EP 585: Holman Logistics on Longevity, Loyalty, and a People-First Approach
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The New Warehouse podcast hosted by Kevin Lawton is your source for insights and ideas from the distribution, transportation, and logistics industry. A new episode every Monday morning brings you the latest from industry experts and thought leaders. And now, here's Kevin.

Hey, it's Kevin with the new Warehouse Podcast bringing you a new episode today. And on today's episode, I am very excited, going to be joined by Brian Downey, and he is the president at Holman Logistics, and they are going to

Talk to us about what they do at Holman Logistics. And we're going to talk about their long, long time in the business since 1864, I think. Pretty long time, we can say. We're going to talk about that longevity, how the business kind of got started, what they're up to now.

now and how they've been able to sustain a business for that long. It's quite the accomplishment for any business, let alone in the logistics space. So we're going to dive into that with Brian and learn a little bit more about that and also how they're approaching kind of the future of the business as well. So Brian, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm fantastic, Kevin. How are you? I am doing well, doing well, definitely. Happy to get you on here. Happy to learn more about Holman Logistics and what it is that you all do. So why don't we kind of maybe start it off there. Give us a brief overview of Holman and what you do. Sure.

So yeah, we are a family-owned third-party logistics company with operations across the country, but we have our support office up here in the Pacific Northwest. It's kind of where we started, but we are, oddly enough, bigger east of the Mississippi. Arkansas is our biggest state. We have operations up and down the East Coast. We're 161 years old this year.

It is the grace of God that we are still in existence as a family owned business. It's pretty wild. It's a great legacy to be involved in. And I'm super excited to be here.

we kind of focus on food paper and appliances uh kind of our three verticals if you will we do more than just that but those are our for whatever reason the verticals we've fallen into uh and supported really well for a long time we've got some really long-standing client relationships

We've been supporting GE Appliances since the mid-1980s. Oh, wow. That's a long time. Yeah, working with Hills Pet Nutrition, subsidiary of Colgate Science Diet, what they make since also the late 1980s. And what's nuts is that we've been serving Scott Paper slash Kimberly Clark since prior to 1967. Wow. No one is alive who remembers when we first started working with them.

It's wild. My great uncle in Portland back in the mid 1960s, we were working with Scott Paper and Scott Paper said, you got to come up to Seattle. I said, no, we're a Portland operation. And then the next year they came back and said, you got to come to Seattle. We said, okay, we'll go to Seattle. So we've been in Seattle area ever since. And yeah, my dad married in in 1976 and joined the company in 1980. I sort

I sort of sowed my wild career oats, if you will, for about 12 years doing things that were not at all related to logistics. But came back when I found that what I was doing, I didn't feel like it was going to be worth doing 30 years from now. I wasn't going to look back on my career and think I'd made a difference in the world. I feel like that's something that I can do here at home. If you had told the 18-year-old me,

that I'd be living in Tacoma, Washington and working the business and enjoying it, I would have said, what? How big was the stick you hit me over the head with? And yet here I am. I live in Tacoma. I work for the family business and I'm having a blast. All right. That's great to hear. And, you know, I love that. I love that message, too, because it's very interesting. It's like similar, similar conversation. I'm

having with my mother right now and her business as well. She gets ready to retire when I was younger. I'm like, no, no way. Don't want anything to do with it, right? And now I'm like, maybe my mind is changing a little bit. But yeah, I mean, I think it's incredible how long you've been in business and, you know, how long it's remained a family company too, as well. You know, usually after...

much time right you know it gets sold off or something like that so it's incredible to hear that you guys have been able to to maintain that so i mean tell us a little bit about kind of the the history of the company because it started in 1864 right and you know i would say that you know supply chain and the idea of logistics and things in 1864 was kind of

Not really a concept, right? Like it is now, right? So how did the business start and what did logistics look like back then?

So yeah, we started in 1864 on the docks of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. As the story goes, somewhere in our family archives, we've got this newspaper story about men you often read about but don't know. And it talked about Edward Holman. And Edward Holman had come out here in search of his future at the time, 1864.

When did Oregon become a state? I think 1859, 18 something like that. You know, looking in a brand new state, figured there's got to be opportunity out here. So he came out and had horses and carts and was doing drayage with draft horses. Wow. And then doing cartage with a cart, oddly enough. So it's wild that we...

I deal with, as president of my company, as you might imagine, I deal with some crap from time to time. But fortunately, it's not actual fecal matter like Ed Holman used to deal with back in the day. So yeah, it was draft horses and carts. And then we got into trucks when trucks became a thing. And then we got into warehouses and warehouses became a thing. But my great-grandfather bought the business in 1929 from the estate of the second owner.

He was the corporate controller back in the day. And 1929 was quite a time to take on a bunch of debt to buy the business. So you can imagine the conservative nature that my great uncle and grandfather took to investment over the course of their lives when their dad bought this business right before the great stock market crash and then owned it through the Great Depression.

And so then they came of age at World War II. And my great uncle stayed behind to run what was very much an essential business, as we learned in COVID. And if you're shutting down a business that is distributing food, you got some serious problems in society. So he stayed home. He was a pilot. My great uncle Herb would have loved to fly in World War II, but he had to stay home. Probably jealous of his brother, my grandfather, who did get to go fly P-38s and P-51s.

in Northern Africa. And so he came home and helped to run the business after that. It's great reading old letters about how my grandfather had promised his buddies jobs after it was all over type of thing. It was really pretty cool. But yeah, we got into warehousing because as I like to joke, you date a trucker, but you marry a warehouseman.

I suppose you sign a blood pact with your WMS provider. But yeah, warehousing, it's long-term relationships and they're not just customers, they're partners. We've had some great partners over the years.

And my dad, as I mentioned, he married in, in 76 and joined the business in 1980. And he came up to be the family representative in Seattle. And he just jumped in with both feet and, and basically we're not in Portland anymore. Everything we have is from what my dad built back in the, in the 1980s and ensuing years. And our strategy has really been to do a really, really good job for our clients.

And they'll ask us to go more places. We're in Kansas, Indiana, California, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, and Maryland right now. And, and,

And I would have never picked Emporia, Kansas to go and serve a client. But when the client says, hey, I've got this plant in Emporia, I want you to do a great job for me out there. We say, yes, absolutely. Sure. So now I have the privilege of being MVP Gold and Alaska Airlines to go out and visit all those places to make sure that we are staying true to our values and being true to who we are. So, yeah, it's been a people and process business since the beginning.

And we've got great people. Just, I think it was a week or two ago, we celebrated Doug Swanson's 50th year. I saw that, yeah. Driving a Lyft truck here. That's wild. I've only been alive for 43 years. Yeah. And he's been driving a Lyft truck for 50. And it was great. We had a lunch forum and we asked, all right, so Doug, what advice would you give? And I couldn't have written this better myself. He said, invest in yourself. Join up and participate in the 401k program.

There you go. Yes, absolutely, Doug. I want this place to be a, I want Holman to be a place where people can come and be a better version of themselves. Yeah.

And whether that means coming and joining the company for a year and deciding, I want to be a police officer. Fantastic. Let's help you be a police officer. Or I want to come and I want to be a supervisor in three years. Absolutely. Let's get you on the path to being a supervisor. This is a place where I really feel strongly about how we can impact people's lives. And I think the proof is in our longevity and in our success and how we've been able to

partner with our customers and, and, and change the world. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And I think that, you know, I saw you post on LinkedIn about your, your employee there that had the 50 years and congratulations to him. Definitely. I think that's a great thing to, to be able to be committed for, for that long, certainly. And, you know, I love that you have this focus on, you know, making the people, you

just better, right? Whether, like you said, whether it's with Holman in the long run or whether it's, you know, somewhere else, but, you know, having them be a better version of their self, I think is such a great thing. So tell us a little bit about, you know, this kind of people focus and maybe some other factors here too. I mean, what, what do you think has allowed Holman to have this type of longevity, 161 years? I mean, what is really,

contributed to you know being a you know sustainable business that can you know withstand like you said the great stock market crash the recessions pandemic all these different things I mean you know how has the business been built to be able to withstand and you know stay stay strong this many years

Yeah, I think it's knowing what you believe and believing it and truly believing it and living that out. I think those are really the three keys. Once a month, I'll get together with all new employees via Zoom. I love to do it in person, but we're in so many different places. I can't do it. And we go over this called our culture card. And it starts out on the outside. It's got our name on it.

in our service lines, our entire history and kind of where we've been. Let me open up one flap that talks about our core purpose. And this core purpose is our original card. And it was a little bit long and wordy. And it was established in 1864. Holman exists to envision and bring into reality new concepts and ideas that help businesses operate more efficiently and cost effectively in order to improve the lives of people everywhere.

It's a bit of a, like, what was that? It was a mouthful. Nobody could remember it. And if you can't remember it, and no one can say it, then you don't believe it. If it's not something you can actually communicate. So we shortened it. Just our core purpose, something we are forever pursuing, never fully achieving, is to improve the lives of people everywhere.

And that's really what we do. We really try, as mentioned, we help each other to be better. I got some programs we can talk about later about how we're helping our people do life strategy sessions. Not at all about the business, but just who are you as a person? What is your giftedness? And how can you become a better version of yourself? And that's something that I think when my dad joined

I don't think he ever quite understood what his secret sauce was. He joined in 1980 and he, it was like 25 people and he just really,

poured into the people that he was working for, that he was working with at the time. And my dad, he ended up getting the GE appliances business in the mid 80s. And that's, he said he got an MBA basically just from working with GE people back in the day. But I think my dad thought that he was, he won business because he was good, fast and cheap. Normally you can pick only two, right? He tried to pick all three. But I think

I think what my dad didn't quite understand is that people chose him and they chose the people that, and so both from a partner customer standpoint and from an employee standpoint, people that really, they felt psychologically safe with my dad. I see back in your bookshelf, you've got Simon Sinek, Start With Why. Yeah.

Simon Sinek talks about sort of psychological safety. People need to feel comfortable making suggestions and trying things and failing and knowing that they're still going to be appreciated. And that's what I try to do. I put myself in our org chart, I actually put myself on the bottom. I'm not on the top. And so I try to, and that's part of living out my core ideology of

This is something that we, again, we go through with all of our employees and that I've taken through personally, showing respect and serving others. That's sort of flipping the org chart on its head where there's nothing that I can do to take care of our customers. I'm an outlook jockey. I'm an email jockey, right? Workplace injury for me is carpal tunnel or a paper cut.

We've got people out there, hopefully not putting their lives on the line per se out in the warehouse floor, but they are doing physical work that you can get injured at. So we don't have a headquarters. We have a support office. I stole that from my friend, Jesse, who works at Chick-fil-A and their support center. And I knew him from business school and I was out in Atlanta. I was like, hey, Jesse, let's get some lunch. He's like, yeah, come here to the support center. I was like, support center? Yeah.

I thought you worked at Chick-fil-A Corporates. Yeah, it is corporate, but we call it the support center. And I really like it because there's nothing at Chick-fil-A support center that drives any revenue. It all happens at the restaurants. And for us, it all happens in the warehouse, on the warehouse floor.

It's the lift truck operator who's going to create value for my customer, not me. So I say that I work for my direct reports and they work for the people who report to them. Ultimately, to the top, we've got this big tree, hopefully a blooming and growing tree of lift truck operators and order pickers and sanitation guys who are helping to create a clean, fast and safe warehouse.

So I think that is the secret sauce that my dad never knew that he had. He thought it was his ability to do a Kaizen or a lean value stream map or something, which we never, we don't have a ton of engineers. So it's not like we're doing that all the time, but no, our value that we're creating is getting people to show up and getting people to care. That's 80 to 90% of profitability or productivity is getting people to

back, getting people to just show up when they're supposed to care about, uh, about what they do. And they care about the people they work with and the people they work for and making an impact. So that's, that's what we try to do. I think that's our secret sauce. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's amazing. And I love a lot of the approaches you've, you've taken there, right. Where you, you say that, you know, we're just, we're just here to support, right. Even though, you know, in a

traditional sense, you would be at the top of the organization as the president, but you're recognizing that I'm just here to support and make sure that the people who are doing that or really driving that revenue and doing the work at the end of the day are getting the best experience possible and the best resources to be able to do that. I think that's a great thing to view it as because I think that too many...

especially on the warehouse side. I think, you know, too many...

often treat the warehouse worker as like the, you know, the bottom of the bottom in a sense, right? And, you know, they don't get the same amount of attention or resources as someone in the office or some people might say the carpet walkers might get, right? And, you know, I think that's a great thing because at the end of the day, like they're the ones that are going to touch the products, right? Before it goes to the customer and they're,

They're the ones that really is going to make it all happen. Right. So I love that. So, you know, tell us, I guess, tell us a little bit about more about these core ideologies and how they've kind of helped, you know, foster and continue to grow the success that you've seen. Sure. Yeah. I mean, the core value here right at the top is safety focus. And when we have our monthly welcome to the company sessions, I bring on our network director of environmental health and safety to help people kind of understand what

how important it is to be safe. If our core purpose is to improve the lives of people everywhere, and particularly the people that we support that work inside our four walls, we're certainly not doing our job if they come in with 10 fingers and leave with nine. That's not gonna work. So, and we talk about how important it is to, if you're not trained to do something, don't try to cut corners and do a shortcut to try to impress people. Like just showing up every day when you're supposed to, that's impressive.

in a world today where a job, job used to mean obligation and now it's where I choose to go to make enough money to support myself. Yeah. And so, so just, just,

showing up and, again, caring and being willing to push the stop button, to pull the cord, to ring the bell, say, hey, I don't think this is safe. That's really important. But then that close second to be able to live out our core purpose of improving the lives of people as we've got here is be better. And the full version is we help each other to be better. It's not about lifting ourselves up by our bootstraps. It's about all of us working together to help each other. And so if someone is having issues

A problem in life that's not even related to the warehouse, that's going to impact their ability to work on the floor. So we like to pride ourselves on the fact that our managers are, you know, people mentors. We really hire for, I place a big emphasis when I hire someone, have they demonstrated an ability to grow the people that report to them?

Have they had a bunch of promotions? Do they have people who are now vice presidents and directors at companies they've been at? Are they willing to? There's nothing worse than someone who is afraid for someone reports to them to shine. We should all try to. I would love to find somebody who would make their own job irrelevant because they train somebody below them or who reported to them.

above them, I should say, right? We train somebody above them to take their job. That's what we all should be striving to do. So that's what Help Each Other Be Better is really about. And then over here, we got Show Respect. Just because my title is president and someone else's title might be warehouse sanitation, that doesn't mean that they're any more or less value than me. And for me, I'm a Christian. I believe we all create an image of God. We share that image equally. So

Just because my title is president and someone else's title, again, is lift trick operator or order picker. We're all human and we're all equally human. So we all deserve to be listened to and to be taken seriously. Serving others in the bottom there, I got a little heart. I mean, that's about, we're all on the same team.

It's not like our second shift. Ideally, we should have good shift handoffs and everybody should be working together. But if there isn't someone working together and first shift at a particular facility didn't clean something up, it's not like, oh, man, the second shift comes in. Oh, first shift, they're terrible. They don't get anything. They just leave all their crap for us. Like, no, we're all working together. We're all one team. We're all one whole lot.

And ultimately, it results in the extraordinary service that we think we have provided and that our customers, I think, have shown as they've come completely come back to us that we have provided this extraordinary service for over a century. That's our kind of our brand promise tagline, if you will, our trucks out here in the Pacific Northwest.

have that emblazoned on the side. And that's something that, so my background, my wild career oats is in advertising and marketing. And I don't think my dad never quite understood the value of that. But yeah, I think it's been great to really take kind of what my father and grandfather and great uncle sort of built and codify and organize and

what they always lived out and what was always their secret sauce, but they just never quite knew it. So it's been really exciting. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I love that. And I love those, those core values or ideologies there and, and you know, how you're, you're focused on that. And I love that it's so people centric and focused, right. And, you know, understanding the value of recognizing that, that,

you know, we're all equal at the end of the day, right? Whether, you know, somebody's title is this and somebody's title is that. You know, I think oftentimes you get into situations or there's companies where there is very much like

I'm above you. Right. So, you know, this and that, and, and that creates a lot of tension, friction, and it goes against what you were saying there about, you know, wanting people to care about being there and, and wanting to be there in a sense. Right. You know, and I think that that becomes more and more important, especially in, you know, the warehouse environment of today, right. Where there are like several other options for warehouse workers that, that,

Maybe are not as taxing or, you know, strenuous from like a physical aspect. Like how do you show them they're valued and get them to continue to make up? So, I mean, I have to imagine you guys have incredible retention with your employees, right? Yeah.

We do. Yeah. We do have good retention. We're not perfect by any stretch, but I think the proof is in the longevity that we've had. Doug's here 50 years. Don Hornsby, he's my director of continuous improvement. He was 19 when he started and he's been here for 34 years. 35 years. We just had his 35 year anniversary party. Roger Clark out in Maryland, he's been with us for 34 years.

He is 17 years old. So he started as a grown man and he continues to be here. We got Genie in Jacksonville for 28 years. So yeah, and I think it goes back to how my dad, I mean, he knew everybody's name.

And I've, so right outside my office, I've got a big video wall. It's 65 inch TVs all jammed together to make one display. Okay. And I've got a rotating visual org chart. Oh, wow. I've got a picture of everybody, all 1600 employees in the company. Wow. On a constant rotation. And then when I go and visit a facility, I, I,

try to remember people's names. There's something really powerful. I read about how to win friends and influence people 20 some years ago. And the power of somebody's name is you can't deny it. It's big. Uh,

I mean, I don't get to every facility every year. I do want to keep my wife and my wife and know my kids, right? So I don't get to every facility every year, but I've been to every facility and I've met all the leadership there. And so when you've got 1,600 people, it can be difficult to remember people's names. But this last summer, I was in Jacksonville and John, our second shift supervisor, came in to the conference room we were in

And he said, Hey, Mr. Downey. And I said, Hey, John. And I shook his hand and just the look on his face, you could see like, Oh man, the president remembered my name. So little things like that go an incredibly long way. It's not, it's weird. It's not rocket science. It's warehousing, but, but it's, it's still the human element is really important. And you talk about numbers and how some, some companies get to get a focus on numbers and,

Interesting. We had a facility just recently where the client, we're doing a phenomenal job for them and they've decided to go a different direction to unify their, so to go to one provider across their network. And it's a big provider that handles ocean freight and freight forwarding. And so it's kind of a one throat to choke type of idea. Yeah.

And so we announced that later this year, we're not going to have this business anymore. And people were really bummed, understandably why they'd be bummed. And then the new provider came in and they brought like 14 people for the announcement. They had engineers and continued improvement and project managers and HR and all this stuff. And they get up and they do their announcement. And all they could talk about was how big they were.

And and to the lift truck operator, they don't care how big you are. Yeah. For them, long term planning. And one of the things we try to do with our life strategy sessions is help people to think about what does my long term plan look like in life? What do I have? My life is long. It's kind of a question that they end up asking. But, you know, to them, they don't care about how big you are. They care about, OK, do you care about me? Yeah.

And when am I going to get paid? How often am I going to get paid? Am I going to enjoy working for you? Or to your point, Kevin, do I go across the street to make 50 cents an hour more? So it was just really telling that they're like, hey, we're big and we're huge and you're going to be part of this big group.

faceless corporation like oh man it's a gut punch to everybody whereas for us I feel like our secret sauce is that yeah I'm the the owner of the company and I am intimately involved on a daily basis and I care about all of our people and it also was interesting this this group that brought all these people to make the announcement they were there looking at our processes and they're like

It takes you 20 minutes to unload a container. It takes our team an hour and a half. Yeah. Well, yeah, because we have people that care, that take their time to do it right. And we don't have to engineer a process to fix what otherwise would be human error. Because you can take the human error out of it when you've got people that are paying attention and that are the same people that are showing up.

And so yeah, 80 to 90% of productivity is just is the human element. Like I say, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture eats productivity for breakfast out of the warehouse floor. Yeah. So you need engineers, you need continuous improvement people, we've got that. But we have a history of outperforming much larger companies who have all that stuff.

but we just get great people and get them to really care out in the warehouse floor. Yeah. And I think that's fantastic. And I love the idea or, well, not the idea you're doing it, but I love the fact that you have that screen wall that you said, that's just constantly rotating through your employees faces and names and things. And you're consciously trying to learn that. I think that, you know, that does make such a difference. I mean, I know you,

that was a big, I was a big advocate for that when, you know, I was working in the warehouse as a, as a manager. And I mean, I remember, you know, distinctly one time, you know, these, uh, we had just temps come in and,

I knew all of their names by the next day and one of them just pulled me aside and was like, I can't believe you know my first and last name already. Usually that never happens for us. And it does make such a difference to factor that in and bring that into play. So I really appreciate you sharing that. I think that's a great thing there. So I'm curious, I mean,

You talk about the people and you're very people-focused. It sounds like you...

Holman has been for, you know, 161 years and that's a lot of the success that you've had. So I'm curious, you know, in the time that we're in right now, right, where, you know, all this technology is coming into play like AI and robotics and automation. I'm curious, how do you view that and how do you make sure that, because obviously there's a lot of, you know,

discourse and skepticism on, you know, does this take away the human element? Does it improve the human element? I'm curious your thoughts on all this technology and how you're looking at it from, from Holman's perspective.

Sure. Yeah. I'd be lying to you if I didn't say I use ChatGPT every day. I even went to ChatGPT and prepped for this podcast interview. And I've got like, what are the things Kevin's going to ask? And how can I respond? You hear people and they sound like, oh man, how does he just do that off the cuff? It's like, well, it's not just off the cuff, it's prepped. So there I am prepping for the interview. But I am certainly committed to, as we pursue automation stuff, to not

lay people off because we've automated their jobs. So there will always be some level of attrition. And so if we got the right people, we'll find something productive for them to do. And they will find hopefully something productive to do if their job is to an extent automated.

So there's that. And we are making investments in automation. We've got a pilot going with Third Wave. I think you've had them on your podcast. Yeah, definitely. That is a really cool technology with a shared autonomy. I think that they've that's the future. Certainly the flexibility they have. I mean, it's that's it's unmatched.

So that's been cool. We're an early user of auto scheduler. We've been using one track in our facilities for years, probably five or six years at least. So we're certainly, and we invested in Fulfill, an AI kind of enabled WMS application and

Certainly, I think there is a future for, it's undeniable, there's a big future in automation technology in the warehouse. And some level of what we are doing will be automated. But you figure we probably had a farrier and a blacksmith on staff 150 years ago. And we survived that transition.

And so there will probably be some, there'll be more opportunity for us to do more human work in the future. I think it's foolish to think that automation is going to automate everything and we're going to have to have this huge problem. I think it will create more jobs than it will destroy, certainly. And it's weird that even people like Bill Gates have talked about, we're going to have a problem because all these jobs are going to be automated and people are going to be out of work.

I don't think it'll be out of work. I think it's going to create an incredible amount of new, more human jobs that we don't even know are possible. But I mean, like what you can do with AI is nuts. And I was, so I subscribed to the what chat GPT plus, and you can do the voice interaction with a chat GPT plus. And I was just goofing around and said, okay. And I was talking to it just like this. And I said, okay, back in high school, I was in German class.

I wrote a sketch, a little comedy sketch, and I want you to analyze it in German and tell me why it would be funny to a German and from the German perspective and from an American high schooler perspective in the late 90s. So here's the joke. There's a guy and he's standing up against a wall. He's holding a fork.

fork, a gobble. That's what I say fork in German. And the fork, I taped an electrical cord to the fork and the plug is sitting by the wall and it's not plugged in. And so another guy comes up to him and says, "Hello, wass is los?" Hello, what's wrong? "Ah, meine Gabel, sie ist kaputt." "Was sagst du? Deine Gabel? Sie ist kaputt?" "Ja, meine Gabel ist kaputt. Sie funktioniert nicht. My fork is broken. It's not working."

"Nein, nein, deine Gabel, sie ist nicht kaputt. Der Stecker ist raus." Your fork isn't broken, it's not plugged in. So then I said, "Okay, now tell me why that's funny." And instantly,

JetGPT went into this long explanation about German practicality and the absurdity of a plug not being plugged in and the wordplay for an American high school student. I set the prompt and I said it exactly like that. That's exactly how I spoke to the AI. And it just did that instantly. So you think about

It can understand humor and different languages and go back and forth with no break. The sky's the limit on the types of opportunities it will unlock. And I was listening to a podcast interview with, was it Chamath Pahilapedia? I forget how you say his last name. One of the guys from All In talking about he invested in some group that is going to

significantly improve the outcomes of breast cancer. When you do a lumpectomy, is it a lumpectomy? I think is what they do. They take out cancer tissue and what they have to do now is they take out a chunk and then send the sample for analysis and they wait a week.

or longer for a pathologist to go through that. And what they could do, they could take that sample and stick it in the, basically into the AI. And then instantly it recognizes, is the cancer gone or is it still there? And so while the patient is still open, they can cut out more if they need to and be much more precise. It's wild what you'll be able to do. So I know that there will be, I think, more opportunities for us. I think there will always be some level of warehousing.

Even someday when there's hopefully a Star Trek replicator, there's still going to be magnesium and potassium and carbon and hydrogen that goes into it, right? Until I can say, tea, Earl Grey, hot.

But that'll have to be a warehouse somewhere. And I don't think I'll be uploading my consciousness into the cloud anytime soon. So I think we will still have manufacturing and there will still be a lot of our businesses, toilet paper and dog food and refrigerators. So that is something that will continue to be warehousing. So somebody has the opportunity to do that.

And I think we will, if we are able to do targeted investments in the types of AI opportunities, it doesn't have to be expensive. As DeepSeek has shown this week, purportedly, they're a fraction of the cost of OpenAI's GPT. This doesn't have to be expensive. I mean, it's wild. Like one of our clients spent well into the high eight, maybe nine figures to automate

I think three or four facilities. Oh, wow. Like the, of the type that we operate. And we are the, the pilot that we ran with third wave is several orders of magnitude cheaper, like, like significantly cheaper to do a pilot and to do a full rollout is like, it's, it's,

I think this client fell a little too early on the rollout of this. It'll never be ROI positive, at least. It's just now getting to the point where it's catching up to the facilities that we run. Oh, wow. Frank.

And they didn't have to spend tens of millions of dollars to automate our facility. So we think that there will be new technologies that a group like Holman can buy into on a much more targeted basis that will augment the type of work that our people do and not totally replace. If they are replaced, it will still open up opportunities for our people to do more human work. Yeah.

Yeah, interesting perspective there. I mean, I agree. I'm of the same mind where I think that, you know, what an entry-level job is, right, in a warehouse will be, you know, in 15, 20 years from now, will be totally different, but it'll still be there, right? It won't necessarily be moving boxes around, but it could be, you know, moving or helping robots do something, right? And I think it's going to be...

less strenuous, probably, I will say for sure. But yeah, I mean, I think there's really, really interesting perspectives there. And, you know, great to hear that, you know, things are going well with Third Wave too. We have had them on the podcast before, as you mentioned. So really great to talk to you today here, Brian.

Brian and learn more about kind of the history of Holman and that people-centric focus that you have within the culture that you've been able to carry out for the 161 years and put together these amazing kind of core values that bring everybody together and really

give importance and focus on the warehouse worker and all the other employees that help to make that happen too. So really appreciate you coming on and talking to you. If people are interested in learning more about Holman Logistics or getting in touch, what's the best way to do that? Yeah, go to our website, holmanusa.com.

Just like the United States, holmanusa.com. That's where you can look us up. Or you can shoot me an email at brien, B-R-I-E-N, at holmanusa.com. I blame my mom for that spelling. All right, great. And we'll definitely put all that information at thenewwarehouse.com as well as in the show notes here. So thank you once again, Brian, for your time on the show today.

You've been listening to the New Warehouse Podcast with Kevin Lawton. Subscribe and check us out online at thenewwarehouse.com. Enjoyed this episode? Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and for more content from The New Warehouse, find us on LinkedIn and YouTube. Links to subscribe can be found in the show notes and for everything The New Warehouse, head to thenewwarehouse.com.