Navigating Tariff Chaos

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Andy There has been so many things going on. Everybody’s, you know, going up and down with changes. There’s been some threats of new tariffs that have been going in and out there and out there that, well, they actually, actually implemented some new tariffs. There’s been the elimination of the de minimis that has gone in, and we’ll see how the overall effect is on that, Andy although I will say on that the elimination of the de minimis for everybody, except for the post office, which to a point I have an issue with. But okay with that, I will say that as we’re going around and trying to everybody’s trying to keep their sanity and all that, I hope you got some sleep last night and you’re able to have a fresh day so that we’re looking at everything with fresh eyes and fresh ears and all that, because we’re gonna have a good discussion today. But Lalo, how are you doing? My friend, it’s a new morning for me. Lalo Yeah, no, I agree. And so it is. It’s a it’s a lot of, a lot of things going on. You know, in trade. Recently, the US Court of Appeals said that the IEEPA, or a lot of the added tariffs, are illegal, and so they’re letting the administration appeal it to the Supreme Court through October, because 1517, something like that. But anyway, so there’s a lot of turmoil, a lot of in, you know, like indecision and like, what are we going to do now? I mean, obviously, right now, the best thing to do is just to go as if that wasn’t even decided, you know, just because you still need to pay your tariffs, because it’s, it’s, it’s under appeal right now, or, or pending, having to appeal it, and I’m sure to the Supreme Court, but, but you’re right. I mean, there’s just things that change on a dime sometimes that folks need to be aware of and stay up on top of and and make sure they’re still in compliance, you know. And so that’s that’s why we’re excited to have the next couple of guests here on our show from Flexport who, I mean, if anybody deals with this. I mean, look at them. I mean, they deal with it. They’re, first of all, they’re global. I mean, they’ve got a they’ve got staff all over the world that are moving cargo all over the world. They, they develop their own technology. They they have their own in house compliance experts. They have their own in house logistics experts. I mean, you name it, it’s all wrapped up into one nice little, neat bundle and build a really nice organization there. Yeah, yes. Anyway, I’m happy to have these two guests come in our show to kind of explain a lot of what goes on for a like a turnkey solution, let’s say, although we’re not talking so much about the actual solution itself, but you know, just how they deal with the whole situation? Andy Well, I will say that we’ve got some, some rapid changes going on and all that. But before we did, I just wanted to point out something is, you know, you and I both have been asked, is, like, with the different hats that I’ve got, I’ve put my hats up on the wall. So if you’re, if you’re listening to the podcast, go to the YouTube and you’ll get to see some of this. But I put up some of the different ones. It’s not all of them and and all that. So it’s like, you know, it’s people have asked, you know, which hats that I usually wear, and all that kind of stuff. It’s kind of a funny deal with that. Let’s bring on our folks, our guests from Flexport, as you just mentioned, we’ve got a policy interpretation type of a fellow that is into knowing, I guess, what’s going on, and has a great job with that. And then we have the tech side of things. Marcus, what? And I forgive me, guys, I don’t have your last names in front of me right now, but Marcus, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself, and then we’ll go to Alex Speaker 1 certainly. My name is Marcus Eamon, and I’m a director of custom systems and process here at Flexport. And forgive me for being not quite having the level of diction I’m used to if you’re on the podcast. Just had a dentist appointment this morning because, of course I did so. But very happy to be here, happy to talk about all the all the changing chaos that’s going on these days. Unknown Speaker Excellent. Alex, Speaker 2 yeah, I’m Alex Nader, love. I’m based out of Amsterdam, so I’m quite far in my day already. I am the Senior Director of trade and financial services, so the engineering group to take. Scare of all of our customs drawback, but also all of our capital, business, insurance, climate, technology and our not for profit, where we ship goods to disaster areas. Andy I love Amsterdam and the Netherlands there. I just have some good friends over there, and had the opportunity, literally, they drove me all over the country, which doesn’t take a whole lot of time, very Oh, it was some fantastic time. Great people and all of that. Marcus, hey, with all this rapid change and everything, how in the world are you keeping your sanity? I mean, you’re, you know, with everything. Lalo Another Red Bull, I guess, right. You Speaker 1 haven’t broken out the Red Bull, but I have gone for coffee, which has gotten more expensive in the last few months. So, yeah, no, I think with this, you know, the biggest thing is just trying to stay organized, right? It’s like we have a single couple of places. I say that single couple places, we have a few different places where you track different programs, things that have changed, where things are in the process. And kind of, know, okay, when does this go into effect? When is this actually going to happen? Where are we going to see this? You know, which countries are affected? I think that’s really just kind of been the main way to we’ve just sort of stayed sane. But ultimately, it’s a dynamic time. Things are moving really quick. Things are moving really fast. You know, we get announcements on Friday go into effect, know, on Mondays, like we saw just a couple of weeks ago with the expanded 232, list on steel and aluminum. So, you know, I think anybody’s doing, anybody that’s keeping on track of it today is doing the best they can. And, you know, I like to say we’re magic wand, but there’s just a lot of hard work behind the scenes and just to keep ourselves updated and to keep everybody else updated, Andy I will say that there’s a lot of reading and a lot of interpretation and and whatnot. I guess. Let me ask this question. Is for those there’s a lot of our audience that that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to keep up with things, and they’re getting yanked six ways from Sunday and all of that. I guess, part of the scenario there would be looking to see, maybe the the x or Twitter, whatever it is, updates and true social updates coming out, more of a an advanced knowledge of what’s being talked about, and then you’re monitoring the federal registry notices for the official, right? Speaker 1 That’s correct, yeah, you know, I think you know, I was in in DC back in February, and I heard from a customs official, and, you know, they said that they didn’t know about some of those tariffs that first went into effect in February, until they saw it on true social it on true social. Like some very senior people at CBP, they’re finding out the same way that we are, you know, through through true social, through social media posts. So that’s kind of the main way. But yeah, when it comes to actually giving advice, we want to see something official. We want to see at least a White House press release. We want to see an executive order language. We want to see Federal Register Exactly, right? You know, there’s just so much out there that we, you know, we can’t respond to every rumor. We want to try to get the best information, which means we need to get, sometimes a little bit slower information, even if we have a high speed direction coming from, from the Andy White House, yeah. So with all of that, is then when you see something that’s going to require an update to the systems for some action on the tech side, I assume that you’re then deciphering, if you will, and translating into layman terms. Okay, here’s what’s going on. This is basically what it means. This is what we need to have the system updated. And you send that over to Alex and his team, right? Speaker 1 That’s, that’s exactly it, yeah. So we, we try to find out and say, like, okay, it’s going to affect these countries, these HTS codes. This is how it’s going to work. And, you know, because we’ve had so much change, we just kind of the only thing we’ve been expecting is more change. And so a big part of what Alex team has done is we now have different like small tools that help us, you know, extract, you know what HTS codes are going to be affected quickly, because some of those federal register notices, you may know are, you know, they’re images. They’re not like text based of what HTS codes are effective. They’re just like a screenshot. But we have more tools now to try to, you know, extract those faster, get those lists published quicker. So that’s exactly right, though. So we’ve tried to find hacky solutions and put it behind a, you know, a nice, nice front, which powers some of our, you know, global facing tools, like our tear tracker. Andy Yeah, so Alex, how in the world are you keeping your sanity? It’s like you probably have your best laid out day, and everything’s going well, and all of a sudden it could change in a fleeting moment. Speaker 2 Yeah, especially lately, because being in Amsterdam, for us, it’s our Friday night that the registry gets published, and then we know that that’s going to be the weekend. But like Marcus said, we’ve developed a few tools that we can ingest these rules faster. What requires the most time? What. People tend to underestimate is we don’t have to make it work for just a few products that we handle. We actually make it work across the board, because we really digitize the entire decision tree of which HS goes need to apply. So I’ve seen diagrams that made me dizzy, of Marcus and our other experts at Deepak of what happens if you have ant steel and aluminum and copper in one product and the boat leaves then, but it doesn’t do and you know the moon is in this position. And what else you know is part of the equation these Andy days, and it’s a red moon, a full moon or a half moon? Speaker 2 And we’ve developed all this internal so then you have, you get these huge decision trees, basically, and then we and then we’ve written a bunch of tools to codify them into our core product. And we expose this to anybody in the world through our Tariff simulator that everybody can use, and that will actually encompass all parameters possible to really get you the true landed costs, as far as we can actually compute it, because there are, of course, like ambiguous things that we don’t know. You need to know more about your product to be able to understand better, but you can even flag those in simulator as well. So yeah, that’s that’s what it looks like. We know it’s coming, and we’re just on standby with the team. And as soon as it comes out, it goes through Marcus and Deepak first, and they map it out into like a computer. So it’s not layman’s terms, it’s actually highly specialized. And then there’s an engineering team that codifies it, and typically we can have it implemented within 24 hours, but it depends on the level of craziness. Andy Well, I guess with that is, as you’re looking at it and updating your system, are you able to, you know, again, I’m going to be very simplistic, and this is really Lalo background, more of on the programming side. But I’m sitting here thinking it’s like, okay, as things come out, Surely you’ve got tables that you can update, rather than doing hard coding. Because if you can update that, and then the then the process also is in the calculation is that may have to change in that algorithm to say, if you have X, Y and Z, it’s going through these tables and say, yeah, let me grab that. Let me grab that, and all. But is that kind of the concept you’ve got? Or how are you able to with all these different systems? Speaker 2 Yes, so to keep it so to not go too deep into, like actual, this is not an engineering podcast, so I shouldn’t talk about, like, very specific nerdy things, but it’s, it’s a combination, right? So we of course have, like, data, data lookup table. So it’s imagine, like changing, changing an Excel sheet with new values, and then we have some simple rules that you can say, well, if this then that you don’t actually need to actually change any code. There’s like, conditionals that we’ve built in, but we’ve seen, like the there’s a lot of variance, let’s say, in the new regulation, it’s hard to predict what combinations they’re going to require, and then we actually program, but we are like a true technology company. We have amazing engineering talent, so it’s actually not a hard lift for us to just change the program and then with one click, it deploys across all of our platforms. So any anything inside flex board now immediately uses the new rule sets so we don’t have to, for example, train brokers or train other operators. The system just takes care of you, which is why it’s so important for us that we respond Andy fast well. And the reason I was setting this up for is that now the end customer that you have that may be using your tools and all of this, I mean, Mark, as you’re going through, you’re trying to keep things up. I’m sure that you’re drafting things to communicate, obviously internally, to the tech side, as we just went through, but also somehow, is working with your communications team to communicate to your client base, if somebody’s looking at it and going, well, I don’t know if I really agree with the way this has come out. So somewhere along the line is being able to walk through the process to say, Okay, I’ve got this issue. I’ve got this product, let’s say from, you know, South Africa or wherever, and it’s coming in, it’s this commodity, or this widget has these, you know, it’s made out of these certain metals or fabric, or whatever the case may be. And they go through and walk through that process, so that you’re looking at the policy from a standpoint and say, Okay, there’s going to be a x tariff on this for. Whatever reason, and the added tariffs, if there are any, and you walk through that, and then you you compare that to what the system does. That’s where I was going with this. Is that then being able to say, Okay, I got to tell you, with so much change, I’m sure there’s times like, you know what? We didn’t we got to tweak this. We didn’t quite get that right this time, it’s not if, it’s when, and how do you deal with it? So as you’re walking through that, and the client base out there sees something, and they’re trying to understand it. It may be that you’ve got it right, they just need to understand the interpretation of all that. But how do you go through that kind of a process? Speaker 1 Yeah, I think before we try to roll it out, you know, like the production side to, like the client tracing side, we try to run it through some, like, kind of stress testing sorts of things. So, like, in your example, right? If we have four different things, you know, it’s part textiles, part metal, HDS, is this, the origins that and the data is this, you know, how do all those things work out? And then we just take a look and say, Okay, we have this list of rules, right? And we got this, you know, this is what the machine spat out. Does it match what I think it should? And, you know, does that actually kind of go through? So I think there’s there. We do kind of a bit of that, and then we have to say, No, this isn’t quite right. So, you know, we look at something like, you know, Brazilian extension cords, you know, like that used to be very simple, until, like, you know, you go back six months ago, and this looked this was very easy, but now there’s all these different overlaps, because now there’s copper tariffs, there’s aluminum tariffs, that flag for it, there’s the Brazilian special rates, you know, because they had the situation with their president, like, there’s all sorts of different layers that are happening right now. And so we got to make sure that we know what those dates are. It’s read the regulation, make sure we got it, got it programmed correctly. Marcus. Lalo Let me ask you, I guess you brought up something very interesting, and so did, and I guess this kind of is also going to bleed into Alex, but whereas traditionally, prior to January and all these different requirements with terrorism, especially with the derivatives, and, you know, especially things like that. And not only that, but also, I guess, trans shipments, trying to make sure where the country of origin is, because, I guess the Rules of Origin have changed a little because of the substantial transformation. And anyway, there’s so many different things that so many factors. But my point is, whereas before, you used to only track at the product level, you know, the product that’s actually coming in, now you have to track at the, you know, Bill of Material level, how has that become a challenge like but I mean, I’m sure that had had to change your the way you do systems and what customers divulged to you, because I’m sure I used to be in software, just a little bit quick brief, you know, I used to, we used to sell, or I used to develop. And so I was part of a company that that did free trade agreements and and and cross border with Mexico us. And so we did all the invoicing and all the manifest, you name it. Anyway. So typically, kind of what you did, but back in the day before AI, you know. So back in the big systems, days of IBM as 400 system 3638 you know, that kind of stuff, the big stuff. So anyway, that, as you can tell from my white hair that was back in my day. So anyway, clients tend to not want to divulge who their suppliers are, for obvious reasons, right? I mean, so I’m not going to ask for any trade secrets or anything on how do you get around that or anything? But how has that created the issue and the concerns, or the like, even grown probably your team, because you now have to track at that level. Or am I wrong? I mean, do you not have to track at that level? Speaker 1 Well, I think what we’re still kind of waiting to see is like, how strong the enforcement stance is going to be from customs on that right to your point is, like, you know, when you have to, like, find out, like, certain you know, things for origin. You know, bait is a substantial transformation. That is still the rule. But when it comes especially to, like, the 232, tariffs, where you’re allowed to break out the steel or aluminum value in an imported product, there’s some open questions that are big and unsettled right now where it’s like, okay, well, what, which value do we use? Like, how do we calculate it? There’s an FAQ from customs that’s pretty vague, and you can very easily read it two different ways. And so, you know, what we’re kind of pointing toward is definitely much deeper kind of bill of materials thing that mostly, you know, a lot of importers haven’t really had to contend with unless they’ve been claiming improving free trade agreements. You know, free trade agreements have kind of always had this sort of like proof of, where’s production, what’s the value add, you know, in this different place, like, where was it before, when it, you know, came in, when it left, what was it? So I think with those that you know, what we’re seeing is so far, customs hasn’t quite yet come to the point where they’re really getting that invasive, but we’re starting to see the the first questions getting asked, like, if not say, like, the last. Last two months, we’ve been seeing more requests for information that are asking for that greater level of detail. Saying, Okay, you’re saying x, x value is, you know, comes from China, and x value comes from India. Okay, we’ll prove it. And so now we’re starting to see a couple of those questions. And, you know, I think a part of it is also what’s the enforcement going to look like? They have to interpret it and give us clear guidance, and give and give importers clear guidance, which, in many respects, they haven’t yet. I think, certainly, you know, the 232 round is one area where I think we’re looking for a lot more. You mentioned trans shipment. That’s another one where they haven’t exactly defined what it means to have been trans shipped for the purpose of the 40% tariff versus, like a 20% tariff or lower ones. You know, we have a traditional definition that we could apply. Is that relevant here? Do they looking for value add? Are they looking for substantial transformation to define a trans shipment that hasn’t been defined yet, which is troubling and very difficult to then comply with, if you don’t know the rules? Andy Well, I got to say, and Lao is a good question, as you’re going through that, is that, as you’re that I think the compliance side of it, customs is still, you know, working out the rules, if you will, and there’s going to be some enforcement on the back end. So it’s like, well, so the point being is, regardless of whatever and however you’re calculating things now, and you’re everybody, I’m sure is trying to do their best so that they can. There’s got to be some kind of a audit trail, in a sense, of how did you come to this decision? Yeah, so that in in looking at it, it gives some kind of a, if you will, a benchmark to go and information to go back with customs on the auditing side, and how are they going to deal with it? Speaker 1 Yeah, and that’s the, you know, that’s actually a key point for importers. You know, for importers, the US, they have this new care since, or this new standard since the mod act, called reasonable care. The idea is that you have to take reasonable understanding of your supply chain, so documenting your rationale for things and saying, Okay, there’s a little bit of gray area here. Customs hasn’t defined it. How are we going to define it internally? What’s our going to business rule going to be for this? And you can make some pretty good justifications. And what that can do is, even if you get it wrong, you may avoid, or you can at least maybe look to maybe mitigate some of the stronger penalties. They don’t think maybe you’re being grossly negligent, maybe you’re just being slightly negligent. And even then, maybe they’ll be willing to be a little more understanding and say, Well, yeah, it’s a little crazy. So if you do have that kind of clear documentation about why you did what you did in this uncertainty that helps to meet your reasonable care standard, and also can look good if you ever need, if you ever get penalized and you want to try to mitigate it. Saying this is why we thought what we did in the absence of clear guidance. You know that satisfies both those things. Andy Say this and see if you agree with this is that I’m out of our discussion already. There are two actions that I see that senior like the C suite needs to be looking at taking one is to make sure that your compliance area is staffed up. They need more staffing to handle this. Folks, you got to understand the workload on compliance folks has probably tripled, if not quadrupled in this and so, you know, status quo is not going to get you anywhere. Matter of fact, it’ll hurt you if you just keep trying to squeeze squeeze them, and it’s just a deal with it. They need additional staffing. Is one thing. The second thing that I’m hearing out of this is probably a lot of companies, especially the bigger ones, will put together like a, I’ll just call it like a logistics Council. They’ll have your compliance, your logistics and transportation, warehouse, maybe customer service, sales, you know, technology or it and all that. And that’s fine for, you know, looking at changes and all that. There probably needs to be a separate, and I’ll call it a committee that deals with the breakdown of specifically a product. What do you think about that kind of a approach? Yeah. Speaker 1 I agree completely. Yeah. I think that compliance teams, we’re definitely seeing, you know, more hiring here, because the costs are real and, like, the cost of failure are also, like, increasing as well. Like, you know, in some of the announcements, like the directors from the White House, the White House is saying, you know, go for the highest levels of penalties for non compliance and don’t offer mitigation. So making sure you have it in order is really, really important, especially these days. You know, I think just another, kind of a clear illustration that Brazilian extension cord, if you were to imported that seven months ago, you’d use one, HTS code one, you know, special code on your on your thing. So now you’d use about 12 if you wanted to import a Brazilian extension cord, you might use up to 12 or 13, you know, different special and HTS codes, making sure across three different entry summary lines. So, you know, if that is a good illustration of like, how complex things have really gotten with all these overlapping tariffs. You know, I think that’s a clear example, but your advice is spot on. You do need to beef up your compliance procedures. You do need to bring in people from your finance teams. You do need to bring in people from your product development teams and sourcing teams to know, okay, can you ask these questions? And if you can’t ask these questions, maybe you need to look at some some other options, or lean on your supplier a little bit more to see what you can get, especially, you know, the threat of 200% tariffs if you’re using Russian aluminum, that should also probably wake up a lot of a lot of executives that maybe haven’t quite looked at this before. You know, just, it’s always been like a footnote on their on their monthly business review right now, it’s like, okay, actually, this is the first 20 minutes of our monthly business review. Is just talking this so Speaker 2 and we, we’ve heard from from competing brokers as well, that because, don’t forget, it’s not just, let’s say, the intellectual work, like understanding it and having the details, it’s also just the clicks in the system, right? So if you are on working on a like a legacy system that wasn’t designed to fill out 20 different codes on a product, suddenly it’s a lot more work. And we had that ourselves in the first couple of weeks, where for a certain car manufacturer that is a customer of ours, which of course, has a lot of steel and aluminum, the work went from 20 minutes to three and a half hours per entry, and we managed to get that back down to 10 minutes again. Because we can do that as a tech company, we can just adjust our products and automate everything and go through this. But if you’re also just dependent on the quality of the IT systems that are that your vendors are using basically to determine the cost, because they are going to pass on this cost to to their customers. And the other thing that, um, where tech can really help out here is on that compliance piece. So we, for example, have developed AI that can automatically check against your standard operating procedure and compare that against every entry that you’ve done. We do statistical analysis on all the entries that you do to catch anomalies. So like, if you have a weird HS code, if you’re an apparel company, you suddenly import live horses, we’ll flag that. Or if you import flour, and a kilo of flour suddenly $500 that’s weird, we’ll flag that. And sometimes it’s legit. Sometimes it’s, you know, maybe it’s flour made by Taylor Swift or something. But like, normally that’s, that’s your reason to look at it. But the so we were, we were developing this technology anyway, just to become because we want to be the most compliant broker in the world and the most automated broker in the world, which is how you become the most compliant broker in the world. But now we’re actually re leveraging that technology to help our compliance group and go like, Hey, tell me what you want to investigate this like an ad hoc SOP, and we’ll run that against all the entries. And now they can, like, very fast and very accurately find entries that might potentially be a problem that we filed over the last few months. And then as soon as we find, like, a pattern that we want to change, it goes into the system, and now every entry that goes out is automatically checked against these rules. And this is like this kind of technology we also want to expose to our customers so that we can help those compliance teams. Basically, they have to do the hard, intellectual but also the interesting work, like from that perspective, like that, that should be why you enjoy your job, right? It’s like figuring out the puzzle, but then the toil of going through all the entries, and like checking everything we hope we can can make a big impact there. As a technology, Lalo you bring up something real interesting. And before we run out of time, I wanted to ask this question also, was that, because of all the different challenges, let’s say, in bringing in products and having and wanting to reduce that tariff. Have you found that now you’re exploring into different programs, and, I mean, you obviously are, but have you found that how that might have affected meaning, like, for example, like, will you flag or help the broker understand that a product is coming in from Mexico. They’re paying now, let’s say 1015, 20, 25% duties on it. But had they applied usmca, for example. I mean, now it’s now that, now they’re going to cut it. Now there’s other other strategies, for example, bringing in the product into an FTC or a warehouse, abundant warehouse, to avoid the tariff today, and then, you know, not pay it until they actually introduce it into the commerce of the United States. I mean, drawback, that’s a big thing. I mean, I’m thinking drawback. Folks are really busy today, you know. And so have you found that you now need to you. Like, sway them to whereas before, like, like Marcus, in the very beginning, it used to be super easy to bring in that court, you know, from Brazil before, before January or before, I mean, even recently. But now let’s think of all these different ways that you can bring it in to reduce the tariffs on it. Speaker 2 Yeah, so this is really the realm of trade advisory, which is also something we do at Flexport. We have an amazing drawback program which, like, truly understands the different drawback programs. And we’re seeing like very so recently, we did a yield comparison to one of the other big brokers, and where they got one half million, we got like 5 million out of that. And that’s just because we invest a lot in that technology, and we really leverage all the different knowledge pockets, basically that we have. So unlike the tariffs and all manufacturing and on the trade agreements, and we’ve everything in house, and what we see now is, yes, there’s a lot of opportunity to do sort of automated trade advisory. So for example, looking at your bills material, see where you source things, and hey, maybe you can source a little mail from there. And if you change, if that changes, it changes, like, the the majority of where your goods come from, you fall under different agreements. And then there’s, yeah, just like, hey, you’re importing and you’ve incorrectly used MCA because it’s no longer applicable to this product, and monitoring that so yeah, we’re looking, we’re leveraging all of that internally right now to help out our customers. Andy If somebody is developing a new product or wants to add a new product to their lineup. Do you have anything that I want to check this out? Here’s, you know what I’ve got. Here’s a widget. What’s the duty rate as of this moment in time? What’s it going to be? Do you have any tools like that that somebody can use Speaker 2 if you have the HS or if you know the HS code, because we don’t do AI classification, because AI classification is not a solved problem yet, so we don’t offer it yet. Doesn’t meet our bar yet. And but if you know the HS codes, you can just go to tariffs.flexible.com, it’s a free tool for everybody to use. You can plop in the HS codes, or you can search the HS catalog, and then it will literally walk you through how to calculate the actual duties that you’re gonna pay. And we promise that it’s up to that GTC change log of like, all the updates that we’ve done Andy it. And so it gives you the questions or the areas to look at there. I’m sorry, Marcus, go ahead. No, I Speaker 1 was gonna say, if you, you know you wanted to, if you’re kind of at that early stage of the development or production life cycle, it’s probably worth talking to our trade advisory team early on and see, like, okay, maybe some, maybe, what are some things here we could maybe do to try to save some costs, like, what happens if we make it out of this material instead of that material? Is there ways that we can, you know, change this? And this comes into a concept that is a very tricky, very powerful tool, but very dangerous, called tariff engineering, which you may have heard before, early on in the development lifecycle. This is still like, this is the right time to try to do that tariff engineering, something that’s already on the water, probably too late. You may be leaving a little bit too close to the fraud line, instead of the clever the point is they, you know, there’s different options you can do if you kind of look at this early and then use our Tariff simulators to kind of see what those, what that actual landed cost would be, yeah, Andy yeah. For our audience, the tariff engineering is where you’re looking at, and it’s, it’s legal to do, it’s fine. You’re trying to, maybe even from a standpoint of trying to do duty avoidance, if you will, or tax avoidance based on, well, you know, if I add a marble slab on top of this table, it’s fine, or if I take it off, or whatever the case may be, you can change components of your widget, and then you might qualify now for a specific duty rate versus a higher one and all that. So that’s fine. What you can’t do is just try and manipulate all that and then misdeclare something to say, Oh, well, we’ve come up with a lower a tariff rate, with a lower duty rate. We’ll just use that. Well, no, if your commodity isn’t that item, then no, you can’t do that. That’s fraud. Speaker 1 Yeah, it cannot be a disguise or artifice, is that is the phrase cannot be a disguise or artifice, and what that means is usually left up to the courts. Andy Well, with all of this and all the changes going on, Marcus, do you have anything to consider that would be the most you know the takeaway here that you would like people to give thought to your Speaker 1 I don’t think so. I mean, I think what we’re what we’re seeing kind of overall, with, like, you know, AI, boom, we’re seeing right now, and like, we’re using it ourselves. I think there’s kind of two things that’s, that’s that’s really doing, is that AI is lowering the cost of intelligence, you know, the idea of getting good answers. Smart answers. It’s gotten a lot cheaper, you know, but now the real value is moving from just knowing something to operationalizing something. And I think that’s where, you know, a company like ourselves can really step in, is like, we don’t just give you, like, kind of an answer to a to a question. We take that answer and use it to, like, you know, change your entries, change your supply chain, improve it and save you money. That’s really, I think, where, where there’s a big, a big portion here. So when it comes to staying on top of things like the knowledge is the first step. There’s a lot of companies out there that do that do great work, but being able to very quickly use that knowledge and operationalize it in a seamless way is, I think, someplace that we have a big advantage. And I think a lot of other companies, you know, would probably benefit from if they wanted to look toward that, but that’s kind of where I see this going. I don’t see the pace of change slowing all that much. Even, you know, no matter which way the Supreme Court goes on this, I don’t really see in that changing too much. But I think it’s just important to try to stay like not know what you’re doing, but how quickly can you take that knowledge and apply it to your products to save money? Is, I think where a lot of business owners should really be be steering their focus. Andy Alex, how about you from a system and data files and all of that perspective and handling all this? Speaker 2 Yeah, we’re gonna stay we’ll be doing what we do, what we’re doing today, which is just applying technology to help our customers. We want to be the most accurate broker in the world. We want to be the fastest to respond to changes and keep the cost low through automation. And that’s that’s all I’m focusing on, and of course, using the latest technology to get that done. So I’m working on a lot of product that’s products I can’t talk about, that will come out later this year, that are really meant to help customers navigate all these crisis and and, yeah, hopefully help them mitigate potential fines or other risk that they face. And yeah, we try to stay cost effective for our customers so they don’t have to eat the cost of all these, all this added complexity, basically, to their Lalo supply chain. I mean, it, when it comes down to it, you are your own customer. So, I mean, that’s the best, that’s the best way to test that, you know, when I, when I wrote software, yeah, we had subject matter experts, but at the end of the day, we did not do an entry, you know, we did not, do, you know, a qualification or whatnot so but yeah, that’s That’s great. How you all are doing that? Andy Well, folks, I will tell you, this has been a good discussion. And some of your takeaways, I will tell you, at the C suite, you need to make sure, again, your compliance area is beefed up. But also the compliance folks, you know the finance group and the and the CFO should be, you know, on a first name basis, and know who your compliance folks are, because there’s a lot of implications there. You’re purchasing, sourcing, folks ought to be joined at the hip with the compliance, along with the logistics and and all these different things that are going on, and your system folks as well, because your data comes from the knowledge of what you’re working on. That knowledge has got to be fed in there, and then that’s got to permeate throughout not only your own company, but other your vendors and your clients and all that. So all that comes into play, we’re trying to stay ahead of this ball game, so hopefully that’ll all work out, like us, share us. We appreciate the support of the show, and we definitely keep growing around the world and keep getting more listeners. So that’s that’s fantastic, but with that, guys, thank you so much. You’ve been an excellent, excellent guest on our show, and we appreciate you coming on board Unknown Speaker and driving us. Thank you. Andy Everybody. Have a great day. You.