#212: Jodi Berg, PhD (Vitamix) Pt. 1 — Delivering Quality, Leading with Passion, and Embracing Legacy

Jodi Berg [00:00:00]:
I remember my grandfather always being this happy, go lucky, jovial, smiling guy, especially when his grandkids were around, right? Well, at that moment I got a very different look. And that's when he looked at me and he said, Jodi, he said someday. I think he was almost pleading with me, but someday you will understand that this isn't about selling machines. This is about changing people's lives. This is about just about helping them know that they can do something and be successful at something. And we're not successful until every single person that buys a Vitamix machine is successful. And you're right, I never forgot that. So I brought that back with me too.

Jodi Berg [00:00:41]:
All these little pieces that become a.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:43]:
Part of who you are welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host Jeffrey Stern and today I had the true pleasure of speaking with Jodi Berg. Jodi recently retired as the fourth generation President and CEO of Vitamix, having joined the family business in 1997 with the directive to lead the company's overseas expansion, later serving as Director of International, Household and Commercial Divisions and then ultimately as Executive vice president in 2007, president in 2009 and CEO in 2011. Under her leadership, Jodi built on the over 100 year history and legacy of her family's business, founded in 1921 and headquartered in Olmsted Township in the Greater Cleveland area, to grow the iconic and beloved brand to what it is today, with expanded distribution to over 130 countries and over 400% organic growth during her tenure. As many are familiar with, Vitamix manufactures high performance blending equipment for home and commercial use with millions of consumers around the world who use Vitamix products to help achieve their personal health and culinary the company's commercial customer list reads like a who's who of major restaurant chains and gourmet chefs regard their Vitamix machines in the same light and importance as they regard their own knives. The company has an incredible history of innovation and invention and developed the first true commercial blender in the early 1990s, which ignited the smoothie movement and has been named the best in class Overall beverage Blender for decades by readers of Foodservice Equipment and Supplies magazine. As you'll hear in our conversation, Jodi developed a highly intentional approach to leadership centered on purpose and employee engagement, which he formalized, researched and earned a Ph.D. in management from Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management and ultimately leveraged to transform the organizational structure of Vitamix and its corporate vision, mission and culture.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:49]:
This was such a fun and unforgettable conversation. We actually got into such depth and breadth here that I'm breaking the episode into two parts that will cover Vitamix and Leadership across growing in the family business and the familial lessons passed on the evolution of Vitamix over the generations and the corresponding ingredients required to thrive for over a century. Balancing family legacy with innovation Lessons learned in hospitality and working at the Ritz Carlton Many personal stories and historical anecdotes about Vitamix that shape Jodi's understanding of purpose and how it drives engagement and fulfillment in both personal and professional contexts. Synthesizing Jodi's learnings into her upcoming book, why Vitamix is headquartered in Cleveland, Helping people find their superpowers and a whole lot more. Jodi is an incredibly thoughtful teacher and operator and this really felt like a master class in all things business, leadership and purpose. So please enjoy this wonderful discussion with Jodi Burke Lay of the Land is brought to you and is proudly sponsored by Roundstone Insurance. Headquartered in Rocky River, Ohio. Roundstone shares Lay of the Land same passion for bold ideas and lasting impact.

Jodi Berg [00:04:01]:
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Jodi Berg [00:04:16]:
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Jodi Berg [00:04:25]:
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Jodi Berg [00:04:37]:
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Jodi Berg [00:04:53]:
Innovation committed to Cleveland so I don't normally have a prop, but I did think it made sense to kick us off with I have a vice Vitamix and I generated a smoothie and well, so what was interesting was to learn that that wasn't necessarily always the desired path for you to work in the family business when you were growing up that there was this exploration of fields and of other businesses and so I kind of wanted to start there. Knowing you ultimately did return to the family business. Just how your interest and curiosities deviated from Vitamix growing up and what it was like growing up within the family business and what you found yourself drawn to Professionally, given, you know, all those influences. And now I'm going to enjoy this smoothie.

Jodi Berg [00:05:49]:
Well, what's in your smoothie? First? We got to start with that. Like, what are you drinking?

Jodi Berg [00:05:52]:
We got to start. It's berries.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:55]:
Berries.

Jodi Berg [00:05:55]:
Some spinach and a banana and some. Some water.

Jodi Berg [00:06:00]:
Ah. Just imagine. You can't, like, just mush something like that together. You have to break it down a molecular level and just bring all those flavors together and it just tastes amazing. That's kind of what makes. Differentiates the Vitamix from anything else.

Jodi Berg [00:06:12]:
It's a real. It's real innovation. I mean, there's a cult, like, following and, you know, and we'll get into all of that.

Jodi Berg [00:06:19]:
Okay. No. So I've already forgotten the question that you asked me. You wanted me to just kind of go back and say, how did I end up in Vitamix and how did I get. Come back to Vitamix?

Jodi Berg [00:06:30]:
Right. Well, I was kind of interested in the deviation from Vitamix because it sounded like perhaps you didn't even want to be in Vitamix necessarily.

Jodi Berg [00:06:38]:
So Vitamix is. Although it's 100 years old, it has not been particularly large for most of its existence. It was actually quite small. And it was started by my great grandfather in 1921. And by the time my dad was around and his grandfather lived right next to Vitamix, and he was involved in Vitamix when he was a teenager, helping out, working. So he didn't really want anything to do with Vitamix. So he went out and did his own thing and was an entrepreneur and moved my family, or his family, us, Moved us to Erie, Pennsylvania. So I was born in upstate New York, lived there for the first three years of my life, and then I moved to Erie, Pennsylvania with my family, the majority of my life was there.

Jodi Berg [00:07:20]:
And it wasn't until I was a junior in high school that I came back to Cleveland because my father had decided at that point they wanted to focus on engineering new products. Up until then, Vitamix was. It wasn't really wasn't in the beginning. It wasn't our invention. We didn't invent the blender. My great grandfather started by selling kitchen gadgets, starting with a. A can opener and from the can opener, then potato peelers and other things and. And just really focusing on tools that you could use to eat healthier.

Jodi Berg [00:07:52]:
So he went down that path. But when my father was out doing his own thing, they asked him, would you come back and bring your engineering skills? Because that was his degree and his experience to help us design, like, the next level of Vitamix. So the family was still living with them at the time. We moved back. We moved to Cleveland. I took a summer job answering telephones and that type of thing at Vitamix. And that was really my first exposure to it. But because the.

Jodi Berg [00:08:20]:
I mean, anyone who's in family business is often has this experience. We are at this point, I'm fourth generation, so family reunions. My grandparents lived in this little house that's still there. We turned it into a museum, a family museum. If you get a chance to see it. It's. We. We took the house that my grandfather built.

Jodi Berg [00:08:38]:
He is not a carpenter, so, yeah, we did a lot of work to shore it up. It wasn't particularly safe to live in at that point, 70, 80 years later, but we shored it up and we turned it into a museum. And we, we picked the 1950s and we froze the house into that period of time. So when you walk through, you can almost feel my grandparents living there and, and then raising their kids. And so as a family business, we'd come back for family reunions. And my grandparents had six kids. And how many grandkids do they have? A lot. Something like 30 plus grandkids.

Jodi Berg [00:09:15]:
Wow.

Jodi Berg [00:09:15]:
And we'd come for family reunions into this little log cabin. And between the kids and the dogs and everyone just plowing into this little cabin, my. The neck. The generation above us would always talk business and politics and religion. So most of us in my generation grew up saying, we don't want anything to do with this family business. Because the conversations were not always sunshine and roses. Right. Sometimes there's.

Jodi Berg [00:09:43]:
There's a lot of. Of energy and passion around what they were talking about.

Jodi Berg [00:09:48]:
Business, politics, and religion. That'll.

Jodi Berg [00:09:50]:
Exactly, exactly. So I grew up thinking there's no way I would want anything to do this family business. And it was okay. We didn't live in Ohio anyways. Well, then we moved to Ohio and I spent one summer working there. And I think I worked there my senior year of high school. But I was going to go off and do my own thing. And my dad was a serial entrepreneur up until the point that he came back to head up engineering with his brother at Vitamix.

Jodi Berg [00:10:16]:
And so I took one of those assessments in school and it said I should be a mechanical engineer. I'm thinking, well, my dad was. The assessment says I should be. Clearly everyone else knows more than I do. I should be an engineer. So I went off to school to be an engineer. And after a year, I was absolutely miserable. I just, I hated physics.

Jodi Berg [00:10:36]:
I hate, I can do it, I just hated it. Calculus, like it just gives me hives thinking about it. To this day I'm more of a, much more of a people person. So after a year I just had one of those breakdown, one on one conversations with my mom and she says, then change, do something else. And it was one of those first times where I guess I'm a slow learner, but I'm thinking, wait, I have that option. Like, but they, the assessment said I should do this. Like, don't they know what I'm supposed to do? So I switched, I went into, I changed actually universities, but I changed degrees in business. And I don't know how I came across the hospitality management program at Bowling Green, but I fell in love.

Jodi Berg [00:11:19]:
I'm like somebody would actually pay me to create experiences for people. They would pay me to make them happy. Like I would get paid to make something happen that would give people a memory that just, just lit me up from the inside out. And so I, I got my degree and, and I got into hospitality management following that dream. So that's when I first landed in hospitality. And yeah, nothing to do with wanting to be a part of the business. That came a little bit later.

Jodi Berg [00:11:50]:
Well, I wanted to pull on the hospitality thread. Ritz Carlton has kind of its own illustrious and lore around being, I think, best in class at what it does. And so I wanted to ask what you learned from Ritz Carlton about brand hospitality customers and just what you took with you from, from that experience and how you ended up at Ritz Carlton in the first place.

Jodi Berg [00:12:19]:
So. Oh, how I ended up there is actually a kind of funny story. So I worked for Marriott for a while and then I went back and got my mba and I couldn't afford an mba. I hadn't worked long enough, I had no money. So being entrepreneurial like my dad, I thought, well, how can I get a degree and use the fact that I love hospitality and not be in debt when I'm done? So I got, I just associated myself with all these different associations that had to do with hospitality management where the directors of these different programs would be coming to their annual meetings. And I just met all the directors and finally found a school that I liked the program and they brought me on as a teaching assistant. And so they paid for my college and they gave me enough of a stipend that as long as I had a roommate, I could pay for housing and food. And I got through.

Jodi Berg [00:13:10]:
I Was going to get through my MBA without any debt. So it's going to work out great. It was all the way out in the state of Washington. So I packed up my car and all the way to the top, I literally just, I had all these bags and boxes and suitcases and I brought them out to the driveway and my dad said, I'll pack your car for you. And I said, okay, I'll help you. He said, no, no, no, no, it's best if you just go inside. So I went inside to visit with my mom. My dad packed, he, he packed everything in my car.

Jodi Berg [00:13:37]:
He comes in, he's like, yep, you're ready to go. I walk out, all of my luggage, my boxes, my bags, everything is empty. But it's all in my car. The only way he fit in my car is literally taking everything out and sticking it in the wheel wells and in the seats and you know, tucking it in all these different places. Saved enough room on the passenger side for my mom to sit and she could crochet the entire way out there. And then I could drive. And my mom and I took off for Washington state and I got to my apartment. I know this is not what this is all about.

Jodi Berg [00:14:08]:
You can cut all this if you want to, but I got to, I love it. My room is on the second floor and it was locked because I got there on a Sunday. So I just went around and I just knocked on neighbors doors to see if there was anyone tall. And there was this nice tall young man, his name is, it was David. We became good friends and I said, would you mind standing on top of my car and lifting me up because there's a. One of the windows in my apartment looks like it's a little open. And I think I can pull the window open and climb into my apartment if I stand on your shoulders.

Jodi Berg [00:14:42]:
Oh my goodness.

Jodi Berg [00:14:43]:
I got into my apartment. But I digress. So I get, I get through my MBA and I had taken a class in quality and fell in love with quality. Now I have two passions. Love hospitality management and I love the concept of quality. But I only took one course. My focus was on multi unit management and restaurants and running hospitality. This was the one at that time, exception because hospitality and quality hadn't come together yet.

Jodi Berg [00:15:12]:
So I come back to Cleveland and I decide, well, for a while, until I figure out how to do this quality thing, I'll work at Vitamix. Because my uncle who was running it at the time was putting in a quality program relatively early on for most companies. But that goes into why our quality is the way it is today was this foundation of my, of my uncle putting in a quality program. So I worked for him for one year and went into every single department and got a chance to understand what they do and how they do it and how it fits with the other departments and how we can improve our quality. But during that time, the Ritz Carlton won the Malcolm Baldrige Award. So Emily Yen was the director of quality at the time for the Cleveland property. And I, I got a chance to go down and hear her speak in the, in the beautiful Ritz Carlton ballroom.

Jodi Berg [00:16:00]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jodi Berg [00:16:01]:
And afterwards, I mean, it was packed. So after the words, there was probably 30 or 40 people that wanted to talk to her about this. Well, I want to talk to her because, oh my gosh, I love hospitality and I love quality. And like these two are coming together. That's like peanut butter and jelly, you know, that's, that's like a. What's like the commercial about the Reese's cup, right?

Jodi Berg [00:16:21]:
The celestial alignment of bodies.

Jodi Berg [00:16:24]:
This is me. So I stood in line. I'm so nervous. Keep in mind, I'm still young, I'm in my 20s, and I get to the front of the line, it's finally my turn, and I babble out and I say, emily Yen, it's nice to meet you. My name is Jodi Barnard. I want your job. I mean, I mean, I mean, I'm sorry that. Well, I kind of do, but when you get promoted.

Jodi Berg [00:16:45]:
And I was just trying to salvage awkwardness of what I had just done and she, she took it in good spirits and started mentoring me in quality and I learned everything about her job. So when she did get promoted, I had to go through the interview process, but I was a shoe in for her job. And that's how I got my job at the Ritz as the director of quality. And you're right, it's so special the, the Ritz Carlton by. In fact, to this day I have, I, I may miss a few words, but I still have the credo in my head of what the Ritz Carlton was all about and the motto of ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen. And you know how you can, you can just instill, well, being in people. You can, you can create an emotion that, that impacts people in a way that's, that's so much deeper than what they've heard or what they've seen. But that experience of how they feel.

Jodi Berg [00:17:45]:
And I never forgot that while I was, while I was at the Ritz, I had, I Didn't realize that I had this skill set, but apparently I'm relatively good at public speaking. And I didn't know that at the time, but the, the vice president of the Ritz was traveling around the world with quite a schedule, talking about the Ritz Carlton Quality and Malcolm Baldrich Award and how that came together. And he, and as the director of Quality, I was in, I had to speak to different organizations and groups about what the Ritz Carlton was. Well, he heard me speak at one point and he asked me if I wouldn't mind being a stand in for him. So the next thing I know, I'm flying to Singapore, I'm flying to Europe, I'm like all over the United States doing these presentations on Ritz Carlton and Malcolm Baldrige. But what it triggered when I started traveling internationally was I realized I have a third passion. I love this world. I love different cultures, I love different countries.

Jodi Berg [00:18:49]:
I love what makes different people click because of where they're from. We talk about you being from New York and we talk about, you know, the Midwest and we just, we act different. I, I have a dear friend from New York and I'm giving him a hard time all the time. Like, no, dude, just chill. Like it's okay. Yes, you can say hi. It's just, it's, it's just a different, it's a different way of, of how our upbringing happens. So then I became fascinated with international and that was my Ritz Carlton experience.

Jodi Berg [00:19:23]:
So you have three loves now, right? Yes, Quality and hospitality and International. And it seems that does lay the foundation for your foray back to Vitamix.

Jodi Berg [00:19:37]:
Ultimately, it actually did. So I'm working my way at the Ritz Carlton as the director of Quality. And the essence of quality is to improve things at the root cause. Right? You want to get to the bottom of problems, but it's also to make things more efficient, more effective and more sustainable. So I, I took those last three very seriously. And it got to a point where I went to my general manager and I said, I am in the process of working myself out of a job. I said, within about six months, you're not going to need me here anymore. You might need a part time person, you can need a lower level person, but you're not going to need a director of quality, this particular property.

Jodi Berg [00:20:12]:
I said, so I just want to give you a heads up. He said, well, what are you going to do? I said, I don't know. We shall see. So at that same time that that was happening, Vitamix the third generation, which would be my father's generation, they were going through quite a bit of a shakeup, if you will, which happens. You got six of them and all of them are married. So you've got this thing right. So they're going through a shakeup. And my uncle decides that he's not sure he sees Vitamix and family being able to stay together, that maybe it's time to sell the company.

Jodi Berg [00:20:46]:
Because I don't think family can run this company going forward. Until he said that my brother, who was working at Vitamix at the time and I had a, had a really strong reaction to wait. It's, it's supposed to always be in the family. It's, it's not. It never occurred to us that it, maybe somebody wouldn't be in the family. And so my brother went out and found a book written by Ernesto Posa, which a lot of people in Cleveland will know from days gone by. He's been in, in Arizona for a long time now, but he, he was in at Case Western Reserve for quite a while, heading up a family business division. I don't know what they would call it.

Jodi Berg [00:21:30]:
Program. Program. And so we read his book and realized that he's in Cleveland. And after reading it cover to cover and all these notes, we called him. He's like, typical Cleveland response, of course I'll meet with you, right? So yes, and he met with us and we talked through and how do you, how do you help a family business that is in this situation? And because my uncle loved to learn, he was very open to. I'm taking a course at Case about how do you keep a family business in the family over generations and how do you help with succession and so many family businesses. One of the most important things I got out of that is we all think we're unique and we are the most screwed up family on the planet. Like, I think every family that's in a multi generational family business thinks there's nobody could be as messed up as we are.

Jodi Berg [00:22:20]:
Now granted, there wasn't some of the Netflix shows back in the day. So the, you know, now you just watch one of those shows, you're like, yeah, yeah, clearly we're, we're not in a bad shape as they are, but we didn't have that at the time. So that's what allowed us to stay a family business. And one of. And because I now realized I was really passionate about it and the timing was happening right about the same time that I was working myself out of a job at the Ritz. And my father has, with his brother Frank, had developed the next generation of Vitamix. That, and that's a whole story in itself, but this next generation of Vitamix would allow us to sell, to create 220 volt versions and 100 volt versions for Japan and be able to sell it around the world. And they needed somebody who would create a division where we could sell internationally.

Jodi Berg [00:23:15]:
So here I'm thinking my, my background in hospitality, but I. What I loved about hospitality was creating that experience and engaging people and bringing out the, the emotional connection to experiences. And I thought, why can't you do that in the manufacturing world? So the whole exposure to this really strong culture about the emotional connection to things, I didn't realize at the time that I was also passionate about that. So I bring this. I brought my hospitality and my quality focus. And now I loved cultures international and the impact and the power that culture can have. And I kind of packed that up in your being, because it's part of who I am. And I came back to Vitamix and to head up our, our international division, which at the time I think we were in, we were under a million dollars in sales outside the United States.

Jodi Berg [00:24:23]:
We grew it pretty significantly because it's a big wide world out there.

Jodi Berg [00:24:27]:
Yes, yes. The spirit of all that reminds me of a quote I came across, I believe, from your grandfather in preparation for this, but that he had relayed to you that was something to the effect of, you know, someday you'll understand that we're not here to sell machines. We're here to change people's lives. And that won't, that won't happen unless people know how to, how to use the Vitamix, something to that extent. But that feels very much in the spirit of your framing, you know, of the, of that.

Jodi Berg [00:25:00]:
So that actually was my grandfather talking to me.

Jodi Berg [00:25:03]:
Yeah.

Jodi Berg [00:25:03]:
Because when I, when I was 12 and we came to one of these family reunions, we had grown out of the little log cabin that my grandfather built. So. And we had, they had just put an expansion on Vitamix building. So we were holding our reunion in the, in the Vitamix building and the, in the middle of this get together and we're doing skits. I mean, that's how you keep 30 some kids happy, right? As you say, go, go design a skit. We'll watch you. You can entertain us. So we were doing skits and the phone rang and my grandfather had set it up.

Jodi Berg [00:25:35]:
So when the customer service phone rang, it Would ring throughout the entire building. And he gets up and leaves the family reunion to go into his office to answer the phone. Well, I'm a tween. I'm. You know, there's one thing that's consistent across all the generations. You're brats at that age, right? You're selfish. And I'm thinking it's all about me. And I came from out of town and how, you know, how could my grandfather leave what, our family reunion? So I actually go into his office and sit down and give him the.

Jodi Berg [00:26:06]:
I don't. Wouldn't call it the death stare, but maybe that, like, what are you doing? You know, Come on back and be with the family. And he's describing to this. This lady how to use her Vitamix machine. In fact, he's teaching her how to make bread. And if you haven't made bread in your Vitamix yet.

Jodi Berg [00:26:24]:
No, I haven't.

Jodi Berg [00:26:25]:
You can grind the grain from the wheat berries, and then you can add the ingredients in. You can actually knead it in the container and it bounces up in a ball and drop it into a pan and let it rise, and you can make bread. People don't make bread as often as they used to. And our blades have become more general and focused on processing liquids than bouncing of the bread. So we had created, after that, some point, a blade that was perfect for the grinding of the grain and the bouncing of the bread dough. But in order to do that, he says, no, no, it's okay. Let's start over. I want you to put the wheat berries in your container and.

Jodi Berg [00:27:03]:
No, it's okay. I'll stay in the line. I want you to run it for about a minute. And I'm sitting there, I'm just seething at this point. And then he says, now I want you to knead it. No, it's okay. I'll stay on the line. And each step.

Jodi Berg [00:27:14]:
No, it's okay. I'll stay on the line with you. Until she had this beautiful loaf of bread and it was ready to rise. And my grandfather gets off the phone and he. I remember my grandfather always being this happy, go lucky, jovial, smiling guy, especially when his grandkids were around, right? Well, at that moment, I got a very different look. And. And that's when he looked at me and he said. He said, jody, he said, someday.

Jodi Berg [00:27:41]:
I think he was almost pleading with me, but someday you understand that this. This isn't about selling machines. This is about changing people's lives. This is about just about helping them know that they can do something and be successful at something. And. And we're not successful until every single person that buys a Vitamix machine is successful. And you're right, I never forgot that. So I brought that back with me too.

Jodi Berg [00:28:05]:
All these little pieces that become a part of who you are.

Jodi Berg [00:28:09]:
Did you come to understand?

Jodi Berg [00:28:11]:
Oh yeah, I did. I absolutely did. In fact, I think it's one of the pieces that helped me instill such a passion for hospitality because even hospitality management in the Ritz Carlton. Ritz Carlton is not successful until every guest and every employee has an emotional. You can instill that well being in them. So I think that for me, whether it resonated with me because it was already a part of who I am, or whether that particular moment of the fact that it came from my grandfather, the one who's usually jovial and smiling and happy in a way where he was serious. And so I don't know if that triggered the emotional connection, but it absolutely became critical to my understanding who I am and how I ran the company.

Jodi Berg [00:29:05]:
Yeah. You mentioned 1921 as the founding. So we are now beyond the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the organization, which really is an incredible milestone for, for any business, let alone a family owned one. To your point about the tensions that arise over generations and particularly a fourth generation organization, and above and beyond all that, it really isn't survival that is that amazing. It's that Vitamix is such a renowned brand with a cult following and this incredibly passionate base of users. So when you reflect on the founding, the history, the evolution of the company, how do you think about why Vitamix has been able to thrive over such a long time horizon when so many other companies don't even survive?

Jodi Berg [00:30:06]:
So a lot of companies don't survive for lots of different reasons. Right. There's a lot of family companies that the reason that they create the company is because they fully intend to sell it. They don't necessarily intend to. So how Vitamix started, my great grandfather was married and he had, I think he had two sons at the time and my grandfather and his brother. And it was during 1918, which was a pandemic, it was a Spanish flu pandemic. And my, my great grandmother and her, the third, the third child passed due to this, in the middle of this pandemic. So my great grandfather found himself trying to raise their two other sons in, in a world where it was very difficult for, I mean, still difficult, but for, for a single parent.

Jodi Berg [00:31:01]:
But it was going to be difficult back Then for a single parent who's, who was a, a dad, right? So he's trying to raise his two sons and then he was doing this job and that job in order to, in order to make that happen in 1921, it was a great, it was not the Great Depression, it was a, it was a depression precursor of the Great Depression. And in that 1921, end of 2020. 20, 2021, he lost. 1920. What am I saying? Back in 1920 and 1921, when we had the depression, that he lost everything else financially. And it wasn't until my grandmother was, my grandma was a prolific writer and I, I guess this is relatively common. We were so blessed that she chose to do it. But every single letter that she wrote, she, she had carbon paper underneath it and she kept copies of every single letter that she wrote.

Jodi Berg [00:32:00]:
And then she kept copies of the letters that she got from other family members. So when we finally got to a point where we're getting, we're like 85 years old as a company, we wanted to dig into this history. We came across a letter where my, my grandmother referenced the fact that her father in law almost committed suicide and how grateful she was that he chose not to commit suicide and, and stick it out because if he hadn't done that, Vitamix wouldn't have been founded and we wouldn't be where we are today day. So, so my grandfather, great grandfather starts the company and he's selling it. He finds, he comes across a product called, we call it the can opener, right? Like it's, it's a common thing. The, the canned goods were coming after the war and people were opening them with knives. I mean, just picture, you know, hey son, can you open us a can of peas? And he takes out a pocket knife and he's jabbing the lid and peeling it off and people were getting hurt and contamination. It was not a good thing.

Jodi Berg [00:33:01]:
So this, the reason for the can opener was to keep people safe and to help them be, eat healthier. We don't think of a can opener for those reasons today, but back in the day, that's why that was a particular product that my great grandfather got excited about. So then he went down this path of, of health and food. Very early on in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, right. There was this focus on what products could we bring to help people eat healthy foods and make it enjoyable and easier to do. In fact, at one point the company was called the Natural Foods Institute because he was Doing research on whole food health. So that was part of our path. My grandfather joins him and the two of them are running the company together.

Jodi Berg [00:33:49]:
They had, his brothers chose not to I think the early on would. But eventually they stepped out. So it's really just my grandfather and his son. And so that's a really easy succession if you will when you both working on it together for a very long time and then one moves out and the other steps in. And then by that time my. His kids, my grandfather was raising his kids and they all got involved. And I believe the, the reason it stayed in the company is just the family members across generations have. We have shared values similar to communities that we're from or areas that were from our cultures.

Jodi Berg [00:34:30]:
Right. There's things that, that tie us together and one of the things that ties the majority of the, the Barnard family, which is hundreds of people at this point is our understanding of life and the role that food plays in our bodies and what we eat. Does that mean we're all the healthiest people on the planet? No, it doesn't mean that but it means we get it, we appreciate it. And by the time the third generation was running the company there was this very deep ingrained appreciation for what our, in our generation, what our great grandfather had done. And the, the legacy is also something that we all feel very passionate about. So that's why our particular company almost fought and continues to fight to say how do we, how do we continue to make this a successful family owned business? And at the end of the day it's not about the money that we can make by selling it. It's about the difference that we can make by keeping the family. There's a fear that if we were to sell the company that somebody would come in and say, oh, you don't need to add all this expense in how you create your blade assembly and you don't have to have this expense and the motors that you select and pay this so much attention to how everything works together.

Jodi Berg [00:35:57]:
It would seem like it wasn't necessary, but you start to pick away at those fundamental things that we've discovered over the years and the product quality would go down pretty quickly and it just, it wouldn't be the Vitamix as we know it today.

Jodi Berg [00:36:14]:
Yeah. When you came to lead the organization and you know, we can talk about the international expansion, but I'm, I'm curious how you thought about balancing that sense of stewarding the legacy that you just mentioned with making bold strategic decisions that altered the trajectory of the company. In the way that they did that allowed for it to grow as much as it has over the last decades.

Jodi Berg [00:36:43]:
Yeah, that is such a great question. There's so much to unpack. Right?

Jodi Berg [00:36:50]:
Yeah.

Jodi Berg [00:36:51]:
And how to. How do you keep the legacy alive and how do you. How do you become strategic in how you develop and grow things? So when I came back to Vitamix, I. To head up our international division and I was, I was doing international for both our commercial. We had a commercial division and a household division. Vitamix was actually started in the household side of things. A lot of people think because our quality is so fantastic, that clearly we're a commercial product that, that ventured into the household side, but we actually were in the household side and we had so many chefs that were begging us to create a commercial version that we. That we finally created one in the 1980s.

Jodi Berg [00:37:33]:
So we haven't been in commercial as long as we've been in hustle. But at this point, the products that we could sell overseas, we are selling them to both. And so my, my initial jobs was. My job was to. Was to go out and set up distributors around the world. And I met some of the most amazing family companies that were distributors on both consumer products and food service products in these different countries. So where. Where there's a handful of them in the states that might still be family owned internationally, the majority of them are.

Jodi Berg [00:38:09]:
And it didn't take me long to realize that the fact that we were a family business resonated so significantly with them. But it also helped the. Helped us cross the cultural divide, if you will. Of. I understood at a deeper level what they were going through in building up their businesses and what that took. So we understood the dynamics of it. So they. And I was so unbelievably proud of my great grandfather and my grandparents and my, my dad and aunts and uncles and everyone that had been involved in it and recognizing the blood, sweat and tears that went into it, that I was driven to keep it in the family.

Jodi Berg [00:38:56]:
Like there was never it, you know, it never crossed my mind, should we at this point go out of the family? My brother and I fought to help keep it in the family at this point. Right. So I'm walking into it through a lens of how do we. It's not a question about whether we should stay a family business, it's a question of how. And being a family business was such an integral part of our history and who we were that let's figure out how to use that as a strategic advantage. So part of the way we kept the legacy is understanding the, the value of that legacy to who we are. When you go back and you realize that your, your great grandfather insisted on quality and he insisted that the products that we sell are focused on food and preferably products that people would use to eat healthier. Now people don't use all of our products to eat healthy.

Jodi Berg [00:39:52]:
And that's okay. It's still about food, right? And, and oftentimes they may not be eating everything healthy, but they might be getting more whole foods in. So knowing that, that you are a steward of four generations, you're the fourth generation, so you're the steward of three generations before you of creating something there's no other opportunity to do that I could not in my lifetime create. I might be able to create a second generation business and maybe I could be around to see a second generation turn into a third generation business. But there's no, it's not possible in our lifetime to create a fourth generation business. So what an incredible, incredible opportunity for somebody to say will you steward this and, and make your great grandparents and your grandparents and your aunts and your uncles and your dad proud of for what this can become. So, so that's where the, it was, the legacy for us was, was really deep and important. The other, the legacy though is what drove our growth.

Jodi Berg [00:41:00]:
Because when I, when I dug in and realized that my great grandfather back in 1921 when he started the company, wanted to make, wanted to sell products that would help people eat healthier and enjoy whole foods, thinking, wow, like that's what he wants us to do. He doesn't want us to be big for the sake of being big. He doesn't want us to grow for the sake of growth. But that was what was important to him, is what important to the generations since then. So you take that piece and then you take what's happening at that particular point in time. So I came back to Vitamix in 1997, I head up our international division, got that going, and then in 20, what was it would have been 2002, I was asked to head up the household division and then in 2004 commercial division. And it was right about that time. I've already expressed one of my more nerdy moments of interacting with people, but I've always been a little nerdy in that regards.

Jodi Berg [00:42:06]:
And I found myself in conversations with people if it got quiet, I was always doing research. So I would eventually bring the conversation around and say, so what'd you have for breakfast? And why would you have that for breakfast and what foods do you like to eat? And why do you eat those foods? And why don't you eat this food? And so I found myself awkwardly trying to do research in just maybe it's a Midwest thing, but people are very accommodating. Right? They would expect. They tell me, exactly. And then they'd say, well, I, you know, I don't like to eat meat. And I'd say, oh, why do you make that choice? And up until about 2003, 2004, the answer that I got 99.9% of the time to that question was to protect the animals. These poor animals, the processing, what they have to go through, we're going to save the animals. And then in around 2003, 2004, I asked the question and people started saying, because I feel better, because it's healthier for me, because I have more energy, the answer started to change.

Jodi Berg [00:43:13]:
And I, being the nerdy one that I was and laser focused on what we were doing and our purpose as a company, I took note of this. I thought, well, that's interesting. And the other thing that was happening is the Internet was growing. It had been around for a while at that point, but there wasn't a lot of E commerce going on. And so E commerce was developing. The other thing that was happening is the way people communicate and develop their social groups was changing in the early 2000s. So prior to that, your closest friends would have been people that you work with in your community, your neighborhood community. It might be your church community or your local communities, whatever organization you're involved in, but it was usually relatively local and it didn't easily spread outside that.

Jodi Berg [00:44:08]:
So early 2000s, picture this. You've got people that are interested in whole food health. And now instead of just being a part of a garden club or local communities, they are talking to people in Europe about whole food health and in Taiwan and Australia. And now my community is a global community, and I'm learning so much more about this thing that I'm interested in. So we took note of the fact that the whole dynamics of social interaction were changing. And then the other thing that was changing is in. In light of or in connection with people eating differently because it was good for them. Yeah, development was happening with.

Jodi Berg [00:44:54]:
You heard things like chia seeds. I have to tell you, the first time people heard chia seeds, like, wait, what? You know, it's different things that were kale and all these things that were not necessarily something that we thought of. People were recognizing the value of these different Foods and you know, it's really difficult to sit there and eat a bunch of chia seeds. And it's not even necessarily that helpful if you just nosh on them, right? So you have to kind of break, break them down. And kale became popular once you were able to put it in smoothies. But until then it's, and that's not, it wasn't really all that popular. So all these dynamics are changing at the same time. And I, I love puzzles, love puzzles.

Jodi Berg [00:45:40]:
And I like to see patterns about coming together. So I saw all of these different, they looked somewhat disparate, but I saw this pattern emerging that we may have an opportunity to do the very thing that my great grandfather wanted us to do. Now more than ever. Like we may be able to connect people through food and help them think about food differently because of the social connections changing, because of the vocabulary changing. The other thing that's changing is it was, it was one of the first times and this way before your time. But you used to go to the doctor and whatever the doctor said, that's what you did. Like you never questioned it, right? Now you hear, you go to the doctor and you say, ask a lot of questions, what about this? What are my options? Other options? How, how about this? Can I do this? People were owning their health and not making the assumption that I, I am going to follow the same path as my parents and my grandparents. So if they got, they had heart disease, I'm gonna have heart disease and I'm just gonna die.

Jodi Berg [00:46:49]:
It's just, that's the way it happens. Like if they had cancer, then I'm clearly going to get cancer and I'm gonna die eventually from that. And this was people owning it to say, wait, I can change the trajectory of what I'm, of what my life, how I'm valuing my life today, how I'm, how I'm experiencing my life today and my long term health by choices that I make. And they're not all medical choices. That's another thing that's happening at the same time. So then you have another element in Whole Foods is, it's a grocery store. We were saying, we've been saying Whole Foods for decades and decades. So this, this grocery store name is named Whole Foods.

Jodi Berg [00:47:28]:
And all of a sudden it starts to expand across the US and people, this word Whole foods is now a common word. You've got this trend which is been here your entire life, but the smoothie trend, right, that's, that's starting in California with, with the jamba Juices and. Yep, yep, that's. They were, they wanted to grow because the other thing that's been happening in the US Is the development of chains. Right. And chains expanding across the U.S. well, the, the smoothie chains were having a hard. Or the smoothie concepts were having a hard time expanding because the equipment that they were using, which was the most important and most expensive piece of equipment in, in order for their concept to work, wasn't performing and it wasn't performing consistently and it wasn't lasting and they constantly had to replace it and they had inconsistent quality until you insert the Vitamix.

Jodi Berg [00:48:28]:
And the Vitamix is meant to perform consistently and take everything down. And even commercially it just outperforms anything else that's out there. So all these things are happening and I'm thinking, wow, how we're a very small company at the time. How do we create a momentum out of all this?

Jodi Berg [00:48:52]:
Yeah.

Jodi Berg [00:48:52]:
Are you familiar with Horton and the who? I digress. Okay. So there's this storybook in my generation called the Horton and the who. And the concept is this little elephant here, because elephants have good hearing, he picks up a speck of dust and he hears inside the speck of dust an entire village of people, but nobody else hears it. So in his, in, in his forest, all the other animals think he's crazy. You know, poor elephant, he's got a, you know, he's, he, he's hearing things, he's losing it. And they typical, more of an American, not American culture, but a human culture, they want to separate him from his speck of dust because clearly the speck of dust is, is making him crazy. He doesn't want to be separated because he knows that what they're going to do is destroy the speck of dust.

Jodi Berg [00:49:41]:
And it's, he's. He can tell that there's an entire village inside the speck of dust. So as the story progresses, who Horton convinces the village of who to all at the same time take every single magnifying mechanism that they can come up with with their voices and, and build. Build magnifiers and, and all shout at exactly the same time. And when they do that, it breaks open the barrier and it's loud enough that all of a sudden everyone else can hear what Horton has been hearing all along and recognize that there's entire village and inside this little spec. So you take that concept and here I am a very simple minded person. Right. I, I never had any desire to run a company.

Jodi Berg [00:50:28]:
The only reason I did is because I so wanted to change the way people felt about food. That if running it is what I had to do to make that happen, then so be it. But I had this, this Horton and the who in my mind. And I'm realizing it's. We have this opportunity to really break. First it was just break open the windows of way people think about food and health. If we could just bring all these different voices together. So what if we brought the people that were all focused on whole food health.

Jodi Berg [00:51:03]:
So all the organizations, all of the smoothie chains, all of the companies that are promoting the. The new health and wellness. The all. If we could bring all of them together and. And give them megaphones to speak through. And how did we do that? As a manufacturer of a blending product was to. To help them understand how the Vitamix was like the. The missing puzzle piece.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:33]:
Yeah.

Jodi Berg [00:51:34]:
Making what they were doing consistently delicious and easy. And therefore they could be more successful. So that my own. My only plan was how do we bring them all together and how do we create these voices so that we can change the way people think about food? It was. It ended up being so successful that it would. At first we were, let's bring. Let's break the windows down. It's like, no, let's break the doors off.

Jodi Berg [00:51:59]:
Let's blow the whole wall out. Let's literally change the way people think about food forever. And that. That was our plan. And the only way it was possible was through incorporating this culture that I learned from the Ritz Carlton, which is every single person matters and what they bring to a table is important. And we didn't even start talking about purpose yet. But understanding what, what drives you as a person and what your individual purpose is. And if.

Jodi Berg [00:52:34]:
If your purpose that drives you can be by you living your purpose every day, you are accomplishing something that's going to drive our company purpose forward. We have a win win. Right. And just to illustrate, we had a gentleman who was our director of communications. He loved history. Loved history. And his passion and purpose in life was how do I take history and make it relevant and bring it to life? Okay. He did it every single day when he worked at Vitamix.

Jodi Berg [00:53:06]:
And yeah. People that on our production line that they. When they realized that maybe it was it was their hands that made a difference. I. I was. Was reading testimonials to our operations team one day and this testimonial that I was reading was about a mom whose daughter was. She just didn't have a lot of energy. She was.

Jodi Berg [00:53:30]:
She. She couldn't Digest food. So she was on a feeding tube, and she was laying listlessly on a couch. And the food, the feeding tube, it was sustaining her. It was keeping her life, but it wasn't giving her much life. So she bought her Vitamix and the whole food that she put in her Vitamix. She sent us a picture. And this daughter was running, and her.

Jodi Berg [00:53:48]:
Her eyes were sparkling and her hair was glowing. And I mean, she's. She was a child again, right? So this is what the testimony was about. And Carmen, who was working on our production floor, I noticed that she just had tears. She was trying to be discreet, but just tears were pouring down her face. So afterwards, I went up and I just gave her a big hug and I asked her if she was okay. And. And she said, oh.

Jodi Berg [00:54:09]:
She goes, yeah, I'm better than okay. She said, at that moment, I realized that these two hands might have. Might have built that machine that brought life to the little girl. And I will. I'll never make another Vitamix machine without thinking about the fact that I could literally be changing somebody's life. So it's no longer about just putting the parts together and sending it down the line. It's about building something that changes lives. So what I did got that from.

Jodi Berg [00:54:38]:
I know I'm going through this really quickly, but I got that understanding from the Ritz Carlton and also from a life and death experience that I went through personally. And I made it a point to say, what if, as a leader, I could help every single person that was involved, whether they're employee or a distributor or a customer? What if my purpose was to help them discover their wings inside themselves and help them fly? That became my. Well, it was. It still is in a lot of ways. My purpose is to help people find their wings, give them a chance to fly. What if I did that for everyone in this community? Therefore, they found their purpose and aligned their purpose. What we were trying to do. And that was.

Jodi Berg [00:55:26]:
That was how it exploded as fast as it did. It wasn't me. It was. It was just me helping give permission to. And helping people discover things in themselves and aligning it to what needed to get done and then getting out of the way and getting the obstacles out of the way and letting them do what needed to be done?

Jodi Berg [00:55:48]:
Wow, that's awesome.

Jodi Berg [00:55:50]:
I kind of went through things fast, but there's, like, one of the things I would love.

Jodi Berg [00:55:55]:
There's so many threads I want to pull on.

Jodi Berg [00:55:57]:
One of the things I would love to talk to people when they realize that Cleveland is my. So we didn't. The company didn't start in Cleveland. It started in Illinois. And it was my grandfather who they. My great grandfather. Grandfather came and brought Vitamix to the Great Lakes Exposition in 1935 and 36. 36, 37.

Jodi Berg [00:56:17]:
I don't know. Right in that time frame. And it was. It was either two summers long or a whole year long, but they fell in love with the people of Cleveland and they picked their company up and they moved it for Cleveland because of the people. And one of the. I believe in my heart one of the reasons that Vitamix became iconic the way it did it had. It was truly about the unbelievable people that are in Northeast Ohio and joined us in Northeast Ohio because they felt comfortable and. And joined Vitamix in our kind of.

Jodi Berg [00:56:58]:
Our mission, if you will, to change the way the world think about food. We couldn't have done it any other way. That unpacking that alone, I think is something a lot of people experience about Cleveland, but they. They don't necessarily realize that the. How powerful that actually is.

Jodi Berg [00:57:19]:
Yeah, well. And I certainly don't think most people are aware of that in the context of Vitamix, you know, in the history.

Jodi Berg [00:57:26]:
Yeah. Bringing it together. Right. Creating that culture and the whole purpose element of. Of how powerful purpose and understanding what our purpose is is another thing to unpack in.

Jodi Berg [00:57:39]:
In light of all that, that framing of legacy. I'm curious if you could, in a hypothetical, talk to your great grandfather about the current state of the organization and where it is and how it's evolved. What do you think would surprise him or excite him most about. About its evolution?

Jodi Berg [00:58:02]:
So my. My great grandfather, apparently I met him when I was very, very little, but I don't. I just don't remember meeting him.

Jodi Berg [00:58:08]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jodi Berg [00:58:09]:
What we do have, though, and what so many people. I'm so blessed to know that we have. This is. We have an infomercial that he filmed when. In 1949. I think it's 1949. In fact, if you go online, you can still look up Vitamix infomercial or Papa Barnard, which everyone calls.

Jodi Berg [00:58:31]:
Yeah, yeah, right.

Jodi Berg [00:58:32]:
It's a half hour long and it is. It is absolutely hysterical. But most people don't have that legacy of their grandparents right now. You probably do. But my generation, we did. Most people, you know, great grandparents didn't do infomercials, and they weren't things like that. So I.

Jeffrey Stern [00:58:50]:
Right.

Jodi Berg [00:58:51]:
I mean, that had to have been one of the. The first infomercials.

Jodi Berg [00:58:54]:
I don't know. That was the first infomercial he created.

Jodi Berg [00:58:57]:
1949.

Jodi Berg [00:58:58]:
That was the first genre of infomercials. Oh, how that happens is a whole nother fun story. So how that. How get. So I digress, but I'll tell you the story. So my. This newfangled thing was coming out called a television. And my grandfather goes to his dad and says, dad, you have got to take your demonstration.

Jodi Berg [00:59:18]:
And because the goal is to get the demonstration in with a message in front of as many people as possible. That's how they sell Vitamix machines, because more people understand why they would need one. So he says, you have to get this in front of a lot of people. You should do it on this thing called the television. Apparently, my great grandfather said, are you kidding? This is just a fad. It's going to tear the fiber. Everything you hear, it's going to tear apart the fibers of the family. It's going to be out in the curb.

Jodi Berg [00:59:45]:
Like, there's no history with this or there's no future with this television thing. So this battle went back and forth, and finally my great grandfather was convinced that, okay, fine, I'll do it once. So he. Cleveland, Ohio, one of the 12 places in the US that actually had a television station. My great grandfather goes downtown. Now, back in the day, they didn't have credit cards. You didn't do a lot of checks, right? You dealt with cash. So he walks in with wads of cash in his pocket because he knew it was going to be expensive.

Jodi Berg [01:00:17]:
And he says, who's in charge here? And I would like to buy a half hour of your TV time, or whatever it is that you call this. And he says, well, sir, I mean, we can certainly do that, but you have to. We have to build you a set. And he looked around the room, as the story goes, and said, that's a kitchen set over there. Can I use that? And he said, yes, you can use that. Fine. So, well, then you're going to have to do some rehearsal. No, I do this day in and day out.

Jodi Berg [01:00:41]:
I know exactly what I'm going to say. Fine. Well, we're going to. We want to film it because then we're going to edit it. He said, I don't want you to edit it. I just want to talk to people. I don't want it to sound fake. I just want it to be real and authentic.

Jodi Berg [01:00:52]:
So they said, fine, we have a slot. And I believe it was on Saturday night. And I believe that it aired in places like New York City. So we may be the first Saturday Night Live, but we don't get credit. But so he takes this, this half hour that he has and he just does his demonstration that he's always done. And it's, it's completely inappropriate today because he blames mom for everything and degrading. Nobody has any teeth because of what mom fed them. And so it's, it's, it's, it's funny if you put it in the context of when it was created.

Jodi Berg [01:01:26]:
Right?

Jodi Berg [01:01:26]:
Yeah, yeah.

Jodi Berg [01:01:27]:
Inappropriate today. But he, he went and he did this show for half hour. What made it an infomercial is halfway through, he says, if you'd like to buy a Vitamix, please call this number. And he gave them my grandfather's home phone number. And so all night long until about one or two in the morning, my, my grandfather's taking calls in his, in the house, sitting on the edge of the bed and back then the operator is the one that connects all the calls, right? So she's connecting all the calls and he's scrambling and he's writing, he's probably begging my grandmother for little pieces of paper. You did everything cod. You didn't take money over the phone back then. You just send it and you got paid.

Jodi Berg [01:02:08]:
So he's writing these addresses and, and sold over 400 of them that night.

Jodi Berg [01:02:13]:
Oh my God.

Jodi Berg [01:02:13]:
Normally more than what we'd sell in an entire year. And finally it, sometime in the middle of the night, the operator comes on and says, Mr. Barnard, I'm sorry, but I'm going home. We're not going to get any more calls today. And that was the only reason the phone stopped ringing is because the operator had to go home. But that was the first ever infomercial.

Jodi Berg [01:02:33]:
What an amazing story. I mean, it's kind of fascinating to me to think about that in the context of social media and advertising today and how it actually comes full circle in a lot of. I feel like the most powerful advertisements today are those that are the authentic long form YouTube infomercials. But I don't, no one calls them that anymore.

Jodi Berg [01:02:55]:
Right, right.

Jodi Berg [01:02:57]:
Wow, that's amazing.

Jodi Berg [01:02:58]:
So it started the whole genre of infomercials back in 1949. Now the one that you're going to see. So the first couple times he did it, they didn't record it. He literally just did it live. And for a couple of months in 1940 and then in 1950, they said we should really record this. So the one that's, that's on YouTube is the one that was done in 1950. Not the original, original ones because he literally said, no, don't, don't record it. I'll just do it live.

Jodi Berg [01:03:27]:
So.

Jodi Berg [01:03:29]:
Wow.

Jodi Berg [01:03:30]:
Really, really neat experience. So I know we have to close because I have to jump on another call in a couple.

Jodi Berg [01:03:36]:
Yes, yes.

Jodi Berg [01:03:38]:
But thank you for this. Was a lot of fun chatting.

Jodi Berg [01:03:41]:
Oh yeah. I feel like we're just getting started.

Jodi Berg [01:03:44]:
To that end, we were just getting started. As a reminder, part two of this.

Jodi Berg [01:03:48]:
Conversation will drop next week and I.

Jodi Berg [01:03:50]:
Encourage everyone to listen in for lots more wisdom and stories from Jodi. Thank you. That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts and on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffreyofthelandfm or find us on Twitter oddleoftheland or Sternhefe.

Jodi Berg [01:04:12]:
J E F E if you or.

Jodi Berg [01:04:14]:
Someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on itunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land. The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with the UpCompany LLC at the time of this recording. Unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

Jodi Berg [01:05:01]:
Thank you for listening and we'll talk.

Jodi Berg [01:05:03]:
To you next week.