Wednesday Wisdom: There’s Never Ready….There’s Only Now!

Hello, everybody. It's Luke Wendtland. It is a beautiful fall day in Minnesota. Just taking a minute. One of my favorite places in the world, White Bear Lake. There you go. Oh, look at somebody sailing. It's gorgeous. Hopefully you all have had a great day. Got my little poppy drink, which I love. Happy Wednesday to you and yours. This is a little Wednesday wisdom again. My name is Luke Wendlandt. I've been at Cadre since day one. This is my favorite community on the planet. It's an honor to be here.

It's an honor to be with you all. Thank you for all those individuals that have shown up and continue to show up again. My name is Luke. I want to talk about being ready. And what does being ready mean and what does that look like? So I got a couple stories that I want to share. The first one is there's an individual neighbor of mine, he lives just down the way a little bit. And I was chatting with him about a week ago and we were chatting over coffee and I was talking to him about him starting his business and starting his company.

And it's a big logistics business. They do 100, 120 probably million dollars at this point of revenue a year. And we started nine years ago. I asked him, I said, so what did you know about logistics? He said, absolutely nothing. And he said, I knew absolutely nothing about logistics whatsoever. But I felt like there was a problem that was big enough that I could solve for and I could establish. So if you. There's transportation companies all over the world that are driving stuff all over the United States.

But 10 years ago, they weren't using technology the way that he thought they could. So he broke into the space and started a logistics company and felt like we could use technology to advance transportation for domestic travel better than before and built this unbelievable business, logistics business, transferring stuff all over the United States. And he didn't, like I said, he didn't have the faint. He didn't know the faint idea about logistics. So again, my question for you is, you know, what are you waiting for to figure it out?

You know, there's this, there's this Obama video. Maybe you guys have watched it or not watch it. Whether you like Obama, don't like Obama. That has nothing to do with it. But he said, if you really want to become insanely valuable, you want to become insanely valuable. At any business, you always find the one person. There's always one person in a boardroom, one person in a director level meeting, one person in a manager level meeting, one Person in a supervisor, manager level meeting. One person, there's always one person.

And he goes, that person is the figure it out person. They can figure it out. And that is the most amount of value that you can possibly drive for your company, your organization, you name it. So, you know, we sit here and we wait for things like January 1st is coming around and here's an opportunity to change in a New Year's resolution. Why not now? You know, why not today? Why not now? Why not the ability to say, you know, November 11th, I'm going to start and I'm going to start by working on my sleep.

Or November 8th, I'm going to start and I'm going to go after it and I'm going to try something new or I'm going to put myself out there, or I'm going to start now and I'm going to start walking, I'm going to try to stop smoking, I am going to put the bottle down, I am going to reach out every day to find a new job on indeed, that causes me so much angst and chaos. I'm going to try to start a new company. But if we are sitting around waiting and waiting and waiting and we're sitting around waiting for somebody to like, have this magic bullet of, like, how to figure it out, I'm telling you, you're going to be sorely mistaken.

There's an individual that just popped on here right now, Ana, who, you know, we were working back in the day here at Cadre over the last two, two and a half years of like, the development of our video department, and she just picked up the camera and figured it out. How much experience has she had before that? None. Like, I'm sure she loved taking pictures and I love, I'm sure she loved doing some video and such, but you just got to put yourself out there and figure it out. And before you know it, you can start like learning a little bit more and learning a little bit more and learning a little bit more.

So what I'm telling you is like, I think one of the greatest strengths that you can have is kind of like this methodology or mentality of like. And there's a lot of people that talk about, you know, ripping up the playbook and all the things like having this idea that I don't have to have all the answers. I don't even have to have any of the answers. I just got to put myself out there to try. And I'm going to try and I'm going to try a little something. I'm going to try a little something. Before you know it, something may stick and something may more stick and a little bit more might stick.

And before you know it, you're like, holy cow, like I'm figuring this out. And to me, I think those are the great separators in this world of those individuals that just keep trying and keep trying again and keep trying again. You know, you're always going to hear people, trust me when I tell you this, you're always going to hear people say we don't have the resources, we don't have the time. We, we don't have the money, we don't have the capital, we don't have the ABC and d. But what you can do is I always say you can out care and out love.

Yes, no doubt about those two things. But you can do the third thing is you can figure it out. If I would have outsourced everything in starting Northstar Behavioral Health, it would have probably cost a quarter million five hundred thousand dollars for all those ancillary resources in order to build the policies and procedures manual. Never done it before. I didn't have the slightest idea. Understanding the policies and procedures, what does it mean breaking out the bill of Rights, developing an employee handbook.

All those things that was 10 years ago. That was pre chatgpt but wrote them all, wrote every one of those things. And what does it allow you to do? It allows you enough to be dangerous. I can go on and on and on about Northstar knowing about the fire rating in between doors, what that needs to be, the fire rating between first and second and third floor. Why is you just figure it out. You just learn and you learn and you learn and you learn and you figure out like, wow, this is insanely valuable.

This is an insanely valuable skill set that I have that two things I'll never quit and I'll keep learning. I'll never quit and I'll keep learning. I'll keep figuring it out. So if you're one of those individuals that are going to sit and wait around until January 1st and have about a 7% success rate to have your New Year's resolution hit through January 31, h*** making it to February, why not now? Why not now? Why not try if the numbers are so poor, the 93%, you know, quote unquote fail, the ability to meet mate make the next month, why not just try now?

Why not try something now? Why not try something today? You know, what are we waiting for? For giving ourselves the chance to put ourself out there and say you know I'm going to be proud of myself that I figured something out today. I'm going to be proud of myself that on a mayo here that I researched a little bit about an AI tool with video. I'm going to be proud of myself of Emily here who's on this call who's a part of Cadre of learning something more that you know is needed or necessary for the business success.

I'm going to be part of something to learn and grow together. So my encouragement to you all today is this. There's something out there for you that like the world call it call it a higher spirit or you know, higher power whatever it is something upstairs that whatever it is you believe in rocks doesn't matter is telling me to tell you to try something new and figure it out and you're going to forever be proud and grateful that you tried. With that I leave you all go after it. Make it happen. We'll talk soon.

Bye bye.