Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

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Ryan Dunn: And again, I think all of our customers are unique to us and we love each one and in each piece. I know that sounds something that you're supposed to say, but I actually do believe in that there are some customers that can be able to resistance sometimes to change, change management, looking at implementing a different chemistry for something that they've been using for years.

I think in Wisconsin, I guess you can say, I won't pinpoint an exact industry, but there's some good old boy mentality. When it comes to what they've done, we've always done it this way. We come in with, okay, you got 12, let's just say six chemistries. We can come in, we can slim that down to maybe four or three.

'cause a lot of redundancy and a lot of the chemical inventories when you come through, you see, we're like, oh yeah, well that can replace this. And you know, we do a good job at application. When we come in, we put together a whole program, obviously highlighting our training, which is our big piece, and. I wouldn't say time and time again, [00:01:00] but there are customers will just be resistant to it.

What? It doesn't matter. They're not gonna, they're not gonna listen or, yeah. We'll have these guys for two weeks and then there'll be a whole new crew in here. It's not worth it.

intro: Everybody's gotta eat and nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes, toil in the shadows, keeping your food safe at all points from the supply chain to the point of sale.

Join industry veterans, Francine l Shaw and Matt Reci for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule. Don't eat poop.

Don't eat poop.

Matt Regusci: Hello? Hello, Francine? Hello, Matt? Hello. Hello, Ryan. Hello. How are you guys? Good. We're doing great. I've been actually waiting for this interview because I knew it was gonna happen for a while now, and I am so excited. I know Francine are talking [00:02:00] about this before. So excited to have you on the show.

You're a longtime fan and a current sponsor of Don't Eat Poop, so thank you. Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan Dunn: Absolutely. Absolutely. You're welcome.

Matt Regusci: So Ryan, tell our audience about yourself and what you do.

Ryan Dunn: So I am currently vice president of sales here at DeVere Company. We are a full line chemical manufacturer. We work with food processing companies, hotels, hospitals, you name it.

We're on all sectors. And I think the number one thing, I guess if you could just put a description behind DeVere itself is. We're here for the folks. We're here for the people. We really are customer centric and that's the reason why I've been here as long as I've been here, just because of the model of that, how we roll.

That's always been our focus has to been just to be absolutely having the customer's interest in the best. So my background's in food processing, so I was brought on to work with our food processing customers, and I still do that to this day. Yeah, [00:03:00] that's about it. I don't really describe myself too often, so that was probably a hack job, but that's about it. So.

Matt Regusci: So tell us a little bit about your career before you started at De Beer. What did you do?

Ryan Dunn: I started originally in food processing as an operator. Really started ground floor, worked in some rowing machines, moved on to some wrapping machines, got into some team leading, and then I was given an opportunity to head up the sanitation departments, ConAgra foods.

I did that. Loved it fell in love. I think of like a lot of people that are in food safety and quality sanitation. They didn't necessarily graduate high school, go to school, I want to be in this. You just fall into it. Right. I definitely fell into it and I have a passion for it and that's I my first quality manager. He really gave me, I guess the religion behind just why he does what he does, and I absolutely ate it up. I was like, I wanna do this.

So from there I kind of moved on and worked out east for a little while, and [00:04:00] then my current boss at DeVere, we connected and he said, Hey, I think we could use the AL team, your technical expertise.

I was relocating back to Wisconsin from New York and we made it work. And I've been doing this going on 10 years now. So again, just falling backwards into my career. Had some great successes, had a lot of failures, but we learn every day and we don't quit. So nothing too fancy. Nothing too. Crazy, but just kind of how it is.

Matt Regusci: So DeVere Chemical was like, wait, you're a food safety guy who can talk to people. We have a job for you.

Ryan Dunn: Right. The funny thing is, the first time I met my boss and my colleague now at Johnson, they showed up to my plant when I worked at ConAgra as salesman. And our gatekeeper, if you will, we always say, sales guys come in.

Just give 'em a card or give 'em an email and then we'll jumble through if it's something we're interested in. Well, that day she called me on the intercom, call up two, two, five, come up call. Oh, there's some [00:05:00] people here for you. So I actually met my boss and a good friend and colleague mine on a cold visit to my plant to try to sell me product that I know.

So, but that was actually how we met, which is pretty awesome. Kind of cool divine intervention. There's some other, just the way the world worked and just the friendship I have with Pat and just how we, we went through some personal things together as families and just everything just melded together the way it was.

I was actually on my way out to move out to Buffalo, New York to take a big opportunity and, uh, you know, homesick and there were some things that just led to me coming back. And then we connect on LinkedIn, Randy and myself, Randy or Stevenson, our president, and then I'm here and then, you know, it's just, it's crazy how that stuff works and it's, it is been wonderful.

So ever since, so.

Matt Regusci: Francine and I, same thing. Our whole entire career has been one blessing after another.

Francine L Shaw: I've talked to you a lot many times at conferences, and one of the things that impresses me about the company that [00:06:00] you work for about DeVere is that the training that you guys do is customized. You understand that training isn't a one size fits all.

It's about the training, the education, and the relationships. And I think that's very important because I did training for another number of years. I am an avid believer of training and education and how it should be done. And your company does that and there are a lot of companies that don't do that. In fact, more don't than do and do you wanna talk about that a little bit?

Ryan Dunn: Yeah, absolutely. No, I, it's actually my food safety is my passion, but training's the favorite thing that I do personally. So yes, each training's unique. Each facility, obviously their processes, not even necessarily if we wanna put bakeries in the one category, sorry, each plant is unique, but each crew is unique.

So is it production labor that's doing the cleaning? So now we understand that we're working with people that have been working all week and now they [00:07:00] have to end it with a changeover clean, or et cetera. Those types of things. So our approach, do we have the floor for an hour or do we have sanitation observation while we're on the floor actually watching it?

So we take all these components into consideration. We get with the quality manager, the sanitation team, we figure out where their gaps are or maybe they, they think they're doing well. But when you have someone come in with their blinders off, sometimes there are some best practices that we can share, and each training is 100% unique to the plant, down to the follow-up action report with all of our summarized findings and pictures if we're available to take them.

All those types of intricacies that we really, we've taken. It's not just a, okay, we're gonna bring our chemical supplier and he's, you subtract milk, we really drill down. And they're not just annual, they can be every week, every month, every quarter, et cetera. It's, it's totally up to the facility and we take a lot of pride in our training.

And then our, our team with background in food processing also [00:08:00] always helps 'cause we can understand the day-to-day troubles, whether it's capital, Hey, we can't clean this, the sanitary design of this equipment's trash. And so we can't, well, let's put our heads together. See, we, other than just going, well increase per, per minute, you know, all the, the, just the normal account management speak. We really like to work as a team and we partner with those guys no matter who it is to really get it done. So.

Matt Regusci: Yeah, just talking with you like we have a sponsor, we want to have someone that actually is passionate and actually cares about it and isn't just trying to sell, like just sell chemicals or sell whatever. It's, do you have a solution behind it?

And can you give some, at least like one example of a success story, someone who didn't know what they were doing. Then how'd you guys come in And then have been there for a while and they have doing very successful. And then can you give us another story of someone who was a client and it absolutely failed and explain why both [00:09:00] was a success and one was a failure because people learned from both successes and failures.

Ryan Dunn: Yes. Had quite a bit of great successes, but yes. So I guess for one, we're working with a food facility. I won't obviously name them, but we came in. We were brought in as a replacement and they wanted a quick turnover. They were having a lot of safety violations. Chemical handling was outta control. There was multiple OSHA recordables.

They were failing their APC swabs, religiously.

Matt Regusci: Like OSHA, like stuff that they're like, oh no, you could definitely just siphon that with your mouth using a hose. Yes. More whatever.

Ryan Dunn: Yes, it was.

Francine L Shaw: Use those chemicals we're good.

Ryan Dunn: Yeah. At the time, they didn't even have any polution controls. They were doing everything manual.

Lack of PPE obviously was a huge piece. I'm just being haphazard with chemistries and heating up certain chemistries you shouldn't. And Aerosolizing, there was a, I won't get into every piece to it, but there was a lot of gaps. So we were brought in, it was a quick turn. [00:10:00] We had to get things put together quickly.

Training docs, first and foremost has always been, you know, chemistry is safety. So we really came in, we got the crews together. All three shifts, including management, were trained and we repeated that training doc and refined that training doc probably close to 10 times. When it was all said and done I think the teams were pretty much over the training, but they absolutely soaked it up and they learned a lot and they were able to apply these principles to the game, their sanitation activities.

No more recordables. Chemistries were being dosed correctly. We came in on background supported sanitation observations, ensured that certain mostly bucket and brush style. The nitty gritty, the tough mechanical force, training the QC, giving them a little bit of a refresher training on inspection. Inspections are a huge piece when they're the last line of defense before a startup, whether it's an allergen change over or it's just a new product end of the week.

We really, I think we were able to touch all [00:11:00] the departments with our training. And then our chemistry speak for themselves and won't go into each chemistry that we applied or app applicated. But all in all, it was a great success with zero hits.

Safety was number one to that culture, and turning the culture around is huge and it's tough. You're always gonna have those outliers that resist change, which is a huge piece.

And from safety, while we're trying to go into a plant that's historically ran very bad and trying to come in and you're really turning the ship around and you'll have some detractors. But all in all, the crew really bought into what we are trying to not sell them, but provide to them and we want to help and reducing clean times.

They were averaging anywhere five to six hours, cleans. We're getting 'em down to three, three and a half just with looking at the SSOPs that were very rudimentary and revising and streamlining chemistry. Or streamlining certain processes. But also being [00:12:00] validated as well, ensuring that they were getting acceptable swabs, we're getting 'em back.

Less than 200, less than a hundred APC, what at least to be thousands in the past. So really taking that whole. Again, and it's not just me, it was a colleague of mine as well. We went in there together as a team and we really turned that, that process around. We're very proud of that. And that's just one of many, but that one was the most recent, about two years ago now.

But that one was a really big success story. It wasn't your classic. All right, we're gonna go with you guys, get us set up with you some training. This was a complete overhaul of their sanitation program and safety, so that was a big one.

Matt Regusci: So a lot of times Francine and I like just on the success.

A lot of times Francine and I are seeing some of the issues, it's a cultural issue at the top. Like the, the CEO or the owners, multiple generation. They may be older. They, we've been doing everything the same way for forever. And then it's the food safety and the quality team that are like, we're gonna have the FDA coming down on [00:13:00] us, or we're not gonna be able to pass our SQF audit or whatever it is.

Um, one of our customers are coming over and looking at this, and this is basically a hellhole and they can't convince their leadership. Do you have tools that you're able to utilize to help with that? Or are you guys having conversations with the owners, the leaders, that type of stuff as well?

Ryan Dunn: Oh yeah.

When it comes to like justification for capital. Well, I wouldn't necessarily say we've had a specific training, but one of the pieces, and if I'm answering your question correctly, let's just target a medium to small size facility. Maybe even one that's been locally known, or I'm not gonna mention this company, but in the state of Wisconsin, there's a very famous pastry company and culture was a little finicky.

Long story short, I came to do a training, an entire shift quit when I showed up to do the training. So we came back about a couple months later, tried to do training again. Once the crews end there, that's a whole nother story. We won't get [00:14:00] into that. That's the only time that's ever happened to me in my life as far as training.

But anyhow, so when we finally got a sculpting crew put together to come back in, we're asking what's going on. We understand there's some leader, there was some clashes between leadership, but they were like, look at our equipment. We can't clean this. We can't. The classic, right? How do we clean this? Right?

It's a dinosaur piece of equipment. What are we supposed to do? They have the capital. Most of the time, obviously production usually gets all the money before quality function. I think a lot of people can chuckle and they hear that, oh yeah, we'll get a new Kool-Aid tunnel before we get a new anything food safety related is you have to justify it, right?

So justification, can we cut our sanitation down 30%? Can we get our guys off the clock quicker? When it comes to management, selling what you need, don't just come and say, Hey, this sucks. I can't clean it. I don't know what I'm doing. I dunno how to do it, and we're just gonna keep going down this crazy cycle.

Come to them with suggestions and some data [00:15:00] and really say, Hey, this is what we can do. So in that instance, we're looking at old machinery. There were some mixers that were not working the best and really saying, Hey, we get these things little updates, small upgrades, and not everything has to be capital.

Right? You have a somewhat inventive maintenance crew. That's another piece. We do trainings on partnerships with maintenance. You have a decent maintenance crew that can really go in and retrofit some non OEM parts that is sanitary proof. Of course we're not getting crazy with things. You really can change a lot of things and make your process so much more.

And food safety obviously is the number one piece here and personal safety. But just working together as a team. If you have some issues and you can't work through it, you really gotta come and sell it to the management. 'cause you're not just gonna get it on silver player. You really gotta show some data what you could do.

And we're always partners in that. We can say, Hey, we absolutely agree with sanitation manager, with the crews. This is what they're seeing. This is what they're telling us. We can tell you right now with our background that they're not [00:16:00] wrong. How can we change this? How can we get better? That's why longer angling answer Matt, sorry.

Matt Regusci: That was beautiful.

Francine L Shaw: Yeah.

Matt Regusci: Alright. Tell us a story where it didn't work other than the last story was a success story, but their whole entire shift quit. So that was classic.

Ryan Dunn: That's a crazy one's. Crazy. That was about five six. That was about five, six years ago. I drove all the way up to this place and they didn't show up.

Matt Regusci: Oh, great. We 30 people, he three is let alone sanitize. What the heck?

Ryan Dunn: And well the fun, the crazy thing about that is business still has to go on. Guess who was cleaning that? Plant management. All the khakis were, they had to clean.

Matt Regusci: All the khakis had to clean.

Ryan Dunn: Literally, that's what happened. And I remember calling my wife coming home, she's like, oh, you're coming home.

I'm like, yeah, guess what? The whole shift quit. So that's, that was a while back. But that was a crazy story.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well there was a mutiny that was building [00:17:00] with this company and Yeah, they just said, oh, we're outta here. They literally did. They all left. So.

Matt Regusci: Wow. Okay. So tell us a story of just companies that just.

It didn't matter. They weren't gonna get it and it just didn't work out.

Ryan Dunn: Oh yeah. And again, I think all of our customers are unique to us and we love each one and each piece. I know that sounds something that you're supposed to say, but I actually do believe in that. There are some customers that can be a little resistant sometimes to change, change management, looking at implementing a different chemistry for something that they've been using for years.

I think. In Wisconsin, I guess you can say, I won't pinpoint an exact industry, but there's some good old boy mentality when it comes to what they've done. We've always done it this way. We come in with, okay, you got 12, let's just say six chemistries. We can come in, we can slim that down to maybe four or three.

Uh, 'cause a lot of redundancy and a lot of the chemical [00:18:00] inventories. When you come through, you see like, oh yeah, well that can replace this. And you know, we do a good job at application. When we come in, we put together a whole program, obviously highlighting our training, which is our big piece. And I wouldn't say time and time again, but there are customers will just be resistant to it.

What? It doesn't matter. They're not gonna, they're not gonna listen or, yeah, we'll have these guys for two weeks and then there'll be a whole new crew in here. It's not worth it. Setting up the. Setting up a new account can be like that with certain customers. I would say a very small percentage when they're ready to accept a different chemical provider or just a fresh set of eyes.

It's not always a full overhaul of every chemistry. It might be a couple skews. It might be just for some training that's some technical or some more niche products, but there can be some resistance. In nine times outta 10, management will just bash their crew and ah, that's not gonna change anything.

This is gonna be waste of your time, let's not even worry about it. Or [00:19:00] once you just send your stuff over to me, we will do it. Those types of things, it's, I try not to keep those in my memory all the time, but it does happen and it's, that's just the nature of the industry, right? You got some really solid plants out there, and then you got some that are solid products.

Core team just can't, just can't get right. I guess that's the only way I could put it that, but yeah, those do happen. Sorry.

Francine L Shaw: No, that's okay.

This is something Matt and I discussed a lot and that's like a corporate culture problem. And that starts, at the top not at the bottom and until that mentality changes, and that's across the board.

That's just across the board. I don't manufacturing, processing, restaurants, it doesn't matter. And until that mentality changes, we can't change the business, so to speak. And I think sometimes some people just don't know where to start. They don't know how to change that because that mentality has [00:20:00] been that way for so long.

Ryan Dunn: No, I, a hundred percent right.

Francine L Shaw: That's what as an industry need to work on.

Matt Regusci: Yeah.

My wife and I have numerous children with different. Like varying degrees of IQs and special needs, right? Like some that are really high IQ and some that are very low IQ in terms of just the special needs. So he was just born that way, right?

And we have a kiddo that is on the spectrum and it like, it was so hard. Like something would, something would trigger him and then he would freak out and then it would be like a two hour fit. And it was so hard and we had this parenting, we're like, oh, we gotta, we have to stop this fit. We have stop this fit.

And then we would be so stressed out afterwards. Like it was just so stressful. And my wife and I, like my wife said to me one time, she was like, you know what? We need to figure out how to turn these into wins. [00:21:00] And I was like, oh hun, what are you talking about? What type of new age mumbo jumbo are you expressing to me right now?

And she's like, no, no, we have to just start celebrating the wins. We need to start celebrating the wins, not with this particular child, but also with all of our children. And just understand that our job is to help them grow as an individual person to be the best that they are at whatever stage they can be.

And so instead of worrying about and focusing on the negativity of what that child is going through. We started focusing on the wins for each of them. And so, oh, my son only had a fit for an hour and a half. We'll take that as a win. And then that mindset that happened, I don't know, about 15 years ago that she and I started changing our parenting to that, like focusing on the wins.

It actually made me a better manager because instead of thinking about all the negative aspects of one of my employees or one of my managers or whatever. [00:22:00] I started changing my mindset to thinking about all the positive things about that individual person, and then instead of saying, Hey, you know what?

This is a problem with this individual person. Maybe I need to let them go. It was sitting down with that person and being like, Hey, I'm seeing that you're not able to meet these expectations here. Are these the right expectations? Should I be putting this off to somebody else because you're really good at doing this.

Can we magnify that and find these tasks for somebody else to do? And where I'm going with this is where I see food plants getting stuck in the mud, is they talk about what they can't do instead of finding solutions for what they can, or this team has always done it this way. They're never going to learn how to do it some way different. No, you're putting negativity on that team and you're not really giving them the chance to [00:23:00] grow.

So instead of saying, Hey, we're gonna put this whole new paradigm on you and you're going to have to do this, it's, Hey, this is where we want to be over the next six months, and these are the incremental steps that we can get to to get there.

And I know you can do it because I have faith in you. I have trust in you. You guys are amazing people. This is why we're doing it, and let's get there. And. I don't know. Like I, I feel if we just as a community just change that mindset that we could accomplish way more.

Ryan Dunn: No, I agree. I that is great.

Francine L Shaw: Leaders also tend to manage everybody the same within their facility, and you can't manage all people the same way because they don't all react the same.

Just your behavior. You need to learn how to manage each individual as a person rather than everybody as a unit. [00:24:00]

Ryan Dunn: No, you're a hundred percent right. I was actually gonna respond to Matt and say, what do you think that the number one issue that you always hear is, well, my boss is too busy. They this done, he sat, everyone's in a rush all the time, and I get it.

That's how we operate, right? We're in fast paced environments. We got deadlines, production numbers need to be hit. Sanitation needs to be finished at this time so we can get back to running. We clean to run, but we don't take time. I don't think everyone takes the time to really sit back. We might have a toolbox talk right in the beginning of a shift or maybe at the end of a debrief.

It's usually in the beginning. We've taken the personality out of management. I think people just feel disconnected. I hear it all the time. They're just, they're disconnected from their relationships with their leaders and their leaders are disconnected with their crew. It's all business 24 7. You spend a lot of time with each other.

You don't have to be buddy-buddy with everyone. I mean, that goes against some core leadership rules right there. You have to understand the dynamics of the team. How do [00:25:00] you talk to Joe versus Jane? Everyone's got a different personality. Everyone's got a different take on things. If you can, you still firm, but fair approach.

But you still have to come through and say, Hey, how was that game last week that your kid had, that you had the leave early for? Did you do good? Be genuine. You don't wanna, if you're not genuine about it, don't ask 'em about it. There's always that hierarchy, that disconnect. As I said earlier, the khakis, the management that's running around with the radios, they're running around with their chicken, like chicken with their head cut off a lot of times, right?

But there still is time in the day to find some connection with your team and that goes so far that usurps any type of leadership cores. It, it just be real with your folks. It will trickle down. It has to start top down. Maybe the plant management's not the greatest, but mid-tier leaders, your frontline team leaders, they get up, talk to your crew, empathize, show a little bit of humility too.

I think that's another piece missing. Mm-hmm. Every [00:26:00] leader, and I'm a victim of this, I've had tons of failures in leadership in the past, thinking that we're supposed to be invaluable 24 7, we're supposed to always be perfect. Our answers are always right, and if we don't know, we'll find out and we'll let you know.

Like that time that that's not how you talk to crews, it's not how you talk to people and you will have a demoralized crew forever if that's an approach. And like you said, celebrating the little wins. Let's say that line freeze sucks and it always sucks. The equipment breaks all the time, but maybe it only broke for half the shift.

Like you said, show a little bit of like, Hey, like. The dinosaur didn't die today, it died for half the day. Like those types of things, just being real with your folks. And this isn't just food processing or anything, this is just across the board. Like he said, celebrating the wins are huge and they don't have to be the biggest celebration, but even just some acknowledgement I think goes so far in that type of culture or that type of behavior builds a culture even in a fractured culture.

So, um, I [00:27:00] thought that was great. Yeah. 100% And parenthood right parent taking those lessons as being parents, young parents too, stumbling through things and then finding solutions. You can apply that to work, you can apply that to your friends. It's, uh, that's a good observation.

Matt Regusci: When I was running an odd being company, I would always be talking to like the food safety people at different companies or whatever, looking over their logs or whatever.

And you can see like infraction, infraction, infraction, infraction, infraction. I would ask the food safety people. Okay, so you found this problem and you retrained that person, and we're seeing that that same person is having this problem like four or five times. So they haven't really learned this yet. Is there a time when you're on the floor that they're actually doing it right?

And like, I don't know. And I'm like, have you gone there and observed them doing it right? I haven't gone there. No. I'm only just finding out when they're doing it wrong. Like how does that person know they did it. Right. When they haven't been told, [00:28:00] congratulations. Thank you for doing this. You're doing it.

Right, right. So a lot of times the food safety world, we're always, not always, but a lot of times it's their focus is on trying to find when somebody does something wrong and then trying to fix that. So much of the time could be actually spent better finding the people that are doing it right, and then having going like, oh my gosh, thank you for doing this.

You're doing this great. Can you help train X, Y, Z person? Because they're gonna learn, the people who aren't doing it right are gonna learn more from their peers than they are from quote unquote the khakis. Right? That's sometimes it's just a simple little fix like that, and then you're celebrating the person who is doing it right on the line.

Which is always great. People wanna know when they're doing things right. You're rewarding that person, quote unquote. They may not think it's a reward, but some people do. Most people do. By training people how to do it right. And then they're gonna listen to that person. Right. So you get [00:29:00] a win all the way around.

Ryan Dunn: Yes.

No, that is absolutely, and there's so many folks that don't even go out into the floor and, and let's be honest too, and I'm sure if there's any folks that are in the industry right now, how many hours a day are you stuck on them? Conference calls, right? 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM There's gotta be some leeway, I think with management, interacting with their team and a lot of the times, Hey, if I could get off these dang meetings and I'm on 24 7, they're back to back.

Like, don't even get to get up for two hours. You know what I mean? I know there's certain companies that really try to do core focused only need to know. I wouldn't necessarily say they're compartmentalizing the meetings, but you can't be on meetings for six and a half hours a day and you're at the plant for nine or 10 and really get a lot done on the floor and really be able to go out and interact with your team.

Mm-hmm. You can't. And that's again, not just in the food, that's just, I think corporate culture is as a whole or just anything it'ss. You can't, and it's so tough to balance all those things. [00:30:00] Oh. That's where you can rely on your team leaders out. But people wanna see the head of the department, they wanna see your plant manager walk around.

I know one plant I worked at, our plant manager used to be on the floor all the time and he interacted with me and he had a good culture and I worked at a place where probably he'd see you on the cameras and that's about it. What do you think the difference would be? Well, it's just, you just get two different types of mentalities in the plants when that's the type of thing.

So I wanted to mention that there's too many meetings. What's make these meetings? Absolutely. If they're a hundred percent needed. Let's rock them out. And I know there's project management going on that each plant organization's individual and we get it. There are very important meetings that need to be in, have to be taking place.

But I think there's a lot of ones that, nah, you have to be on there. As they said, it could have just been an email. 'cause we need to get on the floor where it matters and talk to the folks and identify wins and things that need to be approved. So.

Matt Regusci: Yes. [00:31:00] And also find out what they need.

Ryan Dunn: A hundred percent.

One of the things I used to do, I used to be in meetings all the time with one of the plants. I used to put a wishlist in the sanitation cage. Now, of course, there would be some tongue in cheek things like a raise, way the hell outta here. Like people would put funny things, but there were some, Hey, our sanitation booth suck.

They're super uncomfortable. Can we maybe look at these and there would be a, an item number from a vendor that you'd roll through. A is. What the team needs is if it makes the team better and it's gonna change a little bit of quality of life, why not, but not always around 24 hours a day. So trying to have the, that was a, and I do suggest that a lot of clients that we work with put a wishlist out there.

People will populate it. Again, they will be ready for some, some crazy rights that are on there, but there are some good pieces in there that the crew as a whole. But yeah, let's really look at adding this. Could we look at this? If it's a capital expense, of course, then you have to justify it. But it's, a lot of times it's just small [00:32:00] things the team needs or wants to make their lives easier.

Why not? Not let's do it. So.

Francine L Shaw: I can remember, and I haven't thought about this in years as a restaurant manager, I talk about managing people differently. I had a lot of kids that were in sports and I would work around the sports schedules. I knew that I had some employees that were consistently late. They just, it didn't matter what you did, they couldn't get to work on time.

It just didn't matter. But they were great employees to to work around that. I would schedule them on a quarter hour because if I scheduled them on a quarter hour, they'd be at work on time because I really didn't need them to the top of the hour. So

Ryan Dunn: that's a good mood, Francine and good mood.

Francine L Shaw: So it was like, there are some people, A, D, H, D, whatever, they just, they're not intentionally not there on time.

They're not doing it on purpose. They just can't, they just can't get there. When they're supposed to be [00:33:00] there, call it a minute, two minutes, whatever. But if I'd scheduled them at the quarter of the hour, they would be there when they needed to be there. It was like there weren't a lot, but there were a few over the years.

Ryan Dunn: And that's quite interesting.

Francine L Shaw: Sometimes

Ryan Dunn: I have doing that.

Francine L Shaw: To work around things sometimes.

Ryan Dunn: Instead at 8:00 AM it could be eight 15. There you go.

Francine L Shaw: Well, you know, 7 45.

Ryan Dunn: I mean we're on the topic of leadership and crew and morale and all that sweat. The small things, you gave some of em 15 minute grace or that means the world and you can still make it up.

You know that brother wastes work

Francine L Shaw: around so that it doesn't appear, that isn't what's happening. Right. You're not advertising it. It's very creative out about it and there isn't. There were five. Of them at a time. Right, but.

Matt Regusci: Well, I just wanted to let everybody know too that Ryan, you're at a lot of conferences, right?

Ryan Dunn: Yes, we do. Quite a few. Yep. I got to finally meet Francine for, what was [00:34:00] that, four or five years ago? For the first time. I was like, oh my God, you're LinkedIn famous, Francine. You're like, who said that? That me and Jim Miller from Saldesia we're like, oh my God, that's Francine. And we talk every year. We always find each other, at least at the Food Safety Summit, have a big 15, 20 minute talk.

Then you're popular, you get pulled to the sides.

Matt Regusci: Yeah. So I just wanna tell people like, go to your booth and meet Ryan. 'cause y'all are pretty fun. So that's, that's a good time

. That's also a good culture thing too, is being fun. So yeah, great personalities there. Great sense of humor and yeah, so go see them at conferences and then all of your information will be in the link below, section below.

So. Reach out to Ryan and let them know that you don't eat poop.

Ryan Dunn: I appreciate that guys. And yeah, absolutely. You wanna have some fun Come visit us at conferences and when we do go to a lot of the shows, we always try to get together and do dinners and whatnot. So we tried to, I think we tried to get you last three Francine, but you're so booked.

I think you had to live, you had [00:35:00] to leave the next day you had something going on. We tried to point, me and Jim were like, come on, Francine. We were going down and I think forgot where some. But no, we like to have a good time and yeah. Oh, it's all good.

Matt Regusci: Great. Alright. And to everybody out there, don't eat poop.