No other way to put it in my mind, Doug, that was an old-fashioned beatdown by the Alouettes.

Yeah, that's about as one-sided as it gets.

And I think what was most surprising is obviously this is a football team that they've beaten before.

So what a difference playing at home can make.

But Um, obviously the Montreal Owets are a super capable football team.

They're going to be, uh, one of the highest regarded teams for, for a position in having a great cup birth, especially coming out of the Eastern division.

But at the same time, uh, you know, just being on the road and playing a good team that wants to square things up with you is, is no real excuse for those kinds of numbers.

What's at the core of that inconsistency in your mind?

How important was that win just to kinda settle the waters, if that's the right term?

No, I, I think you, you can't overstate it.

Um, I think after a loss to the BC Lions with, you know, a rookie quarterback and they were absolutely ravished and depleted by injury.

And, uh, to give up, I mean, they gave up 201 yards on the ground in the fourth quarter, which is more than any Winnipeg Blue Bomber team in over 10 years through the entirety of a game.

So let alone the three, it was 377 or 387, set a franchise record.

Uh, and not the way you, you wanna set a record as a defensive player.

So that was as bad as it gets, and then they had a bye week immediately following that.

... an extension to that question is, how much of that defense is really dependent on that front, front four getting pressure?

So the lead's cold.

Yeah, [chuckles] exactly, right.

So the sales team hasn't picked it up for a week, so the lead now is far less warm than it was in the first place.

[chuckles] And so once it's now doing that then eight, eight competitors have already been calling on that lead, so to speak, right? So what we do is we can take that lead time from a week to five minutes, you know, and put things in like that because you c- you can see statistically it's very clear that if you can get to a lead within five minutes, your probability of closing that lead is exponentially higher, like insanely higher, uh, depending on whose statistics you wanna, you know, wanna, wanna believe.

But I mean, all the stats show it, and in practice I can prove it to be, be true.

So we'll look at every little gap zone that's going along, like maybe what sales to operations like, you know, oh wow, we have five orders that have been sitting there that were supposed to be installed but they're not installed, and two of them now are refunding.

So we're looking at that because that's just money dropped right out of the company, right? We'll look at things like dormant clients.

the whole group.

Great.

How many sales? What is the end point, right? Because If you have a thousand leads that are not qualified, you're just creating more activity and you're losing money, not just on the lead cost, folks.

The time in, the lost cause of what you could be doing with that time, like all, you know, maybe people are quitting.

There's all kinds of factors.

So when you look at the whole customer journey across the board, And you break that down into segments, and then you look at each segment and measure those segments and get the math and the ratios.

Now that starts to tell you a story.

And all you creatives out there are probably going, ah, I'd rather die than do this.

Have you ever experienced something like that?

Doug, thanks for joining us today.

Oh, thank you guys for the kind words and for having me on the program.

uh drugs um and then i was the next person to get it and it it hit me completely different and i was like okay this i've dealt with something like this but you can tell it's different my wife a little bit more tender than than that then my daughter my other daughter it hit her like a 12-hour flu and you know it was like the technicolor yawn every five five minutes she had she couldn't go anywhere without a bucket and i felt so bad for her um now that we've grossed out our listeners let's get to uh to this week's podcast

shall we

So, yeah, that was a lot of fun.

Yes.

You know, Glenn, I got to tell you, not to change the subject on you, but business has really been just going up since last September.

It's just really on its way up.

So it's been really nice to see Memphis is back.

And there's a lot of movement on the streets.

It's excitement, music playing.

And, you know, we've had some conversations in the past about how frustrating it is that it seems like sometimes the media and the press are, you know, you're their favorite whipping boy for an easy headline.

So Doug, just to get our conversation started, want to give you the opportunity to provide an overview of IMEA, the Illinois Municipal Utility Association, and the IPEA, and detail the services that they provide to member communities.

Yeah, I can do that.

You know, I, I wasn't really kind of enthusiastic to start my new role, you know, as I retired from CWLP on March thirty-first and, and then, uh, started with IME the very next day.

I didn't have any time off.

I just wanted to kind of get things started.

You know, with thirty-one years in the utility industry, my experience fits pretty well with the agencies here, and the transition's going pretty smooth.

It kind of helped that I knew the staff and the municipal members.

So wanted to, you know, since, since you're still relatively new in the role, wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about your immediate priorities since becoming president and CEO of the three organizations.