Transcript – COO Tim Cocchia on Flexibility, Service and Trust (#6)

FULL TRANSCRIPT – COO Tim Cocchia on Flexibility, Service and Trust

[Music]

Natasha Cary: Welcome to Over the Threshold Podcast, produced by Certification of Delivery Excellence, also known as CODE.  I’m your host, Natasha Cary, owner and president of CODE, where we offer online education for last mile delivery personnel. To learn more about CODE certifications, visit our website: codetrained.com. The purpose of this podcast is to deliver the journey of individuals in the Final Mile/Last Mile white glove industry. As CODE is an educational company, we hope through these stories you can learn something new. Maybe we teach you something about an individual you know, or we introduce you to someone you’ve always wanted to learn more about. Above all, we hope we can leave you inspired. Let’s get started.

Natasha: My guest today is no stranger to the last mile delivery industry. You could say it runs in his veins. Today I am chatting with Tim Cocchia, Chief Operating Officer of Xcel Delivery Services. Xcel Delivery specializes in time-critical, same-day shipments, warehousing, and distribution throughout Arizona. Tim has been in the industry for over 30 years and has worked not only on the delivery side with companies such as Xcel, Intelliquick, and Canyon State Courier. He also spent time as a vendor to the delivery companies when he was VP of sales and marketing with CXT Software. Tim, how are you, my friend?

Tim Cocchia: I’m doing great today.

Natasha: I mentioned that the industry runs in your veins because you were born into it. Your grandfather was in the industry; your dad was in the industry. In fact, your grandfather, at one point, was looking to expand and compete with FedEx. Is that true? 

Tim: That is true. My grandfather started a courier company back in 1962, and he used to tell stories about all of his friends who knew him at the time. He was driving a bank route for a bank out to Palm Springs in California every day. He decided he was going to set out on his own and open up a courier company and all his friends told him, ‘What are you doing? This banking stuff…’ Mind you, this is 1962, ‘…these checks are going to go away. You’re starting a business that’s going to end in a few years.’ Of course, that lasted a little bit longer than they predicted. It wasn’t until 2000s with Check 21 that all that went away. So he started it in 1962; my dad worked for him for a period of time and moved to Arizona in 1985 and started his own business as well, so it was definitely in my blood. 

Natasha: It kind of chose you. As my 9-year-old would say, ‘I choose you, Pikachu.’ [laughter] You went to school for engineering, and at some point, you were pursuing law. What happened there?

Tim: Well, when I was a kid growing up, I would see my dad in the business all the time and all the hours that he put in and the late nights at the office and all those things and so as a kid, I’m like,
‘I definitely do not want to do this!’ And so when I went to college, I went into engineering, and I went through engineering school. I actually graduated first in my class. But in my last semester, I was working with a professor in a lab, measuring aluminum alloys as they solidified to predict the strength of metals by dropping samples of liquid metal into water to freeze them and polish them and measure grain sizes, and it’s… 

Natasha: Wow.

Tim: …about as interesting as it sounds.  

Natasha: That sounds… [laughter]

Tim: Yes. Not very interesting. 

Natasha: You lost me.

Tim: I decided that working in a lab is not for me. I was talking to a professor of mine, and he told me he’d just come back from being an expert witness on a case, and he’s like, ‘Gosh, these attorneys, they don’t understand law!’ and literally that week, I went out and bought a book to prep to take the LSAT. Took the LSAT, went to the University of Arizona Law School, and in my third year, I worked at a law firm for the summer. It was a large law firm here in Phoenix, and I wasn’t very excited about it. I was looking for something else to pique my interest after graduation, and my dad asked me if I would help him. He had just got a large account with Bank of America and Wells Fargo, and his company was growing fast. He wanted some help writing initial contracts, doing employee handbooks, some basic stuff to set the foundation of the company. At the time, I thought, ‘Okay, this is great. I’ll work for him for 3 or 4 months while I look for what I really want to do.’ And of course, that 3-4 months turned into eight years.  

[laughter]

Natasha: It kind of has a habit of happening; you can get sucked into something.

Tim: Yup. And this business definitely does that to you. 

Natasha: For sure. I couldn’t imagine you being in a lab; you’re too social to be spending your entire day in a lab. I think you made the right choice there. How was it working with your dad, and what did you see that was needed? What kept you there? 3-4 months, you said. You were just going to work on a couple of projects. What made you stay? 

Tim: I accomplished a couple of the projects we were doing, but in going through that, I would see stuff and the way the business was being run and would ask questions, ‘Why are you doing this?’ My dad was more of a smile and a handshake kind of guy. He got things done with lots of effort. So I would see things and talk to him about it, and he’d be like, ‘That’s a great idea. Can you do it?’ and I’m like, ‘Alright.’ I did enough of those, and he asked me if I was interested in running our Phoenix branch because we had a problem at the time. I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do that’ and again, it was just one of those things where one thing led to another. After I started working with my dad, I remember sitting around many days in his office, thinking about and appreciating in the moment the fact that I got a chance to work for my dad for all these years. It was really cool. 

Natasha: Mhm. Any fun stories of working with your dad?

Tim: [laughter] I don’t know off the cuff. My dad passed away three years ago; way too young. I’m trying to think of something funny but can’t off the top of my head, but I can tell you that we sat down in his office just about every afternoon, and sometimes it would start with work and end with conversations about everything and about life. It was really cool. 

Natasha: That’s awesome.

Tim: You don’t always necessarily appreciate things in the moment. But that was one of the moments that I recall many times and think about how cool it was to be able to do. 

Natasha: That’s awesome, especially since you don’t have him now. 

Tim: Yup. 

Natasha: So you can have those memories to look back on.

Tim: Absolutely.

Natasha: Being that you’ve been in the industry for so long and have seen your dad go through it, how has it evolved? It sounds like you came into your dad’s business, and he had probably been doing it the way his dad had been doing it, and therefore there wasn’t a lot of innovation, and it sounds like you brought a lot of that to his business. But as an industry as a whole, how have you seen it evolve? 

Tim: The biggest thing has been technology. When I got into it and when my dad was in it, I remember walking into our accountant’s office and seeing literal stacks of paper a foot high. Everything was paper. There were literally no computers when he was starting. It was very simple. Everything was index cards and billing from paperwork. I remember how excited we were when there were pagers, and then text pagers were the biggest thing for a long time because with the regular pager, you would literally text numbers to drivers. Like, 1-2-1-2 meant ‘Call at the next stop,’ and a 9-1-1 literally meant ‘Pull over, find a payphone and call us.’ [laughter] To go from that to where we are today with web-based software and amazing tools that we use that make us so much more productive…it’s ridiculous! And there’s still leaps and bounds to go. There are companies out there working with route optimization and AI and automated dispatch things like that that are going to continue to take it to the next level. 

Natasha: For sure. I’ll flip that. With your experience, obviously there’s technology, and there’s a lot people are working on, so what’s the next phase that the industry should go into?

Tim: Well, one of the problems in the logistics business, at least in the final mile sector, is that there’s not a lot of margin and profit to pay for technology. Companies like CXT Software and Key Software, the products they sell, if they sold those or they wrote software for the medical industry, for the legal industry, they would charge four or five times and be able to deliver an even more robust product to their customers. But this industry’s always been tough because it’s a balance on the software side between the cost and the features that they can provide. So in some sense, that holds companies back. There are start-ups out there that maybe are aligning themselves with some newer technologies, and they may end up having an advantage because they’re fundamentally setting themselves up differently so that they can operate with this technology and maybe even afford it with less dispatchers. Dispatchers are a huge cost of doing business, and if you started from scratch and were able to set your business practices up around some software that would allow you to have a lot less dispatchers, there’s some good cost savings there that could pay for technology. There’s a lot of players in the industry right now that are trying to bring in some really amazing Artificial Intelligence to the industry at cost-effective prices. I think once it gets to the point where the cost point of adding those features into the software that are available to us, once it gets to where the price is right, you’re going to see that stuff explode. 

Natasha: Margins are definitely on top of everybody’s minds, especially these days…

Tim: Yup.

Natasha: …when you’re trying to get things done in the middle of a pandemic. How has that affected your business? What’s going on with you guys?

Tim: I’d say it’s a mixed bag. I mean, if you had asked me five months ago what would happen if this happened, I would’ve probably given you a much grimmer outlook. But there’s been good with the bad. Obviously, the retail sector has shut down. Anything that revolved around a public facility or an office, like doctor’s offices, they’ve all closed down. So that business just dried up and went away, literally almost overnight. Some of the business, the medical field where you’re transporting vital organs and body parts, those things still are moving around and have to move. There’s a lot of machinery and auto-parts that are moving around that have to move around and then supporting, of course, any of the essential businesses. One of the things that’s great about the courier industry is that we’re founded on flexibility. Every day we’re flexible for our customers, and because of that, I think as a whole, we’ve done a really good job at being flexible through this pandemic by finding new ways to offer our services or by tweaking our services or the time we may have available to offer assistance in other areas that we wouldn’t have otherwise. We have great connections with the state of Arizona, and the Procurement Office of the state of Arizona reached out to us to help solve a problem that they had of getting probably around 16,000 palettes worth of supplies to the homeless shelters in Arizona over a couple of weeks. So we’ve been working with them, and that’s been keeping us very, very busy. Things like tendering to the airlines, most of our drivers are TSA certified, so were tendering to the airlines all throughout the day. Of course, with reduced flights, there are fewer local tenders, but because of reduced flights, we now have runs to LAX and San Francisco to move product that would’ve normally been tendered here in Phoenix or Tucson…

Natasha: Wow. 

Tim: …but now it needs to go to these other locations. It doesn’t take many out-of-town runs to offset the loss of a few locals. So overall, I would say we’re probably down 20% in revenue, which from the state of the economy and the country, is a huge success.

Natasha: It sounds like you’re sitting on the good side of it; that’s good. 

Tim: We definitely are.

Natasha: Yeah. You were with your dad and working with his business. Is that when you went to Intelliquick?

Tim: It is. So we ran into some issues at Canyon State Courier. Let’s just say some bad accounting, and probably some lack of accounting knowledge on my side, and my dad wasn’t an accountant at all, so we relied heavily on the accountants that we had with the company. We found out over a period of time that, well, let me give you a little more detail here. Our PNLs were marginally profitable. We were making a little bit of money; I mean, at one point, we were up to about $20million a year in sales. The cashflow was really tight…and again, I don’t have an accounting background; my dad certainly doesn’t have an accounting background. Cashflow was tight, and when I came into the business, it had been tight for a while, and they were struggling with cashflow quite often. So one of the things that we did was to change around our billing to move it from arrears to pre-billing customers that had fixed routes. The result of that should’ve been, in simple terms, getting a lot more cash in faster than we previously did. And we saw the results of it for a short period of time, but it just did not persist. We eventually got to the point where we called in a CPA firm over a weekend when our accountant or CFO was on vacation and found out that there were essentially a lot of inappropriate accruals that had been going on and journal entries that just didn’t balance out. As a result of that, instead of making a slight profit, we were actually losing money…

Natasha: Oh no.

Tim: …every month. Yeah. We made a bunch of quick adjustments. Unfortunately, we had to go through a factoring company for a while for cashflow. We just weren’t able to recover fast enough, and at that point, we ended up selling off the business, breaking up into two parts, and selling off the business in pieces. One part went to Intelliquick, and another part went to BVEx. I went over to Intelliquick delivery as a consultant for six months afterwards, and then they hired me on from there.

Natasha: Another time where you thought it would just be a project, and you’d move on? 

Tim: Yeah. I wasn’t sure about that one. I don’t know. I think if I’d had a little bit more money at the time, I probably would’ve started my own business, but I had just gotten married at the time, and it just didn’t seem like the right time to try to strike out on my own and start from scratch.  

Natasha: I hear you on that. Being your own boss comes with the good and the bad, right?

Tim: Exactly.

Natasha: How did you pivot into the software side? I know that you said that you had used CXT Software when you were with Intelliquick. How did you pivot into that, and what made you think that was the route that you wanted to go into? 

Tim: When I worked for my dad at Canyon State Courier, we had a separate company for our on-demand work called ProCourier. We were an early user of CXT Software with ProCourier. We used their software for a few years at Canyon State Courier before I went over to Intelliquick. Intelliquick also happened to be the third customer of CXT Software as well. We used it heavily there, and then I got to a point where working for my dad was great but then working for someone else overtime wore on me a little bit. So I thought at the time that it would be nice to make a little change outside of the courier industry and some of the pressures that come along with the courier industry, and an opportunity came up to move to CXT Software, and it just seemed like the best of both worlds. It’s still the industry that I grew up in, and I love, and it was a software that I knew like the back of my hand because I had used it for so long. And basically, when I first went to CXT I was selling software to people in the industry who already knew me.

Natasha: Right.

Tim: I could walk in the door, and I’d have instant credibility because they knew that I understood their business and could talk with them on a level they understood about how this software was going to make their life better.  

Natasha: And you used it, so you knew exactly how to release that pressure or pain point for them through the solutions you had.

Tim: Exactly.

Natasha: And then you decided to come back! 

Tim: Yes. I’d known Mark and Kelly Spivak, who own Xcel Delivery for years. It’s funny, about three months before I left CXT, Mark had reached out to me asking me if I knew somebody who would be interested in running his business. I actually gave him a couple of referrals and didn’t think anything of it at the time. And about three months later, when the opportunity came up to make a move, he was the first person I’d called. I’d been doing a little bit of consulting for about three months after leaving CXT, and then I reached out to Mark. It took us another couple of months, but we were able to put something together that worked for both of us and was able to get on board there. And really, the impetus for him was he didn’t run the business out of Tucson for quite a few years, maybe 15 years at the time. He was really looking to grow and start a new branch up in Phoenix. So the combination of my experience and the fact that I live in Phoenix, and the fact that I had worked for a family business before because there’s a lot of ins and outs that go with a family business is compared to other places. It was a good fit, and it’s been a good run so far.

Natasha: That’s awesome. Over the years, you’ve certainly held many positions and family businesses, and corporate businesses. What has been the best or hardest ‘good’ business lesson to learn?

Tim: I think the best business lesson for me personally, or the toughest thing that I always struggle with is allowing people to have the space to succeed. I have an engineering background. I like details. I like things done the way I want them done unless you can show me that there’s a better way. I think definitely early on in my career, I was much more difficult to work for, in the sense that I don’t want to say that I was my way or the highway, but I wanted it done a certain way, and I was probably hard to convince otherwise. But as time has gone on, I’ve seen the benefits of allowing people to have their own space, within reason, to achieve the same result. Or that technique that people always say – instead of forcing someone to drink, leading them to the water and letting them make the decision you want. That, over time, becomes the most gratifying thing; when you work with your managers or your supervisors and you get them to think the way you do and to come to those same solutions on their own, that tends to be the most gratifying. 

Natasha: Or even different solutions, right? 

Tim: Yeah. 

Natasha: The whole point is that I want you to get from point A to point B, and it doesn’t really matter how you get there, right? 

Tim: Yup.

Natasha: And it’s really hard!

Tim: No, definitely.

Natasha: And you can see, you know. ‘I’ve done it a million times, here’s how I want it done, here’s how it’s going to work, and I’ve tested it and just don’t mess with it,’ right?

Tim: Yup. It means developing that trust. 

Natasha: Right. And that’s how you grow as a team, when everybody has a voice at the table, and they could come up with something you may not have thought of.

Tim: Yeah, that’s the problem, when you always think that you can think of everything. It’s hard to let that go! [laughter]

Natasha: But you’re working on it!

Tim: I’m working on it. It’s a work in progress. 

Natasha: I’m sure your dad was probably a very big mentor for you in the industry. Is there anyone else that stands out? Or what has been something that a mentor has taught you that you can share? 

Tim: Obviously, my dad is the biggest mentor and at the forefront just because of the time that we spent together and all the things I learned from him. I mean, the biggest things from him were really customer service. He was over the top when it came to making sure that our customers were taken care of and that they always came back to us. In fact, one of the first contracts he got in the industry was as a dispatcher for somebody else to pay the bills. He was running his company on the side and then dispatching during the day for another guy. This guy’s business was on demand. Came in at 08:00 in the morning, was done by 17:00, didn’t do anything after hours or before hours. And so the guy got a proposal from Wells Fargo Bank, and it was for some bank service in Phoenix, and they had four zones. So my dad had to ask the guy he was working for and say, ‘Hey, do you have any problem if I bid this because I know you’re not going to?’ And the guy was like, ‘Absolutely. I don’t want anything to do with that after hours.’ So my dad did a proposal for Wells Fargo, and when he was done with his proposal they called him up, and they said, ‘Oh yeah, mail it in or come down and drop it off.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m going to come down and drop it off.’ And when he gets down there, he asks to see the person who offered him the bid. And they said, ‘You can just leave it here.’ And he was like, ‘No, I’d really like to talk to him if I could.’ And so the guy came down, and my dad gave him the proposal. They had four areas, and my dad pretty much told them, ‘Listen, I can’t handle all of this, but if you give me one area, I can guarantee when this contract’s up, you’re going to be asking me to do more.’ And sure enough, he got awarded the one area and slowly over time had all of Wells Fargo and all of Bank of America. So it’s that customer service that you get your foot in the door, and you almost do anything you can for that first piece of work because once you have your foot in the door and they see the level of service that you give, they’re going to naturally want to give you more.

Natasha: Right. 

Tim: Outside of him, I’ve learned so much from so many of the people on the board at the CLDA. Rob Papworth and I used to have conversations at different events and laugh over trying to educate people in the industry. He’s been a great person to lean on if you have questions, but really, it’s all those guys. Every single person I came into contact with at the CLDA at the board level that we interact with, you sit and listen to their stories and watch what they do, and you can learn a lot from them. I’d recommend to anybody that you should get involved with the industry meet the people in the industry because we’ve all experienced the same thing and so you can really learn a lot from the experiences from other people.

Natasha: Don’t reinvent the wheel, as they say.

Tim: Absolutely. That’s pretty much all they teach you in law school. [laughter]

Natasha: Don’t reinvent the wheel?

Tim: Exactly. Somebody has always already written what you need to write, just go find it and put it into your words. 

Natasha: You know, I always love reading the fine print in contracts or some rule because…

Tim: You’re a very demented person, just from that comment.

Natasha: Well, the thing that I find fascinating is that sometimes when they’re really whacky, it’s because something has happened to introduce that piece of language. I can’t think of something off the top of my head, but it’s like ‘Caution: coffee is hot,’ you know?

Tim: Right.

Natasha: Obviously, it’s hot, it’s coffee. But something happened, so now there’s a rule in place that says this always has to say ‘caution’—that kind of thing. 

Tim: It’s like common sense 101, but here’s all the legal things that we’ve been sued over.

Natasha: Right. Like a shampoo bottle says, ‘Don’t put in your eyes.’ Well, why would I do that?

Tim: Well, you’re in the upper 50% if you’ve never tried, I guess. 

Natasha: That’s true; that’s true. I have something going for me. [laughter] Obviously, right now there’s through the pandemic it’s mentally and physically exhausting because you’re constantly thinking and adapting and pivoting and reacting…so your answer may have been different three months ago, but what do you do to decompress stress?

Tim: I don’t know if my answer would be different three months ago or not because I was having a conversation with one of my branch managers just the other day about a new employee we’d brought on and we were talking about how every day is like mental gymnastics. In this industry, you don’t just solve the problem once. You solve it once, then something screws up your solution, and you solve it again and again and again throughout the day. The days fly by, and then you get calls at night because something happened afterward, and you have to resolve the problem again.

Natasha: And you’re like, ‘Wait, I just solved this! Why are we talking about it?’

Tim: Exactly. But personally, over the last five years or so, I do try to exercise a lot, never get to do it as much as I want. But the biggest thing for me is honestly just my kids. When I’m hanging out with my kids and playing games with them, everything else is secondary. I have an 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, so right now we’re playing Uno. They played Monopoly for the first time the other day and had a blast, and then my son has recently gotten into playing Fortnite…

Natasha: Oh yeah.

Tim: …so of course now every morning at like, 06:30, the moment I wake up, he wants to play Fortnite for 30 minutes, so we log on and play duos in Fortnite. 

Natasha: I’m well aware. My husband at night will, when the kids go to bed, he’ll play so that he can be as good as my 9-year-old. [laughter]

Tim: We just play together; that way, it’s like joint success. So he carries me, literally, he’s picked me up and carried me in the game when I’ve been shot and carries me to victory.

Natasha: And that’s certainly a way to get your mind off a lot of things! 

Tim: Yup. And that’s all they want to do; play games and do stuff together. Of course, the funny part about my kids is that they do know half the staff at my offices, because my phone will ring, and they will be like, ‘Is that Leigh? Is that Mike? Who were you just talking to?’ I can only imagine what they’re thinking about these conversations about drivers and going and picking this up from their perspective, listening to one side of the phone call. 

Natasha: I’m sure. That’s funny. What would you tell your younger self? Besides listen to what other people’s problem-solving solutions, what would you tell your younger self?

Tim: From my personal history, I would tell myself to take some more accounting classes when I was younger. [laughter] It’s been a learned trade over the years with some very hard lessons along the way. 

Natasha: What about a fun fact? Is there anything that nobody knows about you or some kind of funny story about a delivery? I’m sure there’s all kinds of funny stories about deliveries.

Tim: I have to wade through the ones that I can actually tell… [laughter] I mean, we have had all sorts of things happen with deliveries over the years. In Phoenix alone, some of this will date me back in the day because before cellphones, we had drivers running routes, and so they had stops to go to; it was all very timed, stopping at Bank of America stops, and so on. We got a call one day that our driver hadn’t been to this location, and we were like, ‘Okay…’ and back then, there was no cell phone to pick up and call the driver, so we called the previous stop, and they answer the phone, ‘Oh no, the driver was here 30 minutes ago.’ So we’re trying to figure out what’s going on, and then I get a call from the police department, and our driver had apparently broken down on one of the overpasses and was walking on the edge of the overpass. Eventually, we talked to him and asked him what had happened, and he said he was scared he was going to get hit by a car. But apparently, he wasn’t scared that he would fall off! 

Natasha: Oh my god. [laughter]

Tim: He was more confident walking on the barricade than he was…exactly. On a good note, everybody always complains somewhat about drivers, but I had a driver walk into my office one day, and we delivered tires and rims, and even back then it was pretty pricey. The amounts that we would get paid was always COD, and most of these shops didn’t write checks or pay by credit card, so they would give us cash. So this driver of mine walks in and puts this brown paper bag on my desk, and I’m like, ‘What is this?’ It’s worrying me a bit right now. And he tells me that he found it in the glove compartment of one of our cars that he’d just gotten into before he’d gone out on his route. I opened up the bag and looked inside, and literally, there was $6,000.00 worth of cash. 

Natasha: Oh my goodness!

Tim: And it turns out that the previous driver had apparently done a stop and had put the cash in the glove box and forgot about it and didn’t turn it in. This guy could’ve easily taken the money, and nobody would’ve ever known that he had it… 

Natasha: And they probably would’ve blamed the other guy.

Tim: …they totally would’ve blamed the other guy! But he walks right in, drops it off and walks away.

Natasha: Wow.

Tim: There’s lots of funny stuff along those lines. I’ll tell you one when I was working at CXT Software. It was a feature, an integration with QuickBooks that we had, and now everybody has it, but at the time, it was somewhat new back at that point. I was having this conversation with the courier owner who used our software and just trying to find out how he liked the software, and he told me that he thinks everything’s great, but man, he has to spend all Friday every week entering all of these invoices into QuickBooks. So I’m thinking it through and talking to him, trying to figure out if there’s something special that’s causing this. And he says, ‘Man, it would just be great if you had an integration with QuickBooks.’ And I remember telling him, ‘You know? I’ve got a couple of things I must tell you. Number one, I’ve solved your problem. We do have that integration, and I can literally show you in the next 5 minutes how to do it. The bad news is based on those 6 hours, and you’ve been using this software for eight years…I don’t even want to calculate how many hours of your life you’ve wasted!’

Natasha: Oh my gosh.

Tim: People sometimes can’t see through the simple things, and they don’t communicate enough and end up doing stuff for a long time that wastes them a lot of time.  

Natasha: Oh yeah, I’ve experienced that. Is that the left brain that does that, or is it the right brain? Because it’s that ‘What if? What if I do this? What if this could be faster?’ Eight years it took him to ask that question!  

[laughter]

Natasha: 8 years! That’s crazy, right? So I think some people don’t have the ‘What if?’ it’s just, here’s how it is, and they just keep going.

Tim: Yup.

Natasha: And sometimes you’re so busy with what you’re doing that you don’t have time to think about it and the days go by…

Tim: That’s it all the time. Even in our industry, branch managers have one perception of the world, and sometimes it takes someone not in that hectic day-to-day environment to say, ‘Here’s what you need to do, this will solve your problem’…

Natasha: Right.

Tim: …and then they see it and say, ‘Oh, you’re right.’

Natasha: Yeah. I like talking to other people out loud. Sometimes just hearing myself talk out loud about a problem allows me to find a solution but talking to other people sometimes gives you that fresh perspective that you might not be thinking about because you’re so in it. 

Tim: Absolutely.

Natasha: Well, this has been fun. I always love chatting with you, my friend. Hopefully, we can see each other sooner rather than later with all this pandemic craziness, hopefully by next February at Las Vegas, right? Is that the next conference?

Tim: Yes, CLDA event in Las Vegas. We’re super excited about it, and hopefully if everything goes well, we’ll all be there.

Natasha: Well, I know the mayor or Vegas is chomping at the bit to open up everything, so I’m sure it’ll happen sooner than later.  

Tim: I’m sure they are ready. [laughter]

Natasha: Thank you again. I’ve enjoyed having you on the show, and I’ll see you soon. 

Tim: Alright, appreciate it. Thank you very much.

 [music]

Natasha: Thank you so much for listening to the Over the Threshold Podcast. If you liked what you heard on this episode, I’d love it if you’d subscribe, leave a review or share with a friend you know who would like to hear it, too. To learn more about CODE certifications, visit our website codetrained.com