What We Can All Learn From The Most Innovative Town In Canada - Ep 007


Description: David Gardner, Transit Specialist at the Town of Okotoks shares about how a simple conversation at the grocery store turned into a grocery delivery service overnight. He shares about their investment into technology, their use of data to make decisions, and how they pivoted quickly to meet the changing needs of their community. 


This is the Entrepreneurs vs. Coronavirus Podcast with your host Ryan Kononoff.  


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We’re in an unprecedented time right now. As coronavirus continues to spread throughout Canada—and in fact our world. We’re starting to hear remarkable stories of how businesses are rapidly evolving and innovating within their space. 


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This next interview was really fun. It wasn’t with a business. And it wasn’t with who most would classify as an entrepreneur. In this next interview I had the opportunity to connect with David Gardner, who is the Transit Specialist at the Town of Okotoks, arguably one of the most innovative towns in our country. 


David talks about how forward thinking their entire team is and how one conversation at the grocery store turned into a huge opportunity where using technology, they pivoted overnight, from just a people transit service to a people AND grocery transit service. 


In particular, listen to how he describes the importance of using data to make decisions, to being able to adapt quickly to the needs of those they serve, and how the best ideas are almost always the simple ones. 






[INTERVIEW]
David, welcome to the entrepreneurs versus Corona virus podcast. Before we get started, I wanted to just share a definition of an entrepreneur that I use because I think it's particularly relevant to you and what you're doing now. And that is that an entrepreneur is an entity which has the ability to find an act on opportunities for innovation.
And when I heard about what you were doing in the town of Okotoks, I knew this was a story we had to share. So thanks for coming on today.
David Gardner: Well, thank you for the opportunity. It's great to chat about something that we're having some fun with and some good results.
Ryan Kononoff:  So for those that aren't familiar with the town of Okotoks, maybe tell us a little bit about the town and and in particular, maybe what makes it such an innovative place.
David Gardner: Yeah, sure. So the, uh, the town of Okotoks is, uh, situated just South of Calgary, roughly 30 kilometers South of Calgary, depending on where you start to measure. And there's a population of about 29,000 people. Now, I'm fairly new to the town of Okotoks, so I can't tell you a lot of the history of the town.
I've only been with the town of Okotoks since the middle of last year, but the town of Okotoks is well known across Canada for its initiatives in terms of sustainability, environmental protection and very forward thinking town, very dynamic team. It's the first time, uh, that I've worked in the public sector.
I've always been in private companies and it's been really refreshing to see how innovative people generally are in the town.
Ryan Kononoff: And David, what do you do for the town? Maybe tell us a little bit about your role there.
David Gardner: So I joined the town to launch an on demand transit service. So my role is transit specialist with the town, and the town had been wanting to launch the transit service for quite some time, but struggling with how to go about it, given the costs and the difficulties associated with traditional fixed route transit.
Ryan Kononoff: Okay. And how many staff are part of your team and how many people are part of the staffing at at Okotoks?
David Gardner:  So. I am a single individual and I am pretty much my own team. I report to the corporate services director.
Ryan Kononoff: Okay.
David Gardner: And in terms of the, the town organization, it's fairly dynamic because there's a lot of seasonal work going on.
I might get in trouble for, for estimating the wrong number, but I would think there's probably around 150 to 200 people in total, right across all the different services.
Ryan Kononoff: So you're on your own team, but if we look just at the transit side of things, what's sort of the size and scope of the transit operation at the town of Okotoks there?
David Gardner: Sure. So, um, maybe just a little bit of brief background. The transit service. We launched late last year, officially, the beginning of December, and we launched a fairly, I think you would call it micro transit, a fairly small scale service. And historically there wasn't any transit there, and there was mixed views on whether there was sufficient demand for a service.
And so we launched an on demand transit service and we launched it with two vehicles that you could basically a similar to a Ford transit. So. 6 to 8 passengers and uh, we have three vehicles, so we all, we were initially operating two of them and we were operating them on a Monday to Saturday basis from 6:00 AM until 11:30 PM in the evening.
The real beauty of the service was that it's a, an app technology based service. So it's the very first in Canada of curb to curb public transit service. There are some municipalities across Canada that have had Uber services in the past, but this, uh, to our knowledge was the first on-demand curb to curb service.
There are also a couple of virtual stop services around. Cochrane has one North of Calgary, and there's a couple of others. So very, uh, forward thinking transit service, no fixed route. No fixed schedules as such, just the vehicles available. You book it through an app and then we have an algorithm which controls the picking up and dropping off people around town.
So initially when we started, we expected to have an average of 1.6 passengers per hour per vehicle hours over the first six months. And just prior to things changing in March, we were sitting around about three and a half passengers per service hour. So it might sound like small numbers, but for the size of the vehicle and for our expectations, it's gone really, really well.
Ryan Kononoff: That's fascinating. How did you get into the transit space? What's your background, David?
David Gardner:  I actually moved over to Canada in 2017 prior to that, I've been in industrial and Marine shipping. And a global supply chain for best part of 20 to 25 years. And I worked for global mining corporation ship owners and the like.
So I incidentally moved to Calgary because my family had moved here in 2000 and I wanted to move to Calgary. So I came over and did a two year executive MBA U of C here, university of Calgary. Fresh out of school, basically went job hunting and was selected and had the honor of being employed by the town of Okotoks.
As I said earlier, was, was an interesting scenario because I'd never worked for any public service before. And yeah, it's been, it's been refreshing and it's been great. No regrets whatsoever.
Ryan Kononoff:  So let's talk about coronavirus. What were your immediate thoughts when coronavirus and coven 19 started to hit the news?
David Gardner: Yeah, so for the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to be purely talking about transit. And any of the comments that I make are purely related to trans need to just clarify that because I'm certainly not the town's official spokesperson for any other matters relating to the subject.
Ryan Kononoff: Yeah.
David Gardner: So. Interestingly, our transit volume really only started to drop down in the second week of March, so I think up until that point, people here were generally still feeling like it was a problem that was happening in other places and we didn't really to worry about it too much. We started to see numbers dropped fairly significantly once the provincial governments started to make announcements and give direction.
And there were obvious things that we needed to do. The obvious things that everybody's doing now. We needed to keep our distance. We needed to increase cleaning of vehicles. So those were the sort of the obvious things we needed to do. I think what happened next was that. Given the technology that we use to operate our service, we had an opportunity to do something that very few other transit services were able to do, and that was, we were able to use the technology to reduce the human interaction.
So literally when we set the service up, we set up. Trip windows. And what that means is that when you get on the vehicle, you may deviate and probably will deviates, pick up somebody else. So the more shared rides we can achieve, the better efficiency we get on the vehicle. Now we're in a situation where we don't want people on the vehicle together, or at least limited number of people in the vehicle.
So we're able to use the technology to reduce trip windows. And thus by technology, manage the number of people in the vehicle. So what that means is you don't deviate, pick up somebody else or you deviate to pick up a maximum of one person. So we've got smaller vehicles and our target is to have a maximum of two shared rides.
And so we were in a position where we could very quickly adjust this thing so that we achieve the physical distancing that we want. Literally by changing a parameter on a computer system.
Ryan Kononoff: Wow. And so when did you make that change? Was that a pretty quick in the, in the middle of March, David?
David Gardner: As soon as we received counsel that we need to, uh, adopt a process of physical distancing. And I say physical because social distancing is the cliche. We prefer the physical distancing because it's just a little bit more tangible. But as soon as our town emergency council was put together, emergency operating committee was put together. Well, we looked at ways that we could support that. And so it was within within a couple of days of the request coming up from provincial government that we put this in place.
Ryan Kononoff: And so just to backtrack a little bit before the crisis hit, what was your biggest challenge around transit that you were facing and how did that shift to this adjustment to your algorithm and the adjustment to where your focus needed to be to solve the. Immediate needs of the town?
David Gardner: I was very fortunate during my MBA to do a, an entrepreneurial specialization as well as my finance specialization.
And so it's the same problem everybody has with a business. Well, if it's, if it's that good problem and that is scaling up, our demand was higher than we had expected, and the demand was growing so quickly that we were experiencing a lot of failed rides. So the technology enables us to get data on exactly how many people searched for rides that couldn't get them at what times of day, what days a week.
And so, yeah, we had a scaling issue, a limited supply of vehicles. In the short term, we had a limited number of drivers, so we couldn't equip the third vehicle of drivers. And we also had to ensure that we weren't scaling up too quickly and supplying additional vehicles to meet demand that was driven by winter.
One of our concerns was that we had some really cold weather here in mid January and demand spiked drastically because you, you suddenly had not essential users wanting to use trons that you also had people that didn't want to clean, they call windscreen or people's vehicles who'd broken down or, you know, they wouldn't start because it was so cold.
So it was about having no demand history. Is this demand realistic? Is it seasonal? Is it just going to disappear on us? So that was a real challenge. Fortunately, I'm able to download massive sets of data, analyze them simply through Excel pivot tables, just to look at the trends. So yeah, we had a scaling problem.
And we didn't know if it was sustainable. So that that was the real biggest problem.
Ryan Kononoff: And so introducing this new world that we live in and many of the changes that were coming down from council and provincial regulations, what became your next biggest challenge and how did you pivot to tackling that?
David Gardner: I can't  speak highly enough about the value of data.
And this is a cliche thing because everybody talks about data in today's world. We were able to scale that because of the data and we were able to see exactly what the data  was doing to do the scaling down process, which was the next step. How do we maintain a service whilst not weighing wasting taxpayers' money, but also ensuring that we keep the physical distancing.
We maintain the, the health integrity and safety of our passengers and drivers. So. You know, I'd like to, I'd like to tell you that this was a really complex process, but it wasn't, as I alluded to a little bit earlier, because we could see the exact number of uses every day and what times of day where they were going, we could straight away identify what sorts of people were using the vehicle. Cause we don't collect data on the demographics of our users. We only require them to have a user account, which is a user email or a phone. But we don't have any other data. For obvious privacy protection reasons. But what we are able to do is to see where people are coming from and going to, and so this gave us a good idea to see the users that were using the transit.
Are they using it to go to pubs and restaurants or are they using it to go to places of work, essential services, groceries, and so forth. And so that gave us the confidence to scale down the service. Reduced one vehicle. We haven't changed our service size at all. We just play with a little bit of the vehicle supply and as I mentioned, we adjust the trip windows so that people can get on the transit, having comfort that at most, it's probably going to be one or two other people on the vehicle.
Ryan Kononoff: You hit on something there when you talked about essential services and grocery, and as I understand it, that is another interesting element to how you've been leveraging this transit on demand transit service in Otokes.
Can you talk a little bit about the grocery component and how that partnership came to be?
David Gardner: Absolutely. Yes. So, and I think this is possibly, we're getting to the point where, where you heard about Okotoks transit and what we've been doing here. So as we were scaling down the transit, we, uh, actually my, uh, corporate services director, our deputy CIO, Nancy Weigel, was out in town and she came back and she said, you know what, I just bumped into somebody in town and this person had no option but to go and get groceries.
They were confident that they didn't have any specific symptoms of coronavirus, but they had to go somewhere. They needed their kids and their husband, one of them had to drive the call, one of the men to do the shopping, and they couldn't leave the kids at home. And. We talked about it and we just thought, you know what, there's an opportunity here.
And initially the first idea was perhaps we could just help a few people who were returning from travel and needed to self isolate. Was there perhaps the possibility there. So I then went out and went around to different grocery stores around town. And discovered that for those stores that were set up to do online or phone in delivery orders, there was a huge demand and less demand had been there already prior to the, the covid 19 changes, but it was certainly peaking.
And so we kind of spent a few, I'd spend a few days looking at it. And trying to figure out how this would work. Would we use the technology? What could we do? And again, it might sound really complex, but I think most of the really good solutions in life are often simple ones. And it was just a case of we have a vehicle, we have drivers, we have a system in place for a payment.
Why don't we just give this a try? And so, um. Two of the stores that are in town here were keen. One of them was specifically set up for finding orders, but on a very small scale. And we literally said, let's get this going. Let's give it a try. And so on day one, I went with the driver. Uh, we went into the store and it was a little bit disorganized, as one would expect, but we, we went around and I delivered groceries to front doors of houses, the store, give us the list of the, the orders where they needed to go to in town.
The drivers. We have already very familiar with the town, such as they don't even need an app to, to know where they're going, and we would drop the groceries at the front door, knock on the door, and just retreat a few meters. And it was, it was a great experience, pretty much every door we knocked on that day. And I think we did 24 25 deliveries that first day.
Almost every single one was a senior, which are exactly the people that we really want to help. Not that we don't want to help anybody else, but they're in the vulnerable population. And people were so appreciative. And by the end of that day, we knew we had something, something that we could play with here.
And we're on now a day 16 of the service and we're approaching 500 deliveries in Okotoks.
Ryan Kononoff: Wow. And my understanding is you're still doing, uh, you're still offering transit services to your people. What ratio of of rider versus grocery delivery are you currently seeing?
David Gardner:  It's probably worth noting that we all operate to the grocery transit completely separately to the passenger transit. Our core business. In terms of my, my role is the passenger transit, you know, that is the, the business model, the grocery trends that we are operating with separate vehicle. And so basically right now, over the first 16-17 days were averaging three deliveries per hour on groceries and on passengers.
We're averaging around about 1.2 to 1.5. Those numbers are very low because of the objectives of the physical distance. So if you, if you consider what we're doing with the groceries in terms of where we were going with the passenger transit prior to March, we're being every bit as efficient and successful as we could have hoped to be.
With the passenger transit. It's just the, we're now transporting groceries instead of people.
Ryan Kononoff: That's remarkable. I mean, if you look at the data, as you alluded to, your essentially doing the same amount of trips per hour as you were prior to this incident, and your rider numbers are just slightly lower than your original launch projections when you rolled this out at the beginning of the year.
If my numbers are correct here.
David Gardner: Yeah, exactly. You're 100% correct, and I think I have to, I have to make mention of one person here as well. When we started this grocery trons that we expected that we wouldn't, we would need an additional person to assist with the transport of groceries, especially the condos and places like that.
We have a whole team of really great drivers, so I don't want to discount any of their efforts, but I do want to mention a gentleman by the name of Tom. Who actually went home and over a weekend devised his own little grocery pull card so that he could just move these groceries in and out more efficiently to the condos and keep our additional labor costs down.
So, um, yeah, Tom, I want him to hear this and I want him to be appreciated.
So this
Ryan Kononoff: idea, again, really simple idea, and as you mentioned, generally in life, it's the simple ideas that are the great ones. Was there any challenges getting buy in from the team or was everyone just immediately onboard with moving forward with this?
David Gardner: We're obviously in a situation where our operations and our actions, I would say are directed by our emergency operating committee. So it wasn't important in terms of that. That we share this information through them and that any indecision there was implemented is aligned with our town strategy to best manage the town through these challenging times.
But I'm pleased to say that, that the idea was instantly supported. We did need to clarify and make sure how we're handling the groceries, you know, a couple of the health aspects of it. So there was a little bit of discussion that needed to take place. Just to make sure that we're, we're all aligned, but the, the support has been overwhelming.
But the whole council have been in supportive of this initiative. And, um, it's been great to be a part of it. And I think it's important to mention that this is one of, of many, many fantastic initiatives at the town of Okotoks, staff and management have come up with over the past few weeks.
Incidentally, tonight is going to be a live, musical and theater performance by some residents that is going to be shared. So there's just a whole bunch of things that people are doing. What I'm doing is just one small part in it.
Ryan Kononoff: And when you roll this out, what were some of the challenges that, uh, that you face? You mentioned you're on day 16 now, I'm sure you've had an opportunity to improve the processes related to this, but what are some of the original or initial challenges that you faced when initially rolling this out and, uh, and how did you solve those.
David Gardner:  I guess a little bit of my Marine shipping background comes into play here because I us ed to turn ships around that were costing 30 to $40,000 a day.
And you know where the, where the, uh, the bottlenecks are in any logistics system. And that's really what this was. So it was a case of working very closely with the store to get the loading processes ironed out to make sure that. The sequence of orders are provided clearly to our drivers to make sure that the vehicle arrives when these orders ready.
The loading process is, I would say, the most time consuming process, and that's because you're dealing with a store that has already a lot of pressures in terms of restocking shelves, people not wanting to be in the shop for too long, the social distancing in the store. So it was, I think that the biggest challenge was to get that ironed out and to get ... help assist with the stores staff who are going to take this role on to, um, just get the logistics ironed out as to how that was gonna work.
Once the vehicle is loaded and the driver has the list of places to go to, it's straight forward. You're out there, you get the orders done. Get them delivered. There's not a lot really to do there. It's more about just getting the process sorted out to get the efficiency up. The, uh, the payment systems, as I mentioned, were already in place.
So, you know, we had the vehicles, we had the drivers, we had the payment systems. These are, are things that if you were starting in your business would be a huge amount of time and energy to set up. We had that in place already, so it was pretty straight forward.
Ryan Kononoff: And do you see this as something that will continue on beyond this crisis? Do you see, do you see grocery delivery in your future or do you see this as a bit of a stop gap for providing value in enabling you to keep those vehicles on the road and, uh, ultimately supporting the community at this time?
David Gardner: I think you as an entrepreneur entrepreneur would, would agree that you have to stick to your core business.
You cannot be all things to everybody. And our core business is passenger transit. So do I see this in the future? In the long term I don't, but I could be proved wrong. I suspect that in the, in the longer term, when I was having a discussion with the one of the store owners, just the other day actually on this subject is weird.
When does it end and what does it look like? I think the reality is that many people will become comfortable with online. And pick up. There will be some scenarios where people are comfortable with deliveries, but I think it will be more than likely the biggest stores and the food chain at your grocery chain stores that.
Would look at this as five years into their future. Who knows? You know, how far into the future. But is there a case in the future where our kids, regardless of whether there's some kind of health issue or not. Do they want to leave home? Possibly not. Maybe this is just speeding up the change of, of how the world operates.
So for the town of Okotoks, grocery transit. Is a wonderful thing to be part of right now. It's wonderful to see the appreciation from community, but I, I would think that as we, as we phase, as we hopefully phase out of where we are now, whether that's in two months, three months, six months, a year, two years.
Uh, it depends which crystal ball you read. You'll get an answer. I expected. We'll gradually phase out of grocery transit and ramp up one passenger transit.
Ryan Kononoff:  And who knows. I mean, perhaps you're, you're establishing a, a business opportunity for some local entrepreneurs in, in the town of Okotoks to, uh, to take over where you left off, given the comfort that the community may have to this idea of ordering things online and, and being able to have it delivered right.  Right to your doorstep.
David Gardner: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know it. It's probably worth mentioning. We'd specifically, when we decided to do this, we, we were very clear that we are not going to do anything but groceries. We did consider a medicine deliveries of medicine from pharmacies, but they seem to have that under control.
So we haven't really had any interest there, but we are not doing fast food or restaurant meal. You know there's, there are Uber eats, there's skip the dishes. There's many others that provide that service. And to be honest, exactly as you say, why would they not be. Skip the grocery store, for example. I mean, it's there.
There's a world of opportunity and amongst all this chaos.
Ryan Kononoff: So when you look at, at this experience that you're going through, you're innovating your, you're solving a need today. As we think about where this takes your role and perhaps the different parts of, of the transit system, what do you see taking out of this as far as value, whether it be things that you're learning or, or how this is going to be able to improve things in the future?
David Gardner: The learning is very clear. It's, it's be dynamic and be responsive. And these are, these are things that you learn in, you know, entrepreneurial skills 101. You need to be fast and you need to be flexible and use the data that you have available. You might not have a lot of data available. You'd be surprised what you can do with a little bit of data.
And I think for us it's going to be stabilized. The passenger transit, we do have a fourth vehicle on order for end of December. The drivers that we were training up to operate our third vehicle instead of sign to drive passenger transit, they started driving groceries, transit almost around the same time, with the exception of Tom, who sort of one of the senior guys.
So our objective would be to. Slowly increase shared ridership subject to what the future looks like, and it's, it's really unknown. If you'd asked me this question two months ago, I would've said to you, we're under pressure. We're putting a third vehicle into transit. We have a fourth vehicle coming into the year.
We have to think about what next, because the growth and interest in transit in  has been way more than we expected. So. It's really, you know, who's got the best crystal ball right now? And so I, I would love to tell you that I think in, in two years time, we're going to have an autonomous vehicle doing shuttles around archetypes.
That might sound farfetched, but it was something we very seriously did consider at the beginning of last year and we decided that it would be a little bit premature, but definitely autonomous vehicles are on the radar for Okotoks. In line with our efforts to be a leader in sustainability. How and when we get to that is a little bit gray at the moment.
I could also mention to you that the vehicles that we currently have are leased vehicles. And the only reason we are leasing them is because we have three brand new Ford transit vans arriving, hopefully in the next month or two subjects who current situations. And those vehicles are hybrid vehicles.
They have a hybrid components on the chassis, which, uh, assist us to reduce about 25% fuel consumption. So. I think we'll be in a transition from now on. When the transit started, it was being looked at as a pilot launch. Within a couple of weeks it was no longer a pilot launch. In middle of March it was declared an essential service by the town of Okotoks, and so it's really going to be how do we manage. Um, the needs of our passengers, the needs of the town, and gradually transition this into a more sustainable future.
Ryan Kononoff:  I love the emphasis and the focus on, on innovation. It seems apparent to me that through and throughout the organization, the town of, of Okotoks is just every part of it. Has to live and breathe innovation.
And, uh, it seems clear as, as you've kind of described how things run there and an investment in technology. I mean, you wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for an investment in technology prior to this all happening. And that's really what enabled you to just flip the switch and make some quick changes.
And clearly technology has been a big enabler here for, for you.
David Gardner: Absolutely. And on top of the technology, uh, the tough decision was taken to go with a curb to curb solution. Which is, is inherently inefficient. It's far more inefficient than any other type of service, whether it's a virtual stop or a fixed route.
But it was the level of service we wanted. Also giving, you know, consideration to the way consideration to our target users being a largely youth, young people and seniors. Uh, we didn't want them sitting on a minus 40 degrees at a stop. So that curb to curb model was what enabled us to do the groceries as well.
So it's been really exciting to be part of.
Ryan Kononoff: So David, what would you say to those who are listening in and maybe they're struggling in their own business or their own organization and they haven't found a way to pivot or to shift or to innovate? What resources or suggestions could you make to them?
David Gardner: Separate to my town role, I do have another role as a shareholder of another business. Which is fully disclosed, disclosed to the town, and there's no conflict of interest there in case any of the listeners have that question in their minds and that business is really struggling. It is really struggling.
We have been in survival mode for a year at least, and then the type of business, I'm not going into the type of business required a lot of development before we could offer a service. It's been really, really tough and I think the, the, the biggest learning is you've got to stay on top of your finances.
You know, if you need to do a cashflow forecast every week, do on, because that's gonna that's going to tell you is what you're working on going to pay off. You know, because you can have all kinds of great plans, um, and all kinds of great business leads. But do they translate into a bottom line that is going to help you to survive?
That's the one thing. The other thing is, yeah, you just need to consider every possibility. You may not end up where you start, I think has been the lesson for us where we thought we would be and where we are now is so far apart and we're not there yet with their business. But, and I think it applies to whether it's town or any private business, you, you're going to have to have a lot of courage and probably a lot of sleepless hours.
But. Just keep at it. There's also a, in my entrepreneurial course, we had a lot of online resources. I would encourage this, so many good online resources there on on how to, to manage business challenges. I think a lot of people right now have a lot of time to sit and worry about the future when they're probably better off using that time to search up new ideas, look for solutions, look for advice, and I think the platform that you've created here is fantastic.
First I heard of it when you reached out to me. Um, and I'm certainly going to be following it to get advice from, from others. Who you interview.
Ryan Kononoff:  I think that's great advice, David. I think the, you know, the underlining concept there is, we've all heard it, cash is King and you know, particularly at this time, it's so important for businesses to, to be looking for ways to control their cash and control their spends and keep their overhead low.
But also. As you also alluded to this idea of, of looking at all the angles and you know, in our business we talk a lot about this question of what if, and looking at all these angles and asking ourselves, what if we did this? What if we tried that? And being willing to take that risk. And as you also said, now is a great time to be investing and exploring different ideas and trying things out. And failure is okay as long as you can quickly pivot and quickly, you know, get yourself back up and try something else. So I think those are all great suggestions and appreciate you for, for, for making those. David, thank you for being on the show. What's the best way for people to reach out to you if they want to connect and they want to learn more about some of the innovations and the transit program that you're a part of?
David Gardner: So in terms of the, the , the town of Okotoks, the transit website is, Oh, could talk to transit.ca. O. K. O T O K S. Transit.ca. And if anyone, uh, wants to communicate that way, we do have a contact form on the transit website. And, um, in terms of, uh, reaching out to me for that, I think that would be appropriate.
Ryan Kononoff: Great. And David, can, can people connect with you on LinkedIn or, or best through the transit website?
David Gardner:  Sure, yeah. I do have a LinkedIn profile. Um, I probably not as active as I should be on there, but it's David Gardner one.
Ryan Kononoff: David, thanks for joining us today.
David Gardner: It's a pleasure and thanks for the opportunity.
And I hope that something I've had to say is I've used, I'm sure I have a lot of it is cliché. We've heard it all before and we've just got to do it
Ryan Kononoff: well. So many things in life are the simple things. You've mentioned it a few times, and sometimes we just need to hear them from someone else's perspective.
So I really appreciate you for sharing, sharing your story, and it's a fascinating journey from shuffling people around a town to shuffling groceries. So thank you.
David Gardner: Thanks very much.
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Visit clearbridge.ca/podcast Ryan is the founder of ClearBridge business solutions to find out how investing in technology can help your business. Especially during uncertain economic times. Visit life with ClearBridge dot. CA connect with Ryan on LinkedIn or on Twitter at Runcorn off that's R. Y. A. N. K. O. N. O. N. O. F. F. thanks for listening.