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The fun & fascinating stories of Supply Chain & Logistics.
Bryndis 0:00
Hi, my name is Bryndis Whitson and you are listening to the Zebras to Apples podcast, the fun and fascinating stories of supply chain logistics. Today I sit down with my friend Tim Creedon. I'm actually on location in Halifax for this interview, and we actually talk a lot about the intricacies of retail, logistics, community spirit of heritage, boat building, everything in between. Tim and I met when he worked at the Red Deer Chamber of Commerce, and we've continued our friendship ever since. Across multiple provinces and multiple areas of the world. And it's a really great conversation. And I learned so much within the first 20 minutes, let alone when I learn from it, and it is a great episode. So thank you so much and have a wonderful day. So we're here in Halifax with Tim. How are you?
Tim 1:00
I'm really good today. Thank you.
Bryndis 1:01
Yeah. And so Tim and I knew each other when Tim lived and worked in Red Deer. And we met through our mutual friend, who is my husband, Scott, and we have been friends ever since. And I think you've got some fun kind of stories along the way that have occurred so.
Tim 1:19
Well let's see how we get on.
Bryndis 1:21
Yeah. Uh, so telling me a little bit about your career history. So what? So you lived in, as we can tell from your voice, you grew up in England or. No. You grew up in Ireland.
Tim 1:34
I lived in Ireland until I was about 14, and then we moved to England.
Bryndis 1:39
Okay. So both.
Tim 1:39
Yeah. And then, so in my in my working life, I spent quite a considerable amount of my working life in retail. So I started out on as a management trainee, went through that, went into head office, did some stuff in head office, but latterly around the end of the 80s I began to get involved in some replenishment work. They were replenished both by central warehouses and regional distribution centers. The top 1200 lines in every store were replenished every morning.
Bryndis 2:19
Oh, wow.
Tim 2:20
And the balance of the lines of which there would be about, I forget the number, let's say there were 10,000 lines. They were replenished from central warehouses. So my first direct brush with the world of logistics was when I was recruited as a store manager to lead my store in a trial of delivering stock directly to the shelf. Now what that meant was no outers of sixes or 12 were delivered to the store. We only got what the computer said our shelf needed. So in order to be able to do this, you had to have an incredibly accurate stock file.
Bryndis 3:02
Oh, yeah, you would.
Tim 3:04
So if your electronic point of sale is ordering to meet a gap on a shelf, then number one, the gap has to be there. Or alternatively, you're going to end up in a situation where you either end up with an overstock or an understock. By paying religious attention to the stock file, you end up with number one, full shelf, but number two, you also end up with increased sales. You also end up with a very strong awareness of how many times an individual facing merchandise turns over on a busy day?
Bryndis 3:46
Oh, you would.
Tim 3:47
Because if you have carnation bubble bath, where you can only get three on the shelf, and you sell seven on a Saturday, you have to become very conscious of how that shelf is looking. So you have to have people on the sales floor all the time, pulling forward stock, tidying stock, making sure there's stuff there for the customer. Out of that you get a really strong awareness of where your store performs and where your store underperforms. You also get a very strong awareness of what gets stolen and what doesn't get stolen, because when you suddenly got a gap and you can't explain that there are any sales for that, or you can't see any sales for that, you have a problem. So I started doing that, and then we then sort of moved on doing a trial. And our trial was to do our entire replenishment process out of hours. So previously, stock would arrive at some stage during the day, roll cages would come down onto the sales floor. Staff would be opening the roll cages and filling the stock and sending the surplus back to the stock room. So we changed that, and we went for an out of hours replenishment. And we were trying to do an out of hours replenishment at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day, but predominantly people preferred to do it at the beginning of the day. But in order to do that, we had to invent some new processes, because not every store in 1100 stores is going to get a nice, convenient delivery at 7am. A lot of them will be getting afternoon deliveries. So they had to develop techniques where they could hold that stock over until the following morning completely. But they also had to work on their sales forecasts inside their computer systems so that they had enough stock to last until the following morning.
Bryndis 5:43
Oh, that's huge.
Tim 5:45
So all of these things were going on now we had a computer system which was sufficiently powerful to put something like half a million parameters on one SKU in one store. So to give you an example, you take a seaside store on the south coast of England where they have a merchandiser, a merchandising unit of sunglasses. So the computer has to know how quickly those sunglasses sell. It also has to know what the weather is, because you sell more sunglasses when the weather's good than you do when the weather's cloudy or it's raining. So then the forecast and for replenishment, which remember just sending one pair of sunglasses out at a time, has got to look at that and say, Okay, it's 85 degrees that day. It's a hot, sunny day. There are history of sales of that particular type of sunglass is x, therefore we need to predict that they get Y and we'll send them one today, or we'll send them one tomorrow, or we'll send them one next week, because I can see they've got six already, and they're not on the sales floor, because the actual merchandiser can only hold one pair of that skew. So in order to do this really well, it's incredibly powerful.
Bryndis 7:15
Very much, though, if you can actually manage it, that's amazing.
Tim 7:19
So we were blessed with an in-house team of people who really understood and were highly experienced in managing the flow of stock through the organization. To give you an example, when the post office went on strike in the 1970s, our company handled the internal post office mail, because 1100 stores in 1100 different locations got a delivery every day. It wasn't a great stress to throw on the bag for the local post office, and the local postmaster could come down and pick his mail up.
Bryndis 7:55
Exactly.
Tim 7:56
So when you've got that type of distribution you are invited to because you want to see what you can do to push the boundaries. So we did this out of hours replenishment experiment. I think we had six or eight stores in the London area and we changed people's working days. We changed the time that they came to work in the morning. But one of the things I'm curiously proud of was I was trying to find a way to explain how we would change the day, and I was in a friend's kitchen, and he has a little boy called Jack. And Jack had a little truck made by Fisher Price, which was full of blocks. All the blocks on the faces of the blocks had different things on them, and I had this vision of getting a load of the blocks printed up and put into clear perspex briefcases, and each of the blocks would be one of the things that had to happen. So if you think about it, the first block is unlocking the store. The second one is, get ready for the delivery. If you have anything, anything logistically you need to do for that, and then it's like, bring the delivery and bring it to the sales floor. And we ended up with 50 something steps right that you actually do in this. So my idea of the Fisher Price blocks didn't work, but what did work was playing cards. So we had the whole of the replenishment operation made into sets of playing cards. And then when the implementation managers went out, when we started to roll this out, they took a pack into every store, and they sat down with the store staff and they said, Well, this is the time your delivery is going to be. This is the time that you want your filling up team to start. And then they literally sat down and down a meeting table. They built the store process. And once it was built and critiqued, that was what the store changed their process to.
Bryndis 10:12
Wow, amazing.
Tim 10:15
So it was a very simple idea, yeah, and it was really good, because we were able to roll it out in such a way as every store had their own pack of playing cards. And if they wanted to change something, they could just pull out the playing cards and say, well, we've got to change this. We've got to change that. What impact does it have? And it took them through the entire stock cycle for every single day.
Bryndis 10:39
Yeah, especially when it's like almost 50 processes, and it's a 52 deck, that's perfect.
Tim 10:47
It was really cool.
Bryndis 10:48
It also it's a great way for people, for learning, for, you know, really getting the entire process, too.
Tim 10:55
So it was very good for store staff, yeah, but actually it was better for training the category management teams. So the store staff would understand the steps. Something like routine inspection. That means go out and check your gaps, pull your stock forward, see what you need to bring onto the sales floor. But the category management teams and head office had absolutely zero knowledge of how a store operated.
Bryndis 11:23
Very much so.
Tim 11:24
So we started to run the exercises with them, so that they had a handle on what actually happened in the store, and they could understand why perhaps they were getting phone calls at certain times of day because certain things were actually happening in the store that were generating the calls. So we ran that cross for about two years. It took us to actually do that, and you have to understand that that had a major impact, both in scheduling trucking and also in changing people, how people worked.
Bryndis 11:57
Fully.
Tim 11:58
So one of the things I didn't want to happen is I didn't want all the unpopular staff to be put into the early morning shifts. So we had to work very closely with teams, for the teams to decide who the best people were to do the work, and I do remember one conversation where one of the supervisors was with their team figuring out how to do this, and she turned to one of the girls and said, Well, if you don't go night clubbing that Friday night, maybe you could be in time for work the following Saturday morning. It was tailored right to how people actually lived. So I did that, and after I did that, I went into logistics development full time, and I ended up working alongside external management consultants who were working on something like 11 different change streams. And the change stream that I ended up working on was called Managed suppliers. Now the logic behind this is that if suppliers and retailers work together, it cuts out waste in the supply chain. So if Procter and Gamble are making diapers based on the sales forecasts that have been generated by the retailer, then you don't have the opportunity to have overstocks. It just doesn't happen. And if you look at how Walmart does it, the diapers come in in roll cages and are wheeled into the store. The front of the roll cage is opened, and people buy their diapers directly out of the roll case.
Bryndis 13:41
Oh, they would, yeah.
Tim 13:43
So when you see, and then the sales data is being generated by the till, which is then being sent back to Procter and Gamble, and they know how many diapers to manufacture for, say, Walmart. But to get to that point, demanded a change in the traditional supplier-retailer relationship.
Bryndis 14:04
It would.
Tim 14:05
Because the discussion could no longer be about just margin, it had to be about, how are we going to work together.
Bryndis 14:15
Completely, it would change everything.
Tim 14:16
So we worked on this with a massive change management team, we were by the stage in about 1997 and we did these search conferences where we brought people in, and we explored all of this, all of these themes. And one memorable quotation that came out of that was somebody who asked, 'What's the difference between a buyer and a Rottweiler?'
Bryndis 14:46
Oh, what is it?
Tim 14:48
Rottweilers don't wear lipstick. So we attempted to change that relationship, but in order to change the relationship, we had to spend time with the buying teams. So we ended up in, I believe we spent on the first encounter, we went in and we briefed the buying team. On the second encounter, we gave them a series of exercises, which took two days, and we really explored the relationship within that category team and what the thinking was within the category team. And there weren't any very interesting episodes. There was one category manager who announced that she was completely cooperative with everybody, and her number two turned to her and said, you are absolutely not.
Bryndis 15:44
Oh, wow.
Tim 15:45
The Category Manager went bright red. Her head went down, did not come up for an hour, because it was the first time her behavior had ever been reflected back to her. So in order for teams to work together with suppliers, they have to make a conscious decision that they want this to happen. So we did these numerous training exercises with them. They went back in. And it's very difficult to quantify some of these change management processes, but we believe we substantially added to our profit and reduced the stress and the business over a two year period following implementation, because the new language was out there, and everybody had been trained to speak the new language.
Bryndis 16:34
Yeah, that's good that everyone's trained to speak that because it's if that change management piece is key.
Tim 16:42
Absolutely. And you can imagine there were, there were some teams that accepted it more than others. There were some teams that wanted to embrace it fully. There were other teams who institutionally couldn't adopt it but that's what happens when. You do change management in large organizations. Because what was very clear to me, having implemented out of hours replenishment when I went back into those stores 10 years later, they were back into during hours replenishment, because that's where their comfort was. So as an institution, they just reverted back. I'll give you an example of something that happened when you talk about people reverting back to how they like things to be. So the company decided that once stock arrived in the company, they weren't going to bother checking where it went in the company.
Bryndis 17:38
Oh, dear.
Tim 17:39
So you're running a unit, you get a delivery, and you can clearly see that there's, I don't know, $1,000 worth of stock missing in your delivery. And the company said, we don't care, because overall, it would balance out, because we know we received it into the organization in one of the central warehouses. And if you think about it logically, we've got it somewhere. It's going to get sold somewhere, but we don't have to know precisely where it is.
Bryndis 18:11
Oh dear.
Tim 18:14
The amount of stress that put on staff was so great, that they had to go back to actually allowing the stores to claim when they had not received stock. And it was quite funny, because it was just like, people were just like, so upset that they couldn't get what they saw as restitution for further and ill. But whereas the organization was trying to say, hey guys, just don't worry about it. Yeah, we know we got it, we're going to sell it. And overall, if we put all your store results together, it will be fine. But the stores didn't feel that way, because they felt that they were underperforming or they weren't being allowed to perform, and that caused some stress.
Bryndis 18:55
Yeah, it totally would. Wow. That's really fascinating. That's a neat kind of thing that you wouldn't but the psychology that goes into that too.
Tim 19:05
So the psychology of implementing change is delicate to say the least. And sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails gloriously.
Bryndis 19:18
Yes. And so how long did you stay at that kind of organization, for a few was there a few more projects?
Tim 19:24
I've pretty much finished up in that organization, switching from the category management teams, and then we moved over to actually training up the people who did all the buying, all the stuff that we consume. Because we consumed about $2 billion worth of stuff that we bought in order for our organization just to operate, because it was a very large organization, employing 100,000 people. So we brought that supplier development focus into what we actually consumed in the organization.
Bryndis 20:03
That's a really good idea, because you've got so much stuff just as an organization, I mean, and 2 billion that's huge. Like, when you really, I mean, when you think about it.
Tim 20:16
Yeah, it's huge. But to give you an example of the thinking that we witnessed, I was running a unit for a different retailer that was bought by the new retailer, and the plan was we'd run down the banner, the previous banner. We'd sell off the stock, and then we would close the unit, and we would go away for two weeks, be trained, and come back, and then the shop fitting people would have been in and built the new interior and the store. And then we would then come back and for a number of weeks, we would then re merchandise it. During the re-merchandising phase, I was lent to another more experienced store manager from the same chain, and he came over, and I found him on the loading bay with the full roll cage full of books of forms. And there was a skip by the loading bay, and he was just throwing these forms away, oh. And I said, What do you do? And he said, Well, the way it works is, when we open a new store, we just go into the warehouse and we send the store one block of forms for every single store in the group. And he said, so the only thing you can do, because they aren't sophisticated enough to be able to find the book of forms that you need, so they just send you everything. And he said, I just threw them away because they're not relevant to you. Because I just want you to have the book the forms that we need. And I was going, sort of looking at this, going, I. Yeah, but that's 75% of that roll cage that you're just throwing away. And so that's the type of waste that happens in big organizations. So computers have helped massively in dealing with stuff like that. Having pieces of paper flying around companies is enormously inefficient, but also building the processes that are required to save the money is also the main considerable challenge, because if the only focus in the organization is on sales, without looking at where your costs are really being driven, things over periods of time drift out of sync, shall we say.
Bryndis 22:40
Exactly. And so how did you morph from a kind of distribution logistics into economic development? But the part that I think is really interesting though, is how much economic development really is, so the one thing I always find really interesting is how much the experience in logistics actually really translates into economic development. And that's one of the things I've really kind of seen in this, in all these interviews, is that kind of transition. And so did you transition from logistics into economic development immediately? Or was it a kind of-
Tim 23:17
The key to economic development is working with groups of people, and my first exposure of that was when I was on the traders group for my mall, and so I ended up chairing that group. And then you begin to get an idea of what this retailer's concerns are, what that retailer is concerned of where problems are, and you get an idea of how overall your shopping mall is performing. But then I got asked to go back a year or two later, when I was off doing something else, I got approached to go back to the same town and actually sit in the economic development department and work on some strategies that they could implement to deal with some of the issues that they were facing. So that was my first example of working in a municipality, and I think I did that for about three to six months. I don't remember exactly, but I began to learn a little bit about how things work in a municipality. And one of my biggest learning points was the guy behind me was the planning officer, and his phone rang one day, and there was somebody on the phone saying, Well, you know, my next door neighbor has put another floor in his house, and I'm sure he hasn't got planning permission for this. And the planning officer said, I'll send him a form. And the guy said, well, what happens if he doesn't fill in the form? Oh, that's an offense. We can prosecute him for that. So if he fills in the form, and it turns out what he's done, is reasonable and would normally be permitted. He might get planning permission after the event, but if he doesn't fill in the form, then we go after him.
Bryndis 25:07
Interesting.
Tim 25:08
So it was very, very cut and dried how they look at things, yeah. So it's a different way of approaching things. So I was doing light economic development whilst I was doing other things. Then when I came to Canada, I then began to get involved in the chamber movement, and eventually ended up being recruited and hired to run a Chamber of Commerce in Red Deer. Now, Red Deer is an unusual city in that it has a strong partnership between the city, the county, the chamber, and the college.
Bryndis 25:49
Oh, yes, it would.
Tim 25:50
And those four entities wanted to work together on economic development. So that came onto my desk. Basically it was something that I inherited, something that I wanted to see what we could do with. And we had a massive opportunity a number of years ago when a fund was created called the Rural Alberta Development Fund. And we, by this time, had been working with Red Deer Red as the group was called, but we'd also been working with representatives from the 37 municipalities around us, and we had identified that there was an opportunity to change our focus away from just gentle economic development, almost by evolution, to something more strident, shall we say? Right. So what we decided we wanted to do was we wanted to apply for a grant from the Rural Alberta Development Fund to start to explore foreign direct investment, and we were successful in our application. Our application, I think, was probably taken to quite a few government departments in Edmonton for comment before it was finally signed off. But we ended up with the ability to hire a new team, set up a new organization, and to actually start to talk to people outside Red Deer, and over a period of time, we had some massive growing pains, because it's a very difficult thing to do. But what we did change was that previously, trade delegations, who'd come into Alberta and a lot of economic development into places like Alberta, is through trade delegations, those trade delegations always went to Edmonton and Calgary. What we changed was they also came to Red Deer.
Bryndis 27:56
Good.
Tim 27:56
And it had an effect. It had an effect because it changed the conversation. It changed how people saw us. It also meant that we were in the conversations, when they were actually happening. Personally, I went on the guest list for the trade delegation lunches at Government House in Edmonton, and got to meet all these people at the dinner table. Lunch table, I suppose, is the right way to say it. But I also got the opportunity to meet and chat with them and meet the ambassadors and put Red Deer forward as a place that they could do business.
Bryndis 28:42
Yeah, it would completely change and add that extra piece of something to look at.
Tim 28:47
Yeah. And I think the reason I was invited was because I was the safe person to invite, because I wasn't one of the two mayors, right? I was the guy from the chamber who had an economic development hat. And they seemed to like that.
Bryndis 28:58
And a little bit of back and forth between the two. Well, and even when you look at some of the projects that you can work on there, bringing in development, expanding different facilities, it can really bring that big impact too.
Tim 29:15
It can. And also having the ability to have people on international trade outgoing trade delegations. So we had people in Japan and Korea and places like that representing us. And the conversation is really interesting, because if you have people in your community who know how to handle different visiting dignitaries, it can make a massive difference. So the mayor of the county loved trade delegations. He loved that work, and I do have a memory of him in a ballroom in a hotel in Red Deer walking around, topping everybody's glasses up from a bottle of brandy, because he wanted everybody to have a toast, because he knew that for that, I think they were Chinese, but for that trade delegation, yeah, that was what they would enjoy, right? Having a few drinks, yes, and making toasts, generally, having fun. So if you have people in your community who understand how to do that, it's so much easier.
Bryndis 30:12
Yeah. Well, and what I love about it too is it also brings in, like, it's a really good showcase of people working together, because you've got all layers of government, you've got the community business, like all of that working together, as opposed to just being in their own silos.
Tim 30:31
Correct. You learn some good lessons when you do work like this. And I remember learning a particularly good lesson from one company that was looking to put a servicing operation into Alberta, and the managing director, the CEO of the company, was very blunt. He said, Look, guys, I know your schools are good, I know your communities are lovely, but just remember, I'm going to put my facility where it can make the most money, and you have to be able to speak that language, because you can't go in and just say, well, look at everything we've got. And they're just like, yes, but can I make money? And if you haven't got the confidence and the knowledge to answer the question, can we make money here? Then you're not really able to have the conversation. So it's not a beauty competition, no, it's a hard economic discussion.
Bryndis 31.23
Right, and that's a good way to reframe it for as you're kind of looking at that piece too.
Tim 31.29
Yes, absolutely.
Bryndis 31:30
Yeah. Well, and you know, I know kind of that, and what I love already about this conversation is we're sitting in Halifax, we're talking about England, and we're talking about, you know, Red Deer, Alberta, and now we're talking of a little bit too about Nova Scotia, because there's a few things that kind of brought you back to Nova Scotia. And now you're experiencing a whole bunch of other things in this kind of world, too.
Tim 32:03
This is a really, really nice part of the world. Having just spent the last month in England and Ireland, it was so nice to come back. So one of the surprising things happened to you in life, so one of the surprising things that happened to me was I got involved in a heritage boat charge in Mahone Bay. And we, I'm a very minor member of this group, were able to buy a timber frame building where the frame had actually been built for another customer, and get it assembled and then finished, and it's now on the wharf in Mahone Bay. And we have done some projects there where we've actually brought an accomplished boat builder who's actually shown us how to build a boat in a couple of weeks.
Bryndis 32:22
Wow.
Tim 32:23
And we did one of those during covid. And my liking for work, for physical work while masked, is not great, but we accomplished it, and we got it built, and we were featured on CBC evening news when we did that.
Bryndis 33:14
Yes, we even saw it in Calgary.
Tim 33:16
Exactly, and about 75 people turned up to the launch. It was really cool. Subsequent to that, a team of us two years ago went to the wooden boat Museum in Winterton in Newfoundland, and we built a great bank's Dory there.
Bryndis 33:34
Oh, wow.
Tim 33:34
And we learned a lot through that process about the history of Dory making and how there were dories made all over the world. Sorry, I rephrase that, all up the east coast of the States and Canada.
Bryndis 33:48
And just for clarification, what is a Dory?
Tim 33:51
So a Dory is a small wooden boat that traditionally were built by the 100 and were stored upside down on schooners. And when the schooners went out into the fishing grounds, the dories were launched with either one or two men on board, and they rowed out from the schooner and line fished for cod, and then the Dory was then rowed back into the boat, and the captain looked at each Dory and told them how many pounds of fish there were in the Dory. And the captain could not be challenged. You were paid according to the amount of fish that was in the Dory that caused a lot of accidents over the years. I would imagine, because people would overload their dories, wanting to get a bigger amount of money for what was in their boats. And I think back in the, I don't remember exactly when, but there was a change up along the east coast where they actually said, No, we're not going to pay you per individual Dory load. We're going to pay you based on the entire catch. And that's a massive leap forward in safety. So there are different styles of Dory, built in Newfoundland, built in Lunenburg, built in Shelburne, built in Gloss Domain. And there's actually a guy rowing up from Gloss Domain around now, yeah, in a Lunenburg Dory. And he will have two days out at sea in this Dory. And there's an article on CBC about it at the moment. So I got involved in that. Boat Building is a really interesting skill. You learn a variety of different sub skills in terms of boat building and handling wood and working with wood. And we have, over a period of time, had a lot of stuff, a lot of boats donated to us, a lot of tools donated to us. And we have tried to have open houses and allow people to see what we've got. The single most popular thing we do is model boat building for children. So this year, for the first time, at the Halifax Boat Show, where we were very generously gifted some space on the exhibition floor. We ran boat building for kids. So we basically cut out wooden hulls and then cut out pieces to make, like the cabin on the deck and stuff like that. And we have dowels cut up to make masks and a card that people cut out. And then we provide coloring, and we use a particular type of marker, like a soluble marker, thick marker, kids really like working with. And they come along, and they come, they color up their house, and they stick using hot glue guns. They stick on all the bits they want to stick. We have no idea how many of these that we were able to produce, but what we didn't realize until a certain stage in the boat show, was that we were in the booth, which was the furthest away from the main door. And the kids were walking in with their parents, and they were seeing the other kids carrying these brightly colored boats. And they were, I want to do that, mommy. And then the mother would come along to us about half an hour later, oh, this is where you are. We've been everywhere looking for you. And then they would just make boats. And it was, it was absolutely wonderful. So it's the single most popular thing we've done. We've done it in community events in Mahone Bay. We've done it at Christmas in the Mahone Bay center. And people absolutely love it.
Bryndis 37:38
Oh, that's so much fun. Yeah. And so just out of curiosity, when you're with the ship building and stuff like that, where do you actually get the wood to actually make the boat?
Tim 37:50
Some of it we have been gifted. Some of it is surprising. So some of the best pieces of wood are found in people's gardens. Oh, some of them are tree roots that were traditionally used. So you need to think back to the boat building tradition in Mahone Bay. So they were just taking what they had lying around, turning it into boats. They weren't going to a sawmill or anything like that. They might have taken a certain amount of stuff, but basically, they were just taking what was there and turning it into boats.
Bryndis 38:21
Completely.
Tim 38:22
So they said that, traditionally, in Mahone Bay, they built boats during summer and houses during the winter. And if you go into some of the houses, you can actually see features from ships. So for instance, at the bottom of my staircase, the post at the bottom of my staircase is in the shape of a capstan that we would use on board ship to raise the anchor. Stuff like that.
Bryndis 38:50
Really, wow, you wouldn't, yeah, think of those things too.
Tim 38:56
You wouldn't. But my house was built in 1815 and still stands strong today. Yeah. So they knew what they were doing.
Bryndis 39:05
Fully. They completely do too well. And you know now you're also kind of involved with Rotary. You're doing a whole bunch of other kinds of things there too, and they've got, you know, so many other pieces that you're kind of all, you never sit still for very long. There's always something new on the horizon.
Tim 39:23
Well, they say that sharks die if they don't move. And I think people need to be doing stuff. So I got in year one of my three year term as an assistant governor for the rotary, and I'm looking after the Metro clubs and the South Shore clubs. Got seven clubs to look after, and I'm just starting, so I'm just learning. I'm out visiting people, and over the next few months, I'll get into all my clubs, and we'll have the opportunity to talk to them about some ideas that we have as a district team, and also to offer them a point of contact if they have issues within the district that they are struggling with. And it can be just something like, you know, we did this and it didn't work out, and now we're trying to unpick it. How do we do it? And stuff like that. And the opportunity for the assistant governors is just to go in and get to the right member of the district team and say, Is this on your horizon? And they can say yes, I'm dealing with it, or, Oh, thank you. You know we've taken forward.
Bryndis 40:23
Yeah, well, and the one thing I've really noticed that weaves throughout your entire career in our conversation is really the relationships and building on, making sure you truly have that conversation of understanding with people, so that you can build on to new things too.
Tim 40:42
The relationship is, to me, what it's all about. You can't really do business with somebody you violently dislike. It's a big struggle. But if you can find ways to establish common ground, if you can find ways to have shared agendas. It makes a huge difference. When you go out into certain organizations, it depends on whether you're seen as a policeman or you're seen as somebody who's there for the benefit of the people who are there. And if you go in on the policeman role, forgive me policeman for saying this, but if you go in the policeman role, the amount of cooperation you'll get, by definition, is limited, because they'll think he's here because we've done something wrong, whereas he's here because he wants to make life easier for us. Is a big difference.
Bryndis 41:31
Very much so. So if you look back to your kind of career and stuff like that, if you're talking to someone who's just kind of starting out in, just out of university, or just beginning their career, or transitioning careers, you know, any pieces of advice that you would give to someone?
Tim 41:50
My number one piece of advice is, find out what your values are, and don't do things that are against your values. And if you can have that conversation with yourself, which is a very, very tough conversation, you won't make many mistakes, because you won't go and do things where you're uncomfortable. Now comfort is a different and a bigger subject, because sometimes you need to go and do things that make you feel uncomfortable in order to develop a skill. But if you, if you, if the people around you are not aligned in the terms of the values that you have, then it will be, it will work for a short period of time, but after a certain point, you will actually begin to see behaviors that disturb you, and if you don't get out quick, then it'll be a problem. So trial and error at the beginning of your career is the best way to go. But remember, if you set yourself up to do things which you are emotionally comfortable with, you will be okay. So I'm sorry my answer is really wooly on this.
Bryndis 43:07
No, I love it, and actually it leads me into another conversation. The question is, if you were kind of telling someone to figure out what their values are, do you have any suggestions on how they would choose to do that?
Tim 43:21
One of the simple ways to do it is the negative way. What aren't you, right? Okay, so the subject is actually much bigger than just the values, because there's, there's also, there's a whole load of relationship stuff in there as well. So what type of person are you? Are you anxious? Are you serene? Do you worry about things? Do you not care about things? Are you in the middle somewhere? It's understanding things about yourself. None of us are given all the skills that we need. But we are given things. We inherit things through our parents and through our family situations. We inherit certain reactions that are inbuilt into us. And so there are some situations which I can handle, which you can't handle, vice versa. And so because of that, it's important that you do some work along the line to figure out who you really are. So I could look at somebody who's a really good chef, and I could say that guy just does it, because he just does it? For him, it's just evolutionary. He's watched his mom. He's done this. He's done that. I watched a chef the other day debone three chickens without breaking the skin. Wow. Other than just put an incision down, down the spine, and then he took all the meat off and laid it out like a piece of paper. And he did that three times, yeah? And he was just like, yeah, yeah, you're chatting away, yeah, taking the stuff off, yeah, okay. And you ask him, How do you know you can do that? And he's like, Well, I've just been cooking since I was 14 years old, and he's just got that ability. Right now, another person will need to go to culinary school to be shown how to do that, and will actually find that really, really difficult to do. And once they've actually acquired the skill and potentially demonstrated it to their instructor will never do it again. But the other guy was just, this is just a matter of routine.
Bryndis 45:44
Completely.
Tim 45:45
So everybody has different learning skills. Everybody has different emotional approaches, everybody has different relationship approaches. And my only advice to somebody starting out is you need to be secure in knowing who you are, and then you can work on from there, because if you know who you are, then you are less likely to make mistakes, because you will go and do things that you enjoy. And I do really subscribe to the view that if you work at what you enjoy, you don't really work, no, completely. You just get on with it. It's just part and parcel of you, but if you do stuff you clearly don't enjoy just because, say it's paying you X $100,000 a year, then who are you being good to because you're not being good to yourself?
Bryndis 46:34
Yeah, that's a really great piece of advice. I like that. And so I would really like to say, thank you so much. I think this has been such a great conversation. And what I've really appreciated is that you developed a relationship with my husband, Scott, or my boyfriend at the time, and then developed a friendship with me, and we've been able to continue in that friendship, no matter where either one of us is in the world, and I think that is really key, but I think it also showcases for me your ability to continue relationships, and how building and maintaining relationships is very important to you. And so I just wanted to thank you very much for being part of this conversation today.
Tim 47:18
I'm really pleased you invited me. Thank you very much.
Bryndis 47:21
Yeah, perfect. Thanks. Thank you for listening to this Zebras to Apples podcast episode. I hope you enjoyed the showcase of the fun and fascinating stories of supply chain logistics. If you liked this episode, I would love it if you could give it a rating and review. For more information about this topic, you can go to zebrastoapples.com or follow Zebras to Apples on the social media platform of your choosing, whether that's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter X, Bluesky or LinkedIn. You can support the show on Patreon. Also check out the show notes below. Please join me again for another episode of Zebras to Apples. Have a wonderful day.