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Steve Swinney – Scaling Kodiak Building Partners – EP.242

We cover Steve’s extensive experience in building product distribution, Kodiak’s diversification strategy, communication as a CEO, hiring practices, acquisition strategy, company history, and future challenges.
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Episode Description

Ep.242: Alex (@aebridgeman) is joined by Steve Swinney (@steveswinney).

My guest today is Steve Swinney, founder and CEO of Kodiak Building Partners. The company, which started in 2011 with the acquisition of Barton Supply in Denver, has grown to 45+ acquisitions and $3 billion in sales by 2024. We cover Steve’s extensive experience in building product distribution, Kodiak’s diversification strategy, communication as a CEO, hiring practices, acquisition strategy, company history, and future challenges.

Listen weekly and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Breaker, and TuneIn.

Learn more about Alex and Think Like an Owner at https://tlaopodcast.com/

Clips From This Episode

Fostering an environment of continuous learning

Keeping values consistent across companies within Kodiak

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(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:04:05) – Starting Kodiak

(00:06:09) – Why did you focus on lumber as a commodity?

(00:09:17) – What were the first few years at Kodiak like?

(00:12:28) – What was your capital raise strategy?

(00:13:51) – Consolidation & Acquisitions

(00:17:08) – How have you constructed your team as the company has grown?

(00:21:15) – Recruiting executives

(00:22:51) – How do you foster an environment of continuous learning?

(00:24:46) – How has your communication style evolved?

(00:31:45) – Keeping values consistent across companies in Kodiak

(00:34:01) – Is there ever a breaking point with the house-of-brands approach?

(00:34:53) – What key challenges are you most excited to solve over the next decade?

Alex Bridgeman: I’m really excited to chat all about Kodiak. I was telling you earlier that I’m fascinated by the model. I’d love to hear more about it. But it sounds like some of the inklings of the idea were from your ProBuild days and maybe a little bit before. Can you touch on where the idea for Kodiak came from and what were some of your influences in that? 

Steve Swinney: Sure, sure. So, first of all, it did come out of ProBuild. Myself and the other guys that were part of the founding team of Kodiak all worked there. I was the VP of Finance at ProBuild, and my team was responsible for financial planning and analysis, M&A, all our work, kind of preparing work and analysis and books for our board. And of course, went through the Great Financial Crisis during that time. And so we got a chance during that time, because it was so disruptive, because it was so bad in the market and the industry at that time, that we really were tasked very often with helping our board and our investors understand the dynamics of what was going on, how it compared to past downturns, what happened at the end of those downturns, how things played out. So we kind of got this big history lesson on the industry. And so by mid to late 2010, early 2011 when we officially launched, we were thinking about how interesting an opportunity all this disruption created for the next 10 years of the space. And so, we started with our first acquisition was Barton Supply, which was actually not in the lumber space, which is now our biggest division today and also what ProBuild really focused on, but was in the construction supply space, rebar fabrication, really selling to the concrete foundation contractor base, and we acquired that company, 20 million in sales and 75 employees and really started building. And as we built and as we worked on that business, we really started developing a broader idea for Kodiak. 

Alex Bridgeman: And the lumber focus, where does that come from? Why did you decide to continue focusing on lumber? When I talk to investors about different materials, a lot of the reaction to lumber is, oh, commodity is not that interesting, too cyclical, find something else, but you must see something different or see something beyond that initial look. 

Steve Swinney: Yeah, well, we really like diversification. And so, when we started Kodiak, I was 38 years old. And pretty simplistically, one of the things I thought about was, if this fails, I’m going to have to go start over and get a job and figure this out, figure something else out. But if it’s successful, this is probably what I’m going to do the rest of my life. And we had just gone through the GFC, and because we were very lumber focused and because we were very production, home focused, that was a really, really volatile time, and we just didn’t want to experience that again. And so, we really thought about, in our forming days at Kodiak, we thought about how do we diversify our streams of cash flows so that we don’t have those major ups and downs. And so part of that for us was to get in these different spaces of construction, supply commercial construction, multifamily, single-family, repair and remodel, even infrastructure, because while they’re all somewhat cyclical, they’re not perfectly cyclical together. And so, what we’ve experienced, and we’ve seen it this last year and a half when we had really for the first time in Kodiak’s history a housing downturn where we had single-family starts dropping and multifamily has come down. This is the first time we’ve been able to prove out the model, but what we’ve seen during that is that our cash flows have been much more consistent because we don’t lean entirely on that. And so, this year we have other spaces that are performing better than our single-family world while the market’s a little bit down. In the long run, we love single-family, we love the LBM business because we think there’s a really great long-term trajectory for single-family housing and for multifamily in the country. There’s a huge component, a huge dynamic of underbuilt homes in this country. There’s a shortage there. And so, one of the things that we see for the next decade is a pretty nice trajectory for growth and really kind of some limited downside on a decrease in volume. 

Alex Bridgeman: And you talked earlier about that diversification across different products and materials like lumber, you have appliances, roofing, siding, all that stuff. But also, I didn’t catch the industry piece in some of my earlier reading. So, it’s not just housing, new construction, residential. There’s a commercial and other elements here too?

Steve Swinney: Absolutely. So single-family is our largest. If you kind of think about construction mix, think about what our materials go into. Single-family is the biggest by far. But then we have a really nice mix of multi-family, commercial, repair and remodel, and infrastructure. And so that rounds it all out. And so, what we’ve seen is, when single-family, like this last year and a half, single-family has been down some. But we’ve been having relatively stronger growth in some of the other categories that has offset that some. 

Alex Bridgeman: What were the first couple years like? So, you bought Barton in 2011 and it sounds like the idea was, there were some iterations to the idea for Kodiak because of that. But what were the first couple years like and the follow-on deals after that? What did that feel like? What was your team like at that point? And how was the thesis playing out? 

Steve Swinney: Well, I think the thesis was playing out nicely. When we acquired Barton, the Denver market was one of the first markets to really take off after the end of the recession and everything. Actually, our first full year in business, 2012, we saw about 55% growth at Barton, organic growth, which sounds great, and it certainly did give us the ability to get more stable and we started with a very, very tight capital structure. However, I would say that the first couple years were really, really tough and, frankly really, really hard. They were just hard years. Even with that growth because you’re operating with a very thin team. Our founding team was four of us and then Paul Hilbert, who had been the CEO of ProBuild and had retired from there, became an investor and really became a mentor and continues to be that to this day for the organization here. Paul got involved. But everyone had six jobs, and we were all learning as we went. A lot of the things that we’re dealing with, we’d come from a big company, now we’re at a small business, basically. And so it was very stressful. It was very challenging. And I was, actually on the way in, driving in today, I was listening to a podcast, a Founders podcast, and the guy that they were talking about on that was saying, I’m kind of glad I didn’t know how hard this would be, or I wouldn’t have done it. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I mean, I don’t think we had any inkling of just how hard and for how long it was going to be such a grind just to get off the ground and to get to a place where we could actually start to build the organization and have a little bit of sanity reenter our lives. 

Alex Bridgeman: How long did it take for the second and third deals after Barton? 

Steve Swinney: So, our second deal occurred about 12 months after the first, and then we did another one I think later in 2012. So, we did kind of one that first year in 2011, two in 2012, and then two or three the next year. And so, it kind of just gradually built. And a big factor of that was really just capital. We didn’t go out and find a big capital partner to start with, which is often what you might do in building something like this. We really built our capital structure like we built our business, from the ground up. Our initial founding investor base was probably 20, 25 different people, like the traditional friends and family and some business associates. And then as we grew those first several years, we did three more capital raises. And it was typically going back to that same group and then adding some new ones, adding maybe a smaller or medium-sized family office to the mix. And that was really how we financed the business for the first several years of Kodiak’s history. 

Alex Bridgeman: Is there a flywheel point where cash flows and debt capacity can help with further acquisitions? Or did you need capital continuously throughout that? Maybe there’s just more opportunities than you could do yourself, but you still want to do them, so more capital is required. Can you talk about some of that? 

Steve Swinney: Yeah, I think we could have, probably there was a point where we could have started doing it more with the cash flows. But in those first several years, we really didn’t see a- I mentioned Barton at 55%. That was kind of an anomaly. And the markets, and if you look back at the housing start data in particular back then, it was really much more of a gradual build. So, we could have grown at a certain point with more internal cash flow, but I’d say our appetite was always kind of bigger than what we had the capital and the capacity within the business to do for really those first six or seven years. And it wasn’t really until late 2017, we recapitalized the company with Court Square, who’s now our private equity partner. They own a majority of the business today. And it really wasn’t until about a year after that that we really started having the capacity and the growth and the cash flows within the business to really just grow with our own balance sheet. And so that was really the last time we raised, quote, raised capital. 

Alex Bridgeman: You’ve talked about consolidation before, and in looking at different building materials, there’s different levels of consolidation across lumber, roofing, electrical, siding, all these different places. Do you have a sense for, since 2011 to now, does it feel like there’s still a lot of room to run and find other acquisitions? Or maybe how does your view of acquisitions change now? 

Steve Swinney: Yeah, I think there’s still a tremendous amount of room in most of the spaces we’re in. So we operate in, as I said earlier, lumber, gypsum, construction supplies, and then our interiors division is really kitchen showrooms, but focused on the builder customer. And really in most of those, we still see a tremendous amount of consolidation opportunity. There’s been a lot over the last decade, but there’s still a long way to go. And so if you look at spaces like roofing, and then for us, gypsum is one that’s much more consolidated. But those two areas, you kind of see the big players having a majority of the sales across the country. But then when you look at interiors and construction supplies and even LBM, which has some big players, it’s just a really big space. And so, yeah, I mean, we expect really the next 10 to 15 years will really be kind of a continuing of this journey of significant acquisition and consolidation in all of those spaces. 

Alex Bridgeman: How do you think that would affect your acquisitions in five or ten years from now? Will they be, maybe, larger businesses you’d be acquiring? Or how would you maybe rethink some of your strategy, if at all? 

Steve Swinney: I think we will rethink it some. I think we will do larger acquisitions, but I also think we’ll continue to do a lot of what… our typical acquisition is anywhere from 30 to 100 million in revenue. And I think most of what we do will continue to be those kind of deals just simply because most of the companies out there that are independent are that size. You could say that you wanted to- we only want to do half a billion dollar revenue deals. Well, we do one every other year that way. And so I think as we think about the next decade, it’ll be a lot more of the same and being really good and really efficient and really effective at doing those smaller and medium-sized deals. But then, yeah, I think we’ll lean into bigger opportunities as well when they become available. There’s some great larger regional family-owned businesses in this space, and if we have the opportunity and the good fortune to be able to spend some time with them and develop a relationship, we’d love to do those as well. I think the other thing that will change and evolve more is, if you think about our first several years, any market we did an acquisition in was a new market because we weren’t anywhere. Now we have a pretty holistic national map. We’re in every region of the country. And so I do think that starts to make you think more about strategically, how do we want to approach growth in this market now? We have six companies in this region, let’s say. Where are the places that we’re not? Where are the product categories that we’d like to be that we’re not? And so, I think that the search process gets refined a little bit in situations like that, versus when you just say, six, seven years ago we were saying we really want to be in Florida and we’re not there. Okay, we’ve just got to get there. Now, once you’re there and once you have a position and a leadership position, you start thinking about where are your gaps. I think that’s how the process will evolve a little bit over the next several years. 

Alex Bridgeman: How has the team construction looked at Kodiak over the last 10 years or so? What kind of roles have emerged as key people on your team that maybe earlier you didn’t need, but at some point, in their growth here, this role or these couple roles became really important?

Steve Swinney: Well, I think what’s changed, and I would say, I kind of told people, I feel like we remade the company and the organization, the leadership, every three or four years. Because the way we did it when we were 20 million in sales, it had to look very different when we were at 400 million. It had to look very different when we crossed the billion dollar threshold. Now we’re at 3. And we’ve really kind of had to remake not only how we do things, but I would say I’ve technically had the same job for 13 years now, I feel like it’s been probably four or five different jobs. And so, I think one of the things that’s been a real hallmark for us has been the ability to keep learning, and growing and changing has been really important. But from a leadership and a team perspective, those first few years, like I said, there were four of us that were day-to-day running the business. And I don’t even know if we had any formal titles too much. Everyone just was involved in everything. And what I’ve seen happen over time is as we’ve grown, you start saying, okay, you know what? We finally can have someone focus on, let’s say, accounting. So we hired Darius, who’s our controller now, and Darius was our first true accountant that we hired and has led and built that entire organization for the last 12 years now. And as we grew, we kind of kept doing that, so we were able to get someone dedicated to finance and focus on that. And then we got Brad Becker who came in and focused on IT and built our IT organization. And then we built an HR team, and we built a marketing team, we built a regional kind of a field operating leadership structure. And so, I think what happens as you grow is you begin to be able to invest in talent and focus on these different areas. So, you get an expert doing it instead of these kind of knucklehead founders who are just trying to figure out how to do it as they go and doing the best they can, but they’re doing a hundred different things. And that’s been the real evolution. I think now for us, we’re 3 billion in sales. We have a debt structure, a traded debt structure, and we have private equity partners. Our finance and accounting organization, led by our CFO Jeff Smith, is really critical to everything we do. I mean, obviously, we invest a lot, allocate a lot of capital to deals and to capital expenditures and to growth and expansion. We have to finance all this. We have to now track and analyze and the data analytics around seeing how all the businesses are operating and what the trends are. Jeff’s organization really becomes a real epicenter of kind of information coming in and then going out to help us do this successfully. So I’d say that is one particularly critical area. But really everything is. You can’t do all this without having an incredibly strong and talented operating leadership and structure to work with our local companies and coach and mentor and partner with them. You can’t employ 7,000 people without having a really talented HR organization. And then you certainly can’t do any of this without having an IT team that kind of keeps the lights on and keeps the bad guys from getting into your data and giving you the capacity to get information more quickly passed around. I mean, that’s really important. And then we’ve got a fantastic marketing team here that helps us communicate a message. I would say our biggest constituent for our marketing is really our employees. And it’s about communicating the message of the kind of culture we want to have and the kind of people and place we want to be and how we want to do this. And so that marketing component to speak to our employees and to recognize and appreciate them and engage them has become a really critical thing for us over the last several years since we started that team. So, there’s really just so many important people that go into making this successful each day. 

Alex Bridgeman: What are some things you’ve learned about recruiting really talented executives to come work at your company versus all the other opportunities that someone who’s really talented and has done a lot has on their table? 

Steve Swinney: The biggest thing I would say about that, we have a lot of really long tenured people. When you look at our senior leadership, most of our team, most of our senior team has been with us anywhere from seven to thirteen years, which is a lot when we’re only thirteen years old. They’ve been here a while. And I think that is really about, it’s really about culture. It’s really about creating a place that the people want to be and they enjoy and they’re challenged and they’re hopefully really appreciated and rewarded for what they’re doing. Several years ago, we created a vision for our company. Strip everything away, what do we want to be? And it was creating a culture that empowers local leaders to succeed in the communities they serve. It says nothing about the products we sell. It says nothing about the industry we’re in. It says nothing about construction. It’s just about creating a culture that empowers local leaders to succeed. And I think that’s been what’s attracted people to our organization is that’s the kind of thing they want to be a part of. And we make a million mistakes probably every day as we try to do that, but it’s a really compelling vision for us to strive for. And what we’ve seen is people want to be a part of it, and they stick around, and they thrive in that. And we get to see them do really great things day in and day out. 

Alex Bridgeman: And clearly, there’s an ambition to that culture. You want to grow larger and larger. And at one point, you were 400, 500, a billion, 3 billion, you’re constantly kind of breaking new ground and doing things that many or maybe all of you haven’t done before at that scale. How do you keep learning as a team, maybe starting with yourself, but also then encouraging others, like, hey, we need to be able to figure this out, this is a much larger project than we’ve done before, or this is a lot more than we’ve had to handle in the past, we need to figure this out and evolve? How do you encourage that and build that? 

Steve Swinney: Well, we definitely keep pushing ourselves. We don’t have this number that we want to get to where we can then say we’re done. We’re really ambitious. It’s a really ambitious organization. We want to be the greatest building products distribution company in North America. That also means if you strive for being great, you are going to tend to grow a lot. And so, I mean, that’s an ambition that we- that’ll take us through probably as long as I’m alive to try to get there. And so we do really push ourselves. I think what’s really important to be able to keep being successful in that environment, though, the biggest thing that I’ve found is to really strive for continuing to be humble. I think as we’ve grown, there’s so many times that I know for me that I felt like, what am I even doing leading this anymore? Like, this has way outgrown me. But having that humility and recognizing that, gosh, this is a really big task, and I don’t know if I’m up for it, really, that does then push you to learn more. And it pushes you to find mentors or find resources that help you figure out how to kind of climb that next level, that next stair on the path. And I think our organization overall, I see our team and our leadership and our people as really humble. And you don’t see a lot of people running around here that think they know everything. And so, what that creates and hopefully what that fosters is an environment where people want to collaborate and work together to figure it out. 

Alex Bridgeman: You talked earlier about, just briefly about communication as a CEO. I really enjoy reading letters from CEOs that are written to like the whole company or just hearing about different styles of regular communication. A favorite one that I always love is David Neeleman, the JetBlue founder. He would, at JetBlue, he wrote an email company-wide every Sunday, and in it, he would reference some story or something that an employee did that was above and beyond for a customer or passenger or co-worker or whatever, just to help each week reinforce key values. And I just love that as a style. Do you feel like you’ve developed your own regular communication style? 

Steve Swinney: Well, we’re developing it. I’ll tell you, the first thing I have learned about communication is that it’s just never enough. I would say, when I think way back like to 2014 was the first time I remember how much we- I recognized that we were not communicating the way we needed to be. We’d grown to several companies, and I guess up to that point, we were small enough, and there were a few, only a few, a handful of touch points that you had to have to communicate. And we’d talk regularly. And there was this kind of threshold across, in 2014, we tripled in size, and I think we went from like 150 to like 400 million in sales. And I just remember like things getting really broken in the way we were operating together. And it was because we weren’t communicating enough. We’d relied up to that point on just kind of this natural flow of information, and that wasn’t working anymore. And so we actually had to think about how do we do this? And how do we be purposeful about communicating? Because we assume that everyone knows what we’re doing and what’s happening, and you know what, we’re wrong. They don’t know. And so we have, we’ve evolved with that a lot. We started that year, we started doing our leadership summit which was getting the leaders of all of our companies together and our headquarters together. And we’ve been doing that for a decade now. So that’s certainly a key part of that. Over the last few years, we’ve started doing more short video messages that we get out to our field organization and to the corporate team here. And so, we do those maybe every month or two to really touch on different areas of the business and what we’re working on, say for example, in our technology areas and how that’s evolving and where we’re headed with that. Or maybe one month that’s about what we do philanthropically and why that’s important to us as a company. But I would say the biggest lesson that I keep learning is that it is, and I said at the beginning of this, it’s never enough. We always need to do more because I have not yet been able to overestimate how much I need to communicate. And so we’ve got to keep working at how that evolves. And it’s kind of challenging because we’re in 130 different locations, we’re in 30 different states. We have a lot of our workforce that isn’t on company email because they’re truck drivers or they’re working out in a warehouse in a yard. And so, we have to find different ways of communicating to actually get to all of our people. But I think it’s a never-ending challenge, and I think it’s really, really important and something most the time we do underestimate how important and how much of it we need to do to be effective. 

Alex Bridgeman: You mentioned in 2014, some of those communications started breaking down. What did that look like? Is there an example of something that broke that stands out to you? 

Steve Swinney: The relationship started breaking. I think trust broke down significantly. And it wasn’t necessarily one specific thing, but it was just up to that point, I think in those early years, we had a really good flow and trust with each other. Everyone knew they were doing the right things and we knew the direction we were heading. And so, as we grew beyond the point that our natural communication would satisfy, I think we started not knowing. This person over here didn’t really know, where are we going? What are we trying to achieve? And because we weren’t talking to them about that, when you don’t communicate, then people invent or assume what must be true based on what they’re seeing. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, in the absence of information, you make a decision. And so, I think what happened during that period of time was, as we didn’t communicate, then we had all these different really important people in the organization that were starting to make assumptions because we weren’t telling them something, so they were all making assumptions, and those assumptions are all different. And I think the other thing about human nature is more often than not, when you start making assumptions, you probably assume the worst. And so over time we just had an organization that we were starting to go in a lot of different directions and starting to not trust a lot the direction of where we were headed, and we had to fix that. 

Alex Bridgeman: So, what was the fix? What helped get over that? 

Steve Swinney: Yeah, I mean, the fix was, I hate to make it overly simple, the fix was starting to communicate and finding effective ways to communicate. So, I mentioned the leadership summit. That was something for us to get everyone in the same room for two days. And up to that point, I would say our communication and just our management style was this very hub and spoke. We had this very small, like five of us, five or six of us at the headquarters, and we would talk to this operating company one day, and then we might talk to this one the next day, and so on. They never all talked to each other, and we never talked to them collectively. And it was really, I was talking to my wife one night right before we started the leadership summit, and she asked me, she was like, do the different operating companies ever talk to each other? And I was like, no, no, we really… we just talk to this one and we talk to that one. And she said, well, have you ever thought about getting them all together? Because you say how, you always talk about how awesome they all are. Like, wouldn’t it help to have them talk? And I was like, yeah, that’s a really good idea. And so, I actually- she started, I said, congrats. And I’m like, why don’t you plan that? Why don’t you plan an event for us to do that? And so we’ve been doing it, like I said, for about 10 years now. But it has been, it was really effective because when everyone’s in the same room and it is truly one message, everyone knows what they heard, everyone can corroborate it. And so that was the start of us having better communication because we did, we got all in the same room, we said, this is what we’re going to do. This is how we want to do this. This is where we’re headed. And then everything after that is, how do we reinforce and consistently communicate and remind of those messages? Because it is easy to forget those over time, too. We all get busy, and we all get focused on the fire drills or whatever hectic thing has happened in that day. And so I do think it’s important to really reinforce messages a lot, too. It’s not just say it, one time and then you go, okay, well we’ve said that, so check that box. 

Alex Bridgeman: Is there- That culture and communication piece strikes me as the hardest or one of the harder parts of running a house of brands approach where each local brand remains intact and there’s not this centralization of everything, at least from an external standpoint. So, it sounds like that retreat helps. Are there some other things that have helped keep values consistent across every company and have a similar approach, even if they’re all…they have their own flavor of how they do things, at least there’s something holding them all together?

Steve Swinney: Yeah, well, I’d say two things about that. One is, I really do, I think that a big part of our acquisition approach and a big part of our due diligence is really around culture. We seek out companies that we think have a really kind of consistent culture with ours. Not because we think ours is the only way to do it or the best way to do it or whatever, it’s just this is who we are. And what we found over time is that we have much more successful acquisitions when we’re all on the same page, we’re all very like-minded about where we want to go. And so in most cases, even though our brands are all unique, and in one market, we operate as ABS, and in another one, we operate as Barton, and Zarsky, and FBS, whatever it is, I would tell you that when you walk into any of our 130, 140 locations, in most cases, there’s a pretty consistent culture and pretty consistent values. So, part of that has been kind of a selection process. It’s been making sure that we align with people who are like-minded. And then I think the second part is you do have to, it’s back to the communication point, you have to talk about those things. If I never talk about that it’s really important to us that we have a really entrepreneurial culture, a really driven culture, well, we will forget that that’s important to us and we will gradually lose that. And I think if we don’t talk about it regularly, that it’s important to us and we think it’s a responsibility of ours that because we’re successful and because we’re growing, that we have a responsibility to engage in our local communities and give back to them, if we don’t talk about that regularly, if we don’t highlight when we’re doing that and recognize that, well, we’ll lose that over time. So, I think really that consistent communication to reinforce and hang on to your values so you don’t lose them, particularly as you grow, is really critical. 

Alex Bridgeman: Is there a breaking point, eventually, with the house of brands approach where it stops being as effective, or it’s just too many things going on? 

Steve Swinney: I’ve been asked that a lot, and I would say, I don’t know, I don’t think so. I know this, I know that we would rather stay the size we are than break our culture or stop striving for the ideal culture we want to have. But that being said, and this goes back to the ambition, we’re really ambitious and we’re really confident that we will continue to grow this. And like I said, for as long as I’m doing this, we expect to grow and we expect to grow aggressively. And we expect to do it with the model that we have. 

Alex Bridgeman: In closing up, what’s kind of a key challenge you’re working on at the moment at this point at Kodiak? 

Steve Swinney: Well, I think right now, we’re really thinking about our next kind of phase. I’ll say that’s kind of the next seven to ten years. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about our future and thinking about where we want to be at the end of this decade both in terms of size and scale and then what’s more important, I mean, that’s really important. Like, you’ve got to know where you’re trying to head. And then, how do you get there? That’s a big challenge for us because it is, it’s really complex. We have every one of our companies, operating companies right now, are working on their own long-range strategic plans. Really, what do they want to accomplish? What do they want to be? How big do they want to be? What are the gaps between where their team and their organization or their facilities or resources are today, what gaps are we going to fill, need to fill for them to get to that point? And then we’re going to put all that together and and have a really comprehensive plan for how Kodiak gets to its goals and its plans. So that’s a huge undertaking, and it’s one, again, that we didn’t want to do from this top-down approach. We wanted to do it from the bottoms up. We wanted each of our, not only each of our operating brands, but even within them, some of them have multiple locations. And so that plan is being developed at each individual location so that we can say, okay, within ABS, where’s Fort Myers going to be in five to ten years? How are they going to get there? What do they need to get there? And then all of that gets pulled together, and then we get to help figure out how do we allocate resources and capital to support those plans and then ultimately get to this bigger vision of where Kodiak arrives at in 2030 or 2034, whatever the case may be. 

Alex Bridgeman: Well, that’ll be really exciting to see. Steve, thanks for coming on the podcast. It’s been a lot of fun. 

Steve Swinney: It’s been great, great visiting with you. I always love talking about this awesome organization and enjoy spending time with you. So thanks for stopping by. 

Alex Bridgeman: Absolutely.

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