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From dealing with complex distribution channels to trying to control a distant customer experience, leaders in mobility manufacturing deal with complexity every day. But then, there are the leaders who are, simply, winning.
This is Why You Win, the show hosted by Element Three’s Kyler Mason and John Gough that asks the foremost leaders in the industry to share where they are placing bets and making hard choices that put their businesses in a better position to win.
Noah Thomas (00:00):
We have a really tight dealer network, and so when you have that loyalty and you have that history with a dealer, it really creates openness in terms of communication. And obviously our dealers are entrepreneurs, so they're out there building their business and we're here to support them almost as if they're a customer of ours and we need to be invested in their success as well.
John Gough (00:23):
Whether you're going to market through dealers, distributors, or some other partner channel, the mediated sales complex, we call it B2B2X, but the leaders in the industry are the ones who are making it look simple. I'm John Gough.
Kyler Mason (00:36):
And I'm Kyler Mason.
John Gough (00:37):
And this is Why You Win, presented by Element Three.
(00:41):
Thomas is the Director of Marketing at Great Dane and one of the things that stands out really strongly in this conversation is how confident they are in their position in the marketplace, whether it's what listings they're going to show on their website or the updates that they've made to the brand in the last several years. It's clear that this organization has spent a lot of time working really hard on understanding who they are and who they serve, and I think it comes through really well in this conversation. You're going to enjoy it. Noah, we're glad to have you. Thanks for coming on today.
Noah Thomas (01:12):
Yeah, thanks for having me. Listening to it, your podcast before. So excited to be on.
John Gough (01:17):
So Director of Marketing at Great Dane. You are working at a trailer manufacturer, the largest in the world, I think, and an excellent brand, just an incredible storied brand. So you've weathered some interesting years over the last couple of years, some highs and some lows and some contractions in the market. Can you just give us a little bit of a rundown about what's going on in your world these days? What's great and interesting and what's challenging?
Noah Thomas (01:42):
Sure. Yeah, so not the largest in the world, but we did last year we were number two in market share in North America, so we did manufacture the most trailers in the United States and yeah, as you mentioned, Great Dane is 125-year-old company, so started in Savannah as the Savannah Blow Pipe Company, became the steel products company and has manufacturing in the United States that entire time, so a long story history of manufacturing, different kind of equipment, and then went fully into trailers around 1958, became Great Dane Trailers like you mentioned. I think the main theme throughout the history of Great Dane and throughout the history of any company that's going to last for 125 years is resilience, being open to change. And that's no different in today's market, obviously, where there's a lot of uncertainty, people are trying to figure out when the right time is to make equipment, investments and those sort of things. Definitely an interesting marketplace. I think one of the things that helps Great Dane stand apart is the fact that we do have such a strong brand that people know is going to manufacture a durable and quality product, and it's kind of our job to make sure we get that message out there and that we're kind of all aligned on the things that really set Great Dane apart.
John Gough (02:58):
What are those things in your perspective? You've been there right? Five years, right? January of 21 I think.
Noah Thomas (03:04):
Yeah, six years now. So just got to six years in July.
John Gough (03:10):
Yeah. You saw COVID and then break kind of contraction over the last couple of years. What are you seeing?
Noah Thomas (03:16):
Yeah, a hundred percent. Those things are correct. I think during COVID, obviously a lot of things went online, which was interesting for kind of a company like ours. Everyone was working remote at the time since we've been back in the office, but we still have kind of a hybrid environment, so it was a lot of change internally in terms of just how we worked together as a team. And then yeah, certainly with the freight market there's been, it went straight down but then almost came straight back. Everyone was at home, so there was a lot of people buying products and you need the equipment obviously to move those products. So everyone started to ramp back up really fast. And then now what we've kind of seen the longest freight recession that the industry has ever seen, it's going on three years now. There's trade shows you go to where they're like, I didn't think I would be on this stage talking about this again.
(04:10):
But here we are. We have seen that kind of prolonged exposure to a down market, especially in kind of the truckload space. So in terms of Great Dane, I think we have great customers, we have great fleets that we've partnered with over the years. There's a lot of brand loyalty I think in the industry and the markets we serve weren't necessarily as affected and as such we've been able to kind of grow market share during that time. And again, I think that speaks to the brand and just the customers that we typically interact with.
John Gough (04:42):
How do you continue to reinforce those kind of brand pillars in an environment where people aren't buying as many new trailers? How do you reach into those markets in that kind of moment?
Noah Thomas (04:54):
Obviously with the 125th anniversary this year, we kind of had bigger plans to do more things, but it's a great opportunity to reinforce the fact that we are tried and true. That was kind of our campaign theme throughout 25, tried and true and the future looks great. And so we've been able to hone in on that through different activations. At the beginning of the year, we purchased a trailer that was built in 1953. The gentleman in Canada, we got it from actually drove it down, so it's a 75-year-old piece of equipment. This is back when you opened the front of the trailer and put huge blocks of ice into it, and then there was a Briggs & Stratton motor that actually blew air across the ice to give a little bit of chill inside the equipment. And so if worse, it is actually at a dealer customer event right now, and then we're going to be taking it to another trade show and just two weeks. And again, this thing is on the road, 75 years old, obviously we did a couple things to refurbish it. You can watch the video of the people that were working on it, they didn't have to do too much. So these trailers stand the test of time and it was a great opportunity to use that as an example of how the quality that does go into building a Great Dane product.
Kyler Mason (06:06):
You mentioned resilience earlier and I think you've kind of hit on some of those things about the past. As you look forward, how are you going to continue to win, continue to build the brand, continue to steal market share? What are some of the things on your mind that are important pillars inside of your strategy?
Noah Thomas (06:23):
I think from the outside and even myself, when you see a trailer on the road, you can kind of see a box, but as you get into the industry, you learn all of the small details that go into manufacturing this equipment that maybe one does different than another. And it's really those details that kind of make the difference in terms of how long something's going to last, how safe it is for the drivers to use. Just the details I think is something that we obviously in marketing can do. I think a better job explaining those in some instances and helping make sure everyone's on the same page in terms of communicating the value that you're going to get from a Great Dane trailer maybe as opposed to some other equipment in the market. And really it's some of those smaller things, something that we do slightly different here or there.
(07:12):
A good example is our refrigerated trailer lining. ThermoGuard has a little metallic barrier within the liner, and we've done different ways over the years to try to show the difference. What that does is it doesn't allow moisture in, so the insulation doesn't gain weight and it also stays more effective over time. So the thermal performance in a trailer with ThermoGuard over the lifetime of that trailer, you're going to see ROI, not just from your tus not working as hard in terms of keeping the temperature consistent within the equipment, but you're also not going to get any water weight gain from, obviously these are cold environments, there's moisture, it's not penetrating the lining and getting into the insulation, which can add thousands of pounds over the lifetime of that trailer too, so you can maintain higher payloads and kind of put it together in terms of that ROI for your operation. So there's those subtle differences in the products that if we can tell those stories really proves the value over the lifetime of that equipment.
John Gough (08:11):
The stories are really interesting. I think you're the one you shared a second ago about the older trailer that's still on the road is a great one. Are there other ones that come to mind that take that kind of feature or functionality and make it real for people?
Noah Thomas (08:25):
We have people now who if they spec a trailer with the guard, they can weigh it for themselves when they first got it and then check on it over time. We have a couple stories like that in the works where it's proof the customer's saying it to us that this trailer didn't gain any weight due to water penetrating the insulation, whereas before we were seeing them gain up to 1500 pounds. So you can imagine just how much that's worth on a day by day basis when you're able to keep that 1500 pounds of payload in the trailer and not worry about going over weight or legal requirements. So we do have customers telling us that consistently.
Kyler Mason (09:03):
How do you get those stories in front of current customers or prospective customers? Those are I think the small details of quality. You were talking about quality and commitment to the product and innovation and you're battling on a lot of features and benefits that prop up the brand too. How do you distribute that?
Noah Thomas (09:21):
Yeah, so I mean we have a digital magazine, it's called Evolving Transportation Trends. So I think we're one of the only trailer manufacturers that consistently posts on a week to week basis online in terms of having a blog. And so we try to keep these stories front of mind. We are working more with our dealers and sales team members to try to get more customer stories. They do tell the story better than we can. I mean me saying something doesn't hold as much weight as a customer saying it and being willing to talk to us and put that out there. And if you look at our ETT this year, I believe we've worked in more customer stories than we have in some previous years, and that's just working through dealers, working through our sales team who have customers that are really happy to talk to us and help us promote some of those small differences that do make a huge difference.
John Gough (10:12):
You mentioned your dealers. Tell us about the relationship that Great Dane has with his dealer network. What does that look like? Are they exclusive? Are they multi OE mixed? How does that look?
Noah Thomas (10:24):
So in terms of trailer products are exclusive to Great Dane, and so we go to market two ways. We have a corporate sales team and then we have a dealer network as well. And so each covers different territories across the US and we have a really strong dealer network. We have great dealers that we work with, Great Dane in a lot of their names as well, which I think really proves the value of the brand and how they're carrying it into their markets too. And yeah, we have those two different ways that we kind of go to market there.
John Gough (10:52):
What's a great dealership do? What separates 10 out of 10 from six out of 10?
Noah Thomas (10:59):
That's a good question. Let me think about that. I almost wouldn't rank 'em in that way necessarily because everyone has their own unique perspective in that way. I think what I would say about our dealer network is we have a really tight dealer network, many that have been with Great Dane for 50 plus years. And so when you have that loyalty and you have that history with a dealer, it really creates openness in terms of communication. And obviously our dealers are entrepreneurs, so they're out there building their business and we're here to support them almost as if they're a customer of ours and we need to be invested in their success as well with anything. When you have a family, almost a family type environment, there's differences of opinion, there's differences of ways of thinking about what we should be focused on as a marketing group, for instance, instance.
(11:53):
But I think at the end of the day we listen to our dealers a lot. We have forums where they can come and speak and it really creates a strong relationship and really that's what you need in order to help kind of push all of these things, any initiative forward. And so we kind have a small marketing team, but we try to listen to our dealers and do what we can to help them and we try to tailor our strategies per dealer because not every piece of Great Dane equipment makes sense in every specific region. Some have a high concentration of fleets that run truckload reefers for instance. Others have a high concentration of flatbeds. So how do we get more strategic in terms of helping push the products where they have the best opportunity of winning and tailoring a marketing strategy towards them? And I think having that dialogue, and I think we have really good relationships with our dealers and they do a great job in terms of representing the great team brand.
Kyler Mason (12:44):
I was going to go there. How do you do it? You've got dealers with different needs, different product mix, you've got different locations, and just from the marketing group perspective, how do you support them in the way that you were just saying that you need to?
Noah Thomas (12:57):
Yeah, so we have a dedicated person that's dedicated to the channel as a whole, so that's dealers and our corporate sales teams as well out in the field. But we have a dedicated team that listens to the dealers and one of the things that they did, this must have been a year and a half ago, is that they actually sat down with every dealer and interviewed them in terms of where they think the biggest opportunities are. They also uncovered different types of pain points that they have, and we kind of grouped all of that together so that we could prioritize what we needed to focus on, that we could focus on first and then things that maybe we could get around to at a point in the future. So if you look down that list, one of the things that kind of rose to the top was like we don't feel like we're getting enough market information on a regular basis.
(13:43):
So we instituted doing quarterly town halls where all the dealers, all the sales team attends and our sales leadership has a forum to be able to let people know what's going on in the market, things look out for different products that we may be launching. And so that's from the sales leadership side. And then three weeks later we follow that up from the marketing side with something that we call Grow Great, where we take a deeper dive into some of the things that they talk about in the town hall and how some of that can be activated in the different markets. And so that was just something that came out of those conversations to try and get those back on the agenda to make sure that everyone feels like they're hearing the same information and are a part of the same team I guess more or less in terms of Great Dane overall.
(14:25):
So that's one of the things that came out of that. There's other things that came out of it with some of our smaller dealers, how can we help them from a digital marketing side? We're working on some things on our website, could we extend that potentially to smaller dealers to take advantage of so they don't have to go out and invest in trying to build a brand new website from scratch? Those are things that are still on the roadmap that we haven't really gotten to yet, but those are things that eventually we'll make an impact with dealerships of different sizes.
John Gough (14:55):
I can see on your website that you do have other tools for the dealers already, so the buygreatdane.com, which is dealership inventory, I think. Is that accurate? Is that a good summary of what that property does?
Noah Thomas (15:12):
No, a hundred percent. That was kind of another one that came out of that, but we have a stock trailer program and so we launched a site called buygreatdane.com that dealers can put their specific inventory on and then we promote the stock equipment that we have kind of across every single location, and that was one we wanted to launch so that we could get better lead generation for our dealers and be able to provide them with people who are interested in equipment in their area. And we've had really good participation in that when you do opt into the Buy Great Dane program, we will set up Google ads campaigns funded by corporate that are in those specific locations and drive traffic to the site. So kind of a package there on the digital marketing side of you can promote, we'll promote the stock program, you can promote your used inventory or any other stock inventory that may be dealer owned on this site.
(16:06):
We're going to run the ad campaigns for you so you don't have to worry about that and any lead will be routed directly to you through your regional sales director. So we've seen, I just did this presentation yesterday in terms of how many leads that we were able to produce this year for them. Obviously still ongoing and still some to onboard onto that program, but it's significant and we're able to track some of those that have converted to sales so that we see ROI on that program specifically. And then on the flip side of that's what we do in terms of trying to bring inbound leads and we've also set up a sales enablement platform. We call it Champ's Spot, it's built on the Highspot platform, but it's a pretty powerful sales enablement tool that we put all of our sales and marketing material in.
(16:56):
Dealers can go in, send a brochure directly to a customer, and then the analytics you get back, you can see when they open that, what they looked at, kind of tailor your next piece of follow up based on that. So that's another program that is available to all of our dealers completely free. There's no license fees that they incur as part of using that. And then on top of that, we're building some sales training programs in that platform as well because Highspot just launched an LMS component of that. And so we have different products that we're starting to develop training for, which is nice because you have your training right there, you can learn about the product and then all of the sales materials right there too, so you get some talking points, can click directly into a product spot and send material directly to a customer that way.
Kyler Mason (17:40):
That's a pretty good benefits pitch to a dealer right there. That did make me think, so is it an initiative of Great Dane's to bring on more dealers?
Noah Thomas (17:50):
We have a strong dealer network now. Typically there's not much turnover to be completely honest and it's not something that we necessarily actively pursue. Like I said, we've had a couple leave regions where current dealers have just kind of slid in and taken over a bigger footprint. And so like I said, kind of just having these really longstanding relationships. We have a really great dealer network and a dealer network that has the ability to kind of flex when they need to into new territories.
Kyler Mason (18:18):
Yeah, I was asking because I was like the benefits package you're developing is really attractive to a potential new dealer. It sounds like all the work you're doing is in pursuit of the right support and the right training, helping to move sales and building and defending the moat that you guys have versus new dealer acquisition.
Noah Thomas (18:38):
Yeah, I would say it's trying to listen to the needs of our current dealers and current sales team members as well and putting material and programs and technology in place that makes it easier to do business with us.
Kyler Mason (18:50):
How does Great Dane grow over the next few years?
Noah Thomas (18:54):
So there's definitely markets where we don't have as much market share. I think as we would like. If you look at trends in the industry, think last mile delivery, we turned a plant totally devoted to truck bodies this year in Danville, Pennsylvania. They're developing a great product. Again, some of the key differences that we're hearing in the market is the things that Great Dane's always been known for durability, quality. These things are built using tried and true trailer manufacturing techniques. And so they have sort of that robustness around them that certain fleets are looking for in terms of their last mile delivery. And so there's certainly room to grow in that space. Great Dane, we developed a telematics product called a FleetPulse that's now its own company actually grew enough to the point where it kind of rolled out and needed some additional wings to spread.
(19:44):
But I think that's another differentiator in terms of all of our trailers come out of the box with trailer tracking and can be upgraded easily to have factory installed, hardwired telematics where you get a ton of safety information from ABS systems, tire inflation systems, things like that. So there's additional technologies and things that we can add to our products and I think those are some of the ways that we grow. There are certain markets we know we want to go after more aggressively a couple product things in development where we also see additional opportunities for market share growth. So a couple of things in the hopper are potentially not ready for primetime quite yet, but we do have a pretty clear strategy in these specific markets where we know we have opportunities to grow.
Kyler Mason (20:32):
So in that last mile category in the area where you're looking to grow with truck bodies there, are there plays or are there pillars of your strategy from your past that you can pull on to try to acquire new customers in that realm, earn market share in that realm? What will you test? When we think about Why You Win, the premise of the conversation, show, you're in a mode of making some bets and trying to win that market. What are some things that you're going to try?
Noah Thomas (21:02):
Yeah, so truck bodies is interesting. I think there's a couple of different approaches that we're trying and we do have a couple different sales plays that we've built in an attempt to go after some of these new markets. So if you're thinking about truck bodies in general, one of the places where we have an opportunity to grow is with trailer fleets that also use Last Mile because they're familiar with Great Dane equipment. The value prop is pretty straightforward. A lot of the parts are similar. So from a maintenance standpoint, you already have teams that know how to repair this equipment. It kind of makes sense to continue on and add truck bodies to your fleet in that sense. So that's one avenue. So there's a cross-sell opportunity with fleets that we know are also active in the last mile. And you have the relationship there, it kind of makes sense, you can take that product to them and they get the return and they know the quality that they're going to get just from working with great team trailers historically.
(21:58):
But there are new avenues. So in the truck body space, there's a lot of truck dealers who sell the chassis obviously and need to be able to get a truck body quickly put on to fill the complete need of a customer that they have. And so building relationships with truck dealers, which means having things more readily available, being able to have things that are compatible with the chassis that they carry, all of those things is a different, we kind of build a playbook in terms of trying how would you approach a truck dealer? How's it going to be different than approaching a fleet directly and how do we build those relationships? And there's different things in the industry like consignment programs for instance, different things people are looking at in terms of making that a little bit easier proposition to truck dealers in particular. And then we have a stock program with truck bodies as well. So making sure that we're building our stock bodies in a way that will be accepted by the market. And again, those are kind of quick turns so that if someone is purchasing a chassis and they know they need a truck body quickly, we have one available that we can send over to a dealer or mount it at one of our facilities.
John Gough (23:06):
One of the things that I was thinking about when you were talking about those dealers and those relationships is your willingness to let them list other manufacturers inventory on buygreatdane.com. This is kind of a throwback, but I'm thinking about our experience in other categories and ag and outdoor rec where the OE in that space are very protective about what they are willing to even acknowledge in terms of existence and the fact that you have other manufacturers units used inventory on your website that you're supporting. Tell me about the strategy there.
Noah Thomas (23:43):
Yeah, I mean with pre-owned equipment, we post our used trailer teams, they sell other equipment regularly too. So it wasn't something that we necessarily thought would be a disadvantage, especially in the pre-owned market, depending on the need or what someone needs it for, there's different use cases that equipment can make sense and scenarios as well. So we're not opposed to selling other OEMs on buygreatdane.com. Certainly with our dealers, if they find a good deal on some used trailers that aren't great and have an opportunity to list those on our site, and they're more than welcome to do so. We want to make it a marketplace where we have a lot of variety too for users to come and see what's available. So we don't want to limit it to just pre-owned Great Dane equipment.
Kyler Mason (24:32):
Sure. It gives you some data advantage too, just to see what the market looks like and get the intelligence of user behavior on the site and stuff like that.
Noah Thomas (24:39):
Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, like I said, you want to make it a good user experience for someone going to the site. You want to keep 'em on the site looking at a bunch of different things to see what's available. If we limited it to just great data equipment from a pre-owned perspective, there's other sites out there where people can go to kind of browse something similar. So.
Kyler Mason (24:58):
Yeah, why not be you?
Noah Thomas (24:59):
Why not? Come on, come there, you go to buygreatdane.com, check it out.
John Gough (25:03):
It makes so much logical sense and I just want you to know that it's such heresy that if we recommended that to a client, we'd come in as a consultant and recommend that to a client. There are many rooms that we would be just ridden out of town on a rail. Unbelievable.
Noah Thomas (25:18):
How dare you.
John Gough (25:19):
How dare you. How dare you acknowledge that other manufacturers exist, but I can't fault your logic. It makes a ton of sense.
Noah Thomas (25:25):
Yeah, I mean there's only so many, right? And I think from a brand perspective, we know where we stand in terms of it and everyone knows who everyone is in the trailer market, so it's all good. Yeah.
Kyler Mason (25:36):
It's a good healthy abundant mindset and acknowledgement of consumer and business buying behavior.
John Gough (25:44):
It's the way it goes. It's like you go the grocery store and you're going to buy pancake mix, right? Your Kodiak Cakes, Bisquick, it's right there, you go Kodiak every time. But you got to acknowledge.
Kyler Mason (25:55):
Right, the grocery store didn't just make it Kodiak. Gosh, I'm curious, we love war stories and hardship. What is something that you're working on either right now or something in the past, let's say year or so, that has just been a big challenge. You could have succeeded through it or not and we'd just love to unpack something like that with you.
Noah Thomas (26:16):
I mean beyond greatdane.com, which I mean it did have its bumps in the road at certain points. That was one where we saw some of those stories. I mean obviously we updated the brand in 2023 and carrying that forward, the look and feel of the brand. I wouldn't say the brand too to a certain extent because when we did what we did with the traditional oval in terms of digital channels and now working that into more of our badging and things along those lines, there was I think some initial pushback to it. Not quite like a Cracker Barrel scenario, but certainly there was some hesitancy around it. It's just changed anything else, but being able to communicate the fact that this is the reason we're doing it. So there were a couple of things with the logo we did in particular, and the logo obviously is not the brand and I think the logo is the thing everyone sees and reacts to.
(27:13):
But if you think about a brand, really we define it as every interaction that someone has with Great Dane. So that could be me out on the street handing someone a Great Dane hat to someone coming into one of our service center locations to someone visiting a dealer location as well. So any interaction that someone has with anyone at Great Dane really builds the brand over time. And I think that's where we have that strength in terms of relationships over the years that people have really deep relationships with the person that represents Great Dane to them and that's built Great Dane over time. So that being said, the logo obviously is something that embodies the brand and it's the representation of it. And I think we talked about a little bit about this before where there are certain things with the logo that me from director of marketing standpoint don't like to see happen.
(28:04):
So I don't like to see it on sheet cake where its head can get cut off. You can put it on top of the cake if you want, that's fine, but I don't like to see it on the ground. There's even an event we had where we had our event logo theme, internal one is called Connections where everyone comes and can interact with each other, dealers, sales teams, engineering, manufacturing, and we actually had things on the floor so people could way find and find their way through different things. And we took Champ off that because we didn't want him to get stepped on. And so that in and of itself always creates a little bit of tension just because we're so strongly attached to it, knowing that it represents everyone at the company. And when we're able to kind of explain that, people definitely latch onto it and get it.
(28:50):
I think everyone in our department now knows those things to look out for when we've given opportunities. Our HR team did a thing called the Leadership Experience internally and we were able to present the history of the Great Dane brand. And when I brought that up at the end, this brought in people from all over our network. So we have 10 manufacturing facilities, different service centers, a good group in that one room and everyone's, oh, okay, I get why you won't let me put a Christmas hat on the logo now. Whereas before, and I think we too have gotten a little bit more lenient in the fact of everyone's trying their best, let's work with them to get it right and explain the reason why we feel this way. I'm not so quick to scramble the Jets these days as before, and I had a moment in time where I was very, very particular about it, but we're able to tell the story better now and able to get everyone on the same page with that.
Kyler Mason (29:45):
It establishes an expectation and a culture around it, and that's hard work and I think there's some magic to that, to being that maniacal about it. You can't kind of have do that. You kind of got to commit the way you're talking about.
Noah Thomas (30:00):
Yeah, a hundred percent. And it always does create some, I mean, like I said, we have a big dealer network, they need to use our logo in certain applications. We have plants that use the logo in certain applications and so you can control it as best you can explain the reasoning and again, be a little bit more open in terms of the dialogue of why we're requesting they use it in this way as opposed to this way. And we've had some really constructive good conversations because of that. And I think everyone is kind of on the same page with that at this point. We've kind of hashed it out over the years, so I think we're in a good place. I think I diverted pretty far from the original question, but that's my take on brand.
Kyler Mason (30:41):
There we go. Hey, I love it. We had to cover that now. I remember when we were doing our prep conversation that we talked about that I was like, we got to bring that into the conversation.
John Gough (30:50):
Tell us, just give us the 30-second history of that. We don't encounter a lot of that in our daily lives.
Noah Thomas (30:57):
Sure, yeah. I was in the Peace Corps from 2007 to 2009. I was in the South Pacific, so a country called Vanuatu at the time, the only way people knew what it was is they did a Survivor series in the country, but it's archipelago in the South Pacific, kind of halfway between Fiji and Australia. And I was doing ecotourism and cultural tourism development. There's 83 different islands, maybe 40 or so that are inhabited. I was on a island called Malekula, so it kind of looks like a dog. It's the second largest island in terms of landmass. And so we had an idea to map the hiking trails on the island, which are pretty raw and extreme, but we took a GPS, we went to different villages, had talks about how hiking could potentially be a good long-term sustainable tourism investment for the island. And then did a lot of custom and cultural activities in Vanuatu as well.
(32:00):
And so we worked with, in our village, they stood up different cultural sites and did different dances and things like that, and we're able to promote those a bit as well. So it's a great experience. I mean, Vanuatu is an awesome country. I think at one point it was listed as one of the happiest places on earth, and I think it's just because communities are so strong there. Where I was, there wasn't any running water inside, no electricity, any of that sort of thing. But the people are just so well connected and work together to accomplish things within the community that I think that's maybe one of the criteria that go into that. When I did read that and I was like going to Vanderwalch, I'm like, I hope it don't mess this place up. I'm like, they're already ranked pretty high in the heaviest places on earth. Obviously they had ideas in terms of the things that they wanted to do in different locations and just a really awesome country overall. I met my wife in the Peace Corps there too. So long term benefit of that.
Kyler Mason (32:56):
ROI baby.
Noah Thomas (32:58):
A hundred percent great investment.
John Gough (33:01):
And the island looked like a dog. It was an omen.
Noah Thomas (33:03):
Oh yeah, there you go.
Kyler Mason (33:04):
Have you had a chance to go back?
Noah Thomas (33:07):
I haven't, I would love to. We've talked about it. Our daughter is eight years old now, and so we're just waiting maybe another year or so just because of all the vaccinations and things that you need to get to be able to head over there. So it's going to be a big adventure for her, I think, especially. But we'd love to get back there and get her there.
Kyler Mason (33:24):
That's so cool. That's a great story.
John Gough (33:26):
Yeah. Thanks for sharing that with us.
Noah Thomas (33:28):
No, no worries. Thanks for asking. Any return Peace Corps volunteer you get on this podcast will love to talk about their experience. They don't get asked about it too much, and then it's also hard to relate to in some instances. So I don't think I did it justice. I didn't come prepared, but love Vanuatu. Great country, awesome people.
John Gough (33:47):
This is great, Noah, we appreciate it so much. Thanks for coming on and telling us about what you're working on.
Noah Thomas (33:51):
Yeah, no worries. Hope I did everything justice and appreciate you guys reaching out. And yeah, I'm a fan of the show, so I'm happy to be on it. Like I said earlier, you guys have had some heavy hitters on here, so hopefully I held up my end of the bargain. Awesome, thanks.