Pat St. Laurent, Vice President of the Strategy Group at Expeditors, shares his thoughts on the meaning of resiliency, agility, and the drivers that can impact the survival of companies. Why is resiliency difficult to attain, and how does a company begin to understand its level of risk?

The past few years have tested supply chain resiliency in extraordinary ways. To improve supply chain resiliency, decision makers must first understand the many complex contributing factors. This topic had already been receiving considerable attention in the years leading up to the pandemic, owing mostly to the prevalence of disruptive forces impacting global supply chains. For more information, download our Supply Chain Resiliency white paper. 

Chris Parker: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Expeditors podcast, where we look at the logistics and freight forwarding industry through the lens of a global logistics provider. I'm your host, Chris Parker, and today we're revisiting supply chain resiliency. But this time, we're focusing on why it can be difficult to attain, understanding resiliency as a goal for your organization, and we'll cover some key drivers to get you started with an assessment. We'll also talk about resiliency versus agility and, if you haven't already, why it's important to act now. Joining me today is the Vice President of our Strategy Group, Pat St. Laurent. Pat, welcome.

Pat St. Laurent: Thank you.

Chris Parker: First things first, Pat, I wanted to ask a few questions about you before we get started talking about today's topic. What is the Strategy Group, and what do you do as the vice president?

Pat St. Laurent: Well, we are more of an innovation group than a strategy group.

Chris Parker: Okay.

Pat St. Laurent: So we spend our time researching unmet needs for customers of Expeditors and customers who we might have that are not Expeditors customers, and we create ideas for new businesses that would satisfy those unmet needs. Then we work them through the pipeline to the point at which they either fade away because we're not going to do it, or they become new startups that would be under the Expeditor's umbrella.

Chris Parker: Yeah, absolutely. How long has this team been around, and what are some things that we can talk about that are exciting for you right now?

Pat St. Laurent: Sure. Well, we've been around about five years.

Chris Parker: Okay.

Pat St. Laurent: It takes a long time to seed new companies that you really want to succeed. A lot of startups who go prematurely into a scale, and they realize that the business they started is unsustainable, and we would like to not be those companies. We'd like to be a company that produces successful startups, so we spend more time on our due diligence. We spend more time on our customer research. So we've been working on a handful of things, eight or nine, one has succeeded. There's another one right behind it getting ready to launch, and there's another three or four that are all sort of in the pipeline moving forward.

Chris Parker: Very exciting. So I've been with the company for about 11 years now, and I've always seen you as just one of those folks here who just knows a lot. Your name, I feel like, is pretty established within the organization. I wanted to know how did you get to that point? Where has your career taken you? Where did you start, and what's been motivating you?

Pat St. Laurent: Well, I started in 1978, if you can believe that. So I'm coming up on my 44th full year in this industry.

Chris Parker: Wow.

Pat St. Laurent: So let's start with that. I came into this business like a lot of people did in the 70s by accident because nobody did a choice to do a career in logistics in 1978. I can promise you that. What happened is I started in freight forwarding operations. So I learned about the way that shipments move around the world, and I spent a few years doing that. Then I moved into a sales role and started getting more interaction with clients on what they were up to and where they were, were going. So fast forward 25 years or so of freight forwarding and logistics provider management, and I pivoted into more of a supply chain role, supply chain and supply chain technology. Which I did for 20 years, and that is what I do today. So customer supply chain, structure management, operations, and the technology that supports those activities.

Chris Parker: That's fascinating. I actually took your supply chain fundamentals course here at Expeditors, and it helped me really understand the business at large and just how the world kind of works in some ways, how we go about moving things. It was just really fascinating. So yeah, the wealth of knowledge that you have is incredible. So I'm excited to hear today too not only the knowledge but also the wisdom that you may have built up over the last couple years, in particular since so much has happened. So we covered it a couple times, but resilience, what does it mean to you, and what does it mean in the context of global supply chain?

Pat St. Laurent: Sure. Well, so resilience has been around as a topic for supply chain leaders for a long time. It just never made it to the level of importance that it did now, obviously, it made its importance known because of COVID, which I think everybody realizes. What is resilience? Well, it's the ability for a supply chain to absorb a disruption and either regain its original form or gain a modified form that is competitive against peers who may struggle to. So in the world of COVID and the current supply chain, there's very few companies that have regained their original form. Most have modified their form. So the trick is to be able to modify your form as quickly as possible and to stay ahead of your competitors, who you would hope are transforming themselves slower than you are.
 

Chris Parker: So either someone's coming out with a modified form or going back to their original form. What are some of the characteristics of the original form that can continue to succeed in this day and age?

Pat St. Laurent: Sure. So the diversity of your sourcing, are you overly dependent on too few suppliers and/or suppliers in too few geographic locations? Are you over-dependent on too few stocking locations? Are you dependent on a lead time that you were so used to in a JIT model, and you realize that you can no longer rely on that lead time? Well, all of those things changed. So if you were able, for example, to absorb a different level of cost for transportation and a different level of lead time, and you could still maintain customer satisfaction, and you could still maintain the price that you sold goods at and, therefore, the margin that you keep. Then you probably have succeeded through the course of the last couple of years. But there's been quite a few companies that were not prepared for that at all. They either waited too long to implement measures that they could employ to mitigate the effect of the disruption, or they were just in denial, and they thought they could ride it out, and then they realized that some of their competitors did not ride it out.

Pat St. Laurent: They did some very slick maneuvers, and they got access to your customers that you thought were going to be more patient than they were, and next thing you know, you're losing market share. So resilience has a definite competitive advantage, which I think anybody who is more resilient has adequately discovered through the last couple of years.

Chris Parker: Yeah, 100%. Talking about this modified form, then. I hear supply chain agility is also another thing that's popular. Is that the same as resiliency? Are they related? How do they leverage off of each other? What's the relationship between agility and resiliency?

Pat St. Laurent: So I would characterize agility as the ability to quickly muster people and processes and technology to react with some degree of heroics to a disruption. So if you're really agile, it theoretically means you can respond quickly, and you can transform quickly.

Chris Parker: Sure.

Pat St. Laurent: Whereas resilience, and I'm painting a very simplified difference, but resilience is more structural. So I design resilience into supply chain, and I design agility to transform when these disruptions happen to me. Agility by itself won't save you from over-dependence on a supply source that suddenly stops. There's no level of agility that will save you there. Had you had redundancy in your supply sources, you could have said, okay, I'm going to quickly pivot my dependency for this product on my second supplier instead of my first because my first is in an affected area my second is not. But you if you didn't have that second supplier at all, then you're basically stuck. You're crippled by the absence of goods coming from your prime or your only supplier.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: So I think a lot of companies confuse the two or at least conflate the two. For me, it's very distinct. Resilience is something that you design into your operating model, and agility is much more around how you react when a disruption happens.

Chris Parker: When we were just talking about companies going back to their original form and being able to succeed then, you mentioned the word dependence a lot. Asking the question of, am I dependent on multiple partners and things like that. Is dependence an issue when it comes to trying to work towards resilience or trying to be more agile?

Pat St. Laurent: 100%, yes.

Chris Parker: Yeah.

Pat St. Laurent: Dependence on any entity that has its own ecosystem, its own life, it has its own finances, its own people, it's in a geographic area. There's risks everywhere, and unless you are able to master the degree of risks that are focused on the trading partners you do business with and you feel comfortable that you've understood every single risk that they have in their enterprise, and you're willing to absorb that by consequence in your enterprise because the dependence is so great, then fair and square. But you don't find too many companies that will say I am completely comfortable that I understand the risk of the trading partners on whom I am dependent. That is very unusual. So there's an unhealthy degree of trust that trading partners are okay, and they may or may not be okay. So you shouldn't depend on them being okay. You either verify that they're okay, or you distribute your risk by reducing your dependency on any single one that might cripple your business.
 

Chris Parker: Yeah. We've seen, I guess you could say, a dramatic uptick in the focus of this topic with customers. I mean, you talk with customers plenty about this very thing. What do you think precipitated it?

Pat St. Laurent: I'll say there's a couple forces at play. For starters, years ago, boards started really getting interested and looking at enterprise risk related to supply chain.

Chris Parker: Sure.

Pat St. Laurent: So there was pressure coming from boards on behalf of shareholders, just to understand whether executives knew and were prepared to build resilience into their supply chains, and COVID and the supply chain disruptions that followed pretty much sped up the timeline shall we say. Right? So there was an existing degree of attention being paid to it, but all of a sudden, everything was on fire, and it was like, here we go. The C levels and the boards were all very, very interested at examining the steps companies had taken to build resilience in because the absence of resilience was attributable to some of the financial problems that people had in the last couple of years.

Chris Parker: What would you say then that the leadership for these companies were looking for from their internal teams, as opposed to the answers that they're looking for from their partners, their service providers?

Pat St. Laurent: Well, I guess even asking about teams, right? So a lot of the steps you would take to be resilient are not really dependent on people. They're more structural. So do I have diversified supply? Do I have diversified demand? When you think of the people and the trading partners, the biggest question is, are my trading partners a weak link? So do I have too few service providers servicing a critical area of my business? And maybe not too few, do I have a single one? Right? If that single one, for any reason, goes down, am I crippled? Right? Am I out of business? The trading partners who contribute to the data environment, bearing in mind that access to data is a very significant enabler to agility. You can't make quick decisions on how to transform your company if you struggle to get the data that you need to make good decisions. Right? So I think the trading partner diversity is one aspect, don't be over-dependent on too few. But also, the trading partner's ability to stay with you when a disruption happens and keep pace with what you're going through is a struggle. Right?

Pat St. Laurent: You want to go fast, and your trading partners aren't equipped to go fast, and it's not really a time to change partners in the middle of a rapid, agile transformation. Which a lot of people found themselves in, right?

Chris Parker: The dynamic between whether it's supply chain experts or teams for a company that has to kind of relay this information to leadership. Do you get the impression that company leadership C-suite levels are rolling their sleeves up and working with these teams who have to manage supply chains for the companies? Or is it more of a reporting to and having to answer for themselves?

Pat St. Laurent: Sure. I would say that today more than ever, I don't know if working with, but they're actively involved.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: If you imagine resilience, if you were to do a bottoms up approach on resilience, you would find people getting hold of initiatives that they think are worthy and running them up the chain and building a business case. I would say that's not a very healthy way of building resilience, because if your project has to produce an ROI. Well, generally, it is not it's going to produce a loss because you're going to be ensuring the company against disruption by spending money on resilience as a general statement. It's very easy to say, I'm going to just depend 100% on the one low-cost supplier because my profit motive has me thinking that's a good thing until he is not there anymore.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: So inevitably, dual sourcing means adding cost. So you're adding cost to protect against disruption, and that is not an enviable place to be on a bottoms up pitch to somebody at a C level who doesn't already agree that it's a good thing to do. So I think that C levels right now are extremely, let's say, motivated to add resilience, and with that, the mindset should be I'm willing to invest in it. So if the mission coming down to supply chain people and procurement people and everybody is bring me some initiatives that will increase our resilience and let me paint the picture to shareholders through the board that we have done some very smart steps to protect our company. That's, I think, a really sound way to go.

Chris Parker: What would you say is some of these, I guess, proposals or initiatives that could be brought up to leadership? What makes them a hard sell?

Pat St. Laurent: Well, how resilient do you want to be, I guess? It's like an insurance policy, right?

Chris Parker: Sure.

Pat St. Laurent: Because you can't really tie a financial benefit to it.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: But the ones who got hurt the worst can certainly tie a financial consequence to it.

Chris Parker: Absolutely.

Pat St. Laurent: Yeah. I always say the metaphor is like the best time to buy a house alarm is right after you've been robbed. Because you're very sensitive to the damage and you, therefore, don't care how much things cost. Right?

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: A lot of companies in today's environment are in the I don't care how much it costs, just do it mindset, but that won't last. Companies who are in the risk business are trying to do their very best to increase this sort of sensitivity to the presence of constant disruptive risk. There's been an endless stream of them going on for the last, I don't know how long. They seem to be getting more frequent, and the disruptive natures are either getting bigger, or they're becoming wildly unpredictable. So to wait and just go, we'll deal with it when it happens is probably a practice that is losing popularity. So I think the hospitality for resilience initiatives is at an all-time high. So if I were a supply chain leader, I would be striking while the iron's hot.

Chris Parker: Yeah.

Pat St. Laurent: If I was trying to do things that I thought were smart that my C-levels never thought were smart, this would be the time to go back to the table.

Chris Parker: I mean, yeah. The material impact has been clear, but these are existential questions, it seems like. Yeah.

Pat St. Laurent: For sure.

Chris Parker: So then let's say we're getting started then to talk to leadership or leadership wants to then understand the level of resiliency that they want to shoot for or what they're comfortable with. How does a company go about that?

Pat St. Laurent: Well, to start with, you look at your operating model through the lens of resiliency, and you ask yourself the question, is my sourcing model, does it have sufficient resiliency? Have I distributed my supply across the suitable number of sources and or in a suitable number of sort of geographic places? Am I solely dependent on China when there's so much rhetoric around what may or may not impede trade with China? Or am I in China and India and Vietnam, and I'm like, "Well, okay, I've got a pretty good diversity there. I can shift as needed. So I'm feeling good about that." Now let's switch over to my inventory. Well, I've got $100 million worth of inventory in two buildings. What if one burns to the ground? Am I out of business, or can I sustain my customer order fulfillment through the second one? How quickly can I replace the inventory that was lost? Are manufacturing lead times six months, or are they 60 days? Right? All those questions.

Pat St. Laurent: So you think about the operating model bit by bit through the lens of resilience, and you ask yourself the question, am I or am I not at a comfortable place in this area? If I'm not, then that is the target of an initiative. But on balance, what you might find is that there's a link in the chain that has a disproportionate amount of weight in resilience. Right? Maybe that one deserves more attention, right? So I can set up some redundancies so that I feel better about a dependency on one thing, but I've got two different channels I can move it through. So there's a lot of different ways you can go.

Chris Parker: It makes me want to ask, is it possible to over-engineer resilience?

Pat St. Laurent: Sure.

Chris Parker: Yeah. What does that look like?

Pat St. Laurent: A lead box, right? Where you are risk-free.

Chris Parker: Yeah.

Pat St. Laurent: There's no such thing. Right?

Chris Parker: Sure.

Pat St. Laurent: Let's face it business leaders are paid to balance risk and to try to just find the right place to be. Yeah. I would say the right place to be is wherever you're comfortable, and you'll know how right you were when the disruption strikes.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: Over the course of, let's call them mini disruptions, things that last a month and disrupt the flow of goods, but they're not existential, and you go, okay, well, we battle-tested that plan, and it worked well, or it didn't, and you learn and adjust, learn and adjust. Right?

Chris Parker: So not to say that a lead box is the ultimate goal here, but it sounds like true resilience is hard to attain. You cannot be completely risk-free. However, it's still a goal you can work towards, right? But to work towards that, we got to start moving somehow. So how do we start moving? And then also, when we come across certain obstacles or certain things that get in the way, what do you think is the best way to go about mitigating them or getting around them?

Pat St. Laurent: Well, I think that what gets in the way is probably a level of denial that the worst is behind us. So we're, hey, listen, that would've been a great idea a year ago, Chris. Why didn't you come to me with that brilliant resilience initiative before COVID? But now that it's over, we don't need to worry about doing that, right? Until we do, right? Again, the one thing that I don't think anybody can deny is that disruption is going to be constant, unpredictable, and the impact of it will be highly variable, some severe, some less severe. But to imagine that the worst is behind us is definitely folly. It is decidedly not behind us. There's many, many things that are still going to happen. So I don't think it's an option to build resilience in. The only question is the degree, and again, I think the degree is how much... It's like, how much cost am I willing to invest in marketing? When the return on marketing for some companies is very nebulous.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: So it's like, well, you can't find an ROI. You just have to spend as much as you're comfortable with, right? As much as your shareholders are comfortable with, and your board is comfortable with and just move on, and then you'll realize through the course of testing it with actual disruptions, you'll realize whether you over or under did it.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: For example, if you have suppliers in three Asian countries that are serving up product perfectly for you, you're breaking profit. But you think you know just in case everything in Asia goes wrong. So I'm going to set up some US suppliers that actually make product in the US, and it's expensive, but I'm going to balance that cost out against the whole, and I'm going to say for resilience, this is a good idea. By about year five of doing that, when you've spent $100 million that you would not have spent, and nothing ever goes wrong in China or Vietnam, or India. You probably are saying to yourself why, "the heck did I do that?" and that's the point at which you may just say, okay enough, we're going to stop, and then Murphy's law will be visiting upon you very quickly.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: Right? So it's one of those things. You either commit to it, and you sustain it in spite of constantly worrying that you may be wasting money. Hey, I haven't had a car accident in 10 years, and every time I get my car insurance bill, I don't wonder whether I should cancel it.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: That's the same mentality.

Chris Parker: Yeah.

Pat St. Laurent: You just have to accept it and just keep going.

Chris Parker: Yeah, absolutely. We're a couple years past the start of the pandemic, right? I mean, we're recording this in 2022 or towards the end of it. Are there still any reasons a company would not start its own assessment and looking into its own resilience or improving its resilience? What are the valid reasons you feel that make sense to hold off or to delay, or to even just not invest as much?

Pat St. Laurent: Wow. I guess it depends who you're asking. So if you're asking a C level, I can't imagine that there's any reason. If you're asking somebody whose three or four tiers down, my guess would be why they would not start is because they are predicting that they will not succeed in getting anything done. So they're imagining that the C-suite will say no, and they, therefore, don't bother trying.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: Again, I think that now is the time to get some fuel and some energy behind initiatives that bring resiliency to the C levels, even if they weren't thinking about the initiative that you had in mind until you showed up. Because there's no better time to get the hospitality you need, and it's always better to show up in the C-suite with an idea that they like than to implement one that they like that you never heard of. I mean, it's good for everything, including your career, right? So yeah.

Chris Parker: You mentioning at the very beginning of this conversation around companies coming out as a modified form or some returning to their original. No matter what, we're all trying to shoot for pre-pandemic performance in some regard, right? Do you believe pre-pandemic performance can be reached or maintained with post-pandemic strategies or transformations?

Pat St. Laurent: I feel like right now, things are at the point where they will not go back to how they were pre-pandemic. Whether it's capacity, freight cost, realignment of different industries, rearrangement of priorities, I don't see people going back to the old way. So the new reality is that certain commodities are going to be very hard to source overseas because the freight rates are too high. Certain countries are going to do really well. Countries that manufacture good products at a good price that have been under-exploited from sourcing organizations are going to be in a moment where they're going to be welcoming all these procurement leaders who are coming to look for potential new suppliers. Right?

Chris Parker: Yeah.

Pat St. Laurent: I think Vietnam is a great example, India as another one. But even the lead times today, shipping by air or ocean are longer, and they aren't showing signs of shortening much anytime soon. So the inventory holdings that you need to satisfy customer demand when you've got containers sitting in queues or crossing oceans really slowly is a very different capital requirement that you have to hold onto that much inventory. Are you getting that money back from customers by raising that price of goods? Not so easy, especially in an inflationary environment. People are getting dinged on things that they can't control, and they can control whether they buy or don't buy the TV you imported.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: Right?

Chris Parker: Absolutely.

Pat St. Laurent: So it's hard to imagine that the absorption of a considerably higher freight cost to import goods is going to be met by a customer who's willing to pay more for those goods because of it. So I think we're in a new paradigm, and it's not going back to the pre-pandemic one.

Chris Parker: Sure. Yeah, the pandemic kicked up the dust, right? It brought a lot of change. To you, I guess what does a world look like where the dust has settled, and things have calmed down? How does that world work for you?

Pat St. Laurent: Well, gosh, more diversity in sourcing, more diversity in sales channels, and in the locations where your goods are bought. More technology. So with more data, more connectivity between trading partners so that you can see through data a connected web of companies that are all in some form or fashion winning or losing based on the end customer who buys a product. Gosh, it's just different. Yeah, it's going to be different. It'll be different skill sets are going to be needed to thrive in the new market.

Chris Parker: Yeah.

Pat St. Laurent: Cost models, everything's going to change, or it has changed, and I don't think it's going back.

Chris Parker: I look at logistics, transportation, supply chain as kind of this hidden industry. At least growing up for me and for my own self, I always kind of saw it as a hidden world. I talked with my friends before the pandemic, no one gave a second thought to shipping. But now it's everywhere; everyone's feeling the pain of it and how it's been impacted. When you think of the consumer, and I'm thinking of like, my father-in-law listens to this podcast, right? He'd have to have listened to a whole 30 some minutes of us chatting through this. Why should he care about what's going on behind the scenes of supply chain? Why should he care about what we've discussed today? What can he take away from something like this? What can the consumer take away from this conversation?

Pat St. Laurent: I guess I'm with you, by the way, just for a way longer time. I don't even think my wife of 40 years really knows what I do for a living. Yeah. I guess when you look at an empty store shelf, and people say, "oh, supply chain issues." What does that mean, right? Does it mean the goods are just stuck in transit? Doubtful, I wish it were that simple.

Chris Parker: Sure.

Pat St. Laurent: They're on a truck that hasn't got to Kansas City yet.

Chris Parker: Right, it's on its way.

Pat St. Laurent: Not really. So it's because, for a lot of companies, the decisions that they made on how they're going to design their supply chain, those are the decisions that are resulting in the empty store shelf. Not the truck that's delayed in transit from a Phoenix distribution center to a storefront in Kansas City. That is not what's causing the empty shelf. Generally speaking, obviously, there's exceptions. But the overall design of a supply chain that is able to successfully produce and flow goods from their supply to their demand is a supply chain that is either running today, and you don't have empty shelves, or it's massively obstructed by disruptions that you could not overcome with resilience. So COVID problems in a manufacturing site, factory shuts down, or it's running at half capacity. You get no goods. That's not as big a problem unless that's your only factory.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: Right? The Ningbo Port in China went to, I believe, half staff because of COVID protocols, and the containers couldn't get through the port very fast. Well, if every single one of your containers you buy from China comes through Ningbo, then you just lost half of the speed of your goods getting out.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: You could go down the list and think of 1000 reasons why a design decision has put you at risk of an empty store shelf.

Chris Parker: It kind of puts the phrase by design in a whole new light, for good or for bad.

Pat St. Laurent: This store shelf is empty by design, in parentheses, poor design.

Chris Parker: Right.

Pat St. Laurent: Yes.

Chris Parker: Pat, I know that you wrote a white paper talking a little bit about this with a couple of key drivers and stuff to look into doing an assessment. Could you talk a little bit about that? What could folks expect to see when they dig this up and read it?

Pat St. Laurent: Sure. Well, I started by thinking about, well, what are all the areas of a supply chain that have a direct link to resilience, right? So, in other words, if you wanted to be super resilient, what are all the things you would have to do? And in this white paper, I've basically characterized what all of those things are, and I'm sure I missed a few, but there's a dozen or so on there.

Chris Parker: Yeah, it's pretty comprehensive, it looks like.

Pat St. Laurent: The idea is that if you distribute your supply and go, okay we're good because we now have a stronger degree of supply continuity in the face of a disruption, but you do nothing else. What might end up happening is the good old whack-a-mole game, where you knock down that one mole, and you think, okay, everything's fine until the other one pops up, and you realize that supply continuity by itself is not an answer to resilience. It's just one piece of the puzzle. So in the white paper, I guess I'm kind of arguing that if you're going to do resilience, you got to do resilience. Meaning you got to hit on all of them and at least understand where you are and if you don't have vulnerabilities, check; you're great, that's awesome. But if you do, then you should look at all of them. So I guess I'm advocating for an assessment of your degree of resilience on every one of these topics and maybe others you think of that I didn't think of because I don't operate a supply chain and figure out the risk profile.

Pat St. Laurent: Then with that risk profile, you sit down, and you talk about the company's risk profile in total, and you sort of visit the question about what should we do to de-risk some of these things and how much money are we willing to invest in the de-risking.

Chris Parker: Yeah.

Pat St. Laurent: Right? But the assessment, of course, is where it starts, right? And it has to be enterprise. A supply chain is the ultimate system; it's got 1000 moving parts, they're all interconnected, and if you look at a moving part and you optimize in a silo, you will surely lose. Because you are going to forget the mole in the corner that is going to pop up the second you pop this one down.

Chris Parker: Pat, thank you so much for this time and for talking me through this. This was really cool.

Pat St. Laurent: Awesome.

Chris Parker: Really appreciate it.

Pat St. Laurent: Hope it helps. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Parker: Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you've got any questions or want to learn more about today's topic, check out the show notes for more information. And before you go, make sure you're subscribed to whatever podcast app you're using so you won't miss the next episode. To learn more about Expeditors, you can find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, or simply visit us at expeditors.com. Take care, and I'll see you next time.