodes we're gonna do on profitability, and remember how leadership bleeds or feeds the bottom line, I want you to think about how you can yourself start journaling what am I doing from a leadership standpoint to ensure the viability of this organization that I'm in charge of leading or this department over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. Because at some point, as long as the organization stays in business, you will hand it off. There will be a baton pass at some point to someone in the organization, and how you left that organization is going to determine the viability of it going forward. And the next episode we're gonna be talking about is the vitality variable, how how you can leave the organization in in good shape when you exit the organization, which a lot of people really don't think about. They think, I'm out of here, we'll see you later. God bless you all and take care of yourselves. But what you're doing by not looking forward, you're not leaving the team that comes in and takes that baton and you're not allowing them to move it forward. And which which I personally think, Mr. Ford, the poor leadership in America is doing to the children. I think we're we're leaving them what I call in the military a soup sandwich. And we're better than that. And this the generation of people right now, and my generation, and even the next generation in front of me, have a unique opportunity to transition and start chipping away, chiseling away at the poor leadership that's gone on over the last two or three decades.

Douglas Ford 32:06

Yeah, we were um focused obviously very health uh very heavily this episode and the next few episodes on on kind of corporate America and uh small businesses. And you know, you you said it nobody lasts forever, whether you're a uh entrepreneur and you started a business and you're growing it, at some point you've got to retire, or you know, you're no longer gonna be in that business. So what's your what you are you doing with that? Are you developing leadership? Or if you're uh a hired person that goes into an established company, there were people there that were before you, and there were people that will come after you. And so did you benefit, or are you paying the penalty for the people that came before you? And so, what do you want to leave for the next people that are going to come after you? So it's very it's very important to think about what are we doing, how are we positioning the company, how are we putting it in success, and we want to be so much about today, today, today. Uh we're you know, we're kind of even if you're not an investor, you're everybody's so kind of geared to the to the share price, to the stock price, whatever it is, uh, does that we're doing making short-term decisions trying to run a long-term business. And so uh it's uh vitally important that we think about what we're handing off to the next people, and we've got to start putting those things in place today so that they can mature appropriately.

John Ballinger 33:24

Yes, we matter of fact, first lead you needs to be in every MBA business school in America. Just call firstleadju.com, one s t leadletter you.com. We would be happy to put leadership academies inside MBA schools or business schools in America, wouldn't we, Mr. Voard?

Douglas Ford 33:42

That would be awesome.

John Ballinger 33:43

Yeah. So, and remember, leaders, in order to lead your teams well, you must first lead. Thanks, everyone.