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#135 | Taking a Technical Business Global

In this episode, we hear from Tom Gallagher, CEO of Diversified Automation and a former Penn State classmate. Who'd have thought we'd reconnect all these years later via a podcast? Listen in for Tom's real-world insights and career advice shaped by his global business experience. 

Tom recently stepped into the role of CEO at Diversified Automation following its acquisition by Leadec, a German powerhouse in the automotive and manufacturing sectors. Their newfound, shared vision leverages Leadec’s international scale to develop opportunities for innovative and advanced automation in manufacturing and package handling. Together, the companies have worked with Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Chevy, Amazon, DHL, FedEx, UPS, and more. 

Tom regrets not having learned German, though he couldn’t have predicted the country’s influence on his career at the outset. He explains how government-mandated work safety and life balance requirements mean German citizens can only work a certain number of hours in a single day. During one visit, he and his associates were not allowed back in the building after an evening meal! 

His global experience yielded other surprising customs: 

  • When traveling for business internationally, your hosts may expect you to dine and socialize outside the office.   
  • In Germany, people like to walk for fresh air and exercise before and/or after dinner. His colleagues would often pick a restaurant 15 to 20 minutes away to enjoy the time together. 
  • Breakfasts can vary widely worldwide! Some European breakfasts feature an array of meats and cheeses, completely unlike typical American fare. Singapore's charming "Toast" shops offer avocado toast and matcha tea, showcasing the city-state's unique blend of Eastern and Western influences. 

Like many in global business, Tom grappled with common concerns: How do you pick the right partners in unfamiliar territories? How can you anticipate trade limitations that might vary wildly from country to country? He recounts instances where equipment from China was barred entry into Korea and Vietnam, causing unexpected delays. In every case, a good and knowledgeable partner will help to avoid these issues. 

Similarly, Tom's experiences underscore the value of expertise in translation, interpreting, and communication across language barriers. For technical discussions and high-stakes negotiations, he found bilingual professionals with relevant industry knowledge invaluable. Their nuanced understanding of both language and subject matter far outperformed general translators or AI solutions, especially in technically complex fields. 

His final, best advice: 

“If you have the opportunity to do international work, do not hesitate to say ‘YES!’” You will learn so much through travel, the interactions with local people, the experience of seeing how people live, and exposure to different cultures. Don’t worry about failing,” he adds. “You may. That’s OK. You will learn from it.” 

Read the Episode Transcript.

ATTENTION:  Below is a machine-generated transcription of the podcast. Yes, here at Rapport International we talk a lot about how machine translation lacks quality. Here you see an example of what a machine can do in your own language. This transcription is provided as a gist and to give time indicators to find a topic of interest. 


Wendy Pease: Welcome back to another episode of The Global Marketing Show. Of course, as you know, it's brought to you by Rapport International, offering you high quality language translation services and spoken interpretation services in over 200 languages. And I've got a tidbit from them today. Who knows the [00:01:00] fourth largest English speaking country in the world? United States is number one, then you have the United Kingdom, then you've got India. Can you guess what the fourth largest English speaking country is in the world? It's the Philippines. I would not have guessed that because you've got Canada and you've got Australia in the mix, but apparently the Philippines is the fourth.
 

So, speaking of English, we've got a great guest on today. I actually went to college with him. I knew him at Penn State. So Tom Gallagher is a Penn State electrical engineer graduate, and he's been married to 40 years to his college sweetheart, who I also knew back in college. So, we're, we're talking about getting her on. 

He's a global business development facilitator for industrial automation systems, and then on the side he's a part time woodworker, he's a granddad, you're so lucky, and a wildlife manager [00:02:00] at their Kentucky farm. So Tom, it is so great to have you on today.  

Tom Gallagher: Yeah, I forgot about that last title. We do have a lot of wildlife out where we are. 

It's a nice part of Kentucky.  

Wendy Pease: Oh yeah, tell me about your wildlife. Let's start there.  

Tom Gallagher: First of all, it is really good to be with you. This has just been an interesting progression of things. I was telling one of the people I work with here today that I was going to be on your podcast and they asked me about it a little bit. 

And so I gave him the backstory on how we got together. So, just really glad about that. But yeah, our place in Kentucky, we live a little bit outside of Louisville, which is really probably most famous for hosting the Kentucky Derby every year, big horse race here. We have all the worst vices in Kentucky. 

We have bourbon, we have tobacco, and we have horse racing. So if you wanna really go the wrong direction, you can come out here and spend some time with us.  

Wendy Pease: I think back in college we were drinking cheap beer rather than bourbon. Huh? So you've upgrade?  

Tom Gallagher: Yeah. Not, not the good stuff. 

Yeah. We've got a lot of [00:03:00] options out here. It's a dangerous place to live. Yeah.  

Wendy Pease: Yeah.  

Tom Gallagher: We have deer, we have fox. We have raccoons, rabbits, all sorts of birds, and wildlife like that. So it's never a dull moment. We always are interested to see what comes walking by on our cameras outside the house. 

Wendy Pease: Oh, okay. So on your wildlife farm, do you have horses or any of those?  

Tom Gallagher: We don't now. We had horses for, oh, about 20 years at our place. My wife and my daughter both rode competitively for a while. So, we spent a lot of time out in the barn, cleaning up after the horses, getting ready for the next horse show, and all of those kind of things, we just last year lost the last one, and that was kind of a sad, you know, change of era for us, so I don't think we'll go back to that now. 

 But we are getting ready to go on our anniversary trip, Annie just booked horse riding on the beach in Ireland. So [00:04:00] one little fix that way.  

Wendy Pease: That's fantastic. So speaking of Ireland, it is a global marketing show. So we might want to talk about that. So tell me a little bit about what you're doing now. 

Tom Gallagher: So currently I'm here at Diversified Automation. I came on board two years ago. The owner at the time and I have known each other for a long time, he was getting ready to move on to another company. He'd sold this organization to a parent who we have by the name of Leadec which is based in Stuttgart, Germany, and Leadec is a global company. 

Um, I've come into Diversified Automation as a CEO, so I've been running the organization for the last year or so here, and we work collaboratively with our Leadec partners, both in Germany and other parts of the world. They have offices in India and China and South America, as well as all over Europe.[00:05:00]  

Wendy Pease: And so, how are you working in conjunction with them?  

Tom Gallagher: Well, that's a great question. So, Leadec's primary business is supporting automotive manufacturing. They actually have people that work in Mercedes Benz or Volkswagen or Ford, Chevy. Yeah, all those major manufacturing operations. 

Leadec provides people to go into their facilities every day and help maintain the equipment. We predominantly work in the parcel handling industry. So, when you order packages on Amazon, or you get a shipment delivery from UPS or FedEx, most likely that package has passed through facilities that we provide the control systems for. 

So we help get your packages delivered to you, as quickly as they come in. Leadec acquired us for the purpose of expanding their footprint and other areas of industry. So what we work on together is we talked to customers like FedEx and others [00:06:00] in, for instance, all through Europe, FedEx has parcel scanning machines that they're getting ready to replace because they're end of life. We partner with Leadec to provide the labor and engineering expertise to go in and help them figure out how to do those replacement projects. And we do that in South America, Mercado Libre is sort of the Amazon equivalent down there. 

 We've collaborated with our partners in South America to have discussions with Mercado to do the same kind of work that we do here down there with our Leadec partners. We're looking to sort of, kind of cross reference our respective industries and work together to provide services in new ways for some of those customers. 

Wendy Pease: So when you came into the company, they were already doing international work then?  

Tom Gallagher: Not so much. Diversified Automation is predominantly a US based operation. Over the 20 year history or so of the [00:07:00] company, they've done a few projects outside of the United States and Canada, in Europe once or twice, in Mexico, a little here and there, but predominantly in the US so this relationship with Leadec is really building out that infrastructure to do more of that kind of work outside of the borders here.  

Wendy Pease: What's your background in doing international work?  

Tom Gallagher: Well, over the years, our industry is kind of funny that, that way, I used to do a lot of work for the US Postal Service. Same kind of work, handling packages, controls, and things like that for their systems. And back in the 80s, I got involved with Siemens, who was another German based company, interestingly, and I did a lot of collaborative work with them when they were trying to enter the US, 

so we were bidding jobs here in the US, we were bidding jobs in Europe, we bid a job in Singapore for a postal organization there, and so very early on in my career, I had the opportunity to work [00:08:00] with people in other countries to try to pursue work in other parts of the globe and that theme has been kind of a recurring situation, whether I was working in my original place when I started the postal work to working for a company called FKI Logistex that had a UK based owner. 

And then I worked for a number of years for Honeywell, before coming here to DA and Honeywell also global organization. And we pursued business globally when I was with Honeywell, um, more in Asia and the APAC region when I was there. The opportunities come up in different parts of the world and the organizations that I'm with had the wherewithal to chase the business. 

Wendy Pease: Yeah, so you've had a lot of different experience. I'd love for you to share, like, some of the biggest challenges you've had, like unexpected things or [00:09:00] things you wish that you knew before you got into it, because it always helps us learn from that.  

Tom Gallagher: Well, the big thing I think I mentioned when we talked earlier, had I known how often I was going to find myself working with German counterparts, I would have prioritized learning to speak German right away, because, it has come up over and over and over again in my career, and I'm sorry to say that even today, I've started to take another run at that, and I still haven't mastered the language to the point where I can have a conversation, so, I'm hopeful that this time around, I have meetings in the fall that I'm going to be up to a working level when I get to that meeting. 

That was one of the big ones. There are some things that have come up depending on where I was either in Europe or in Asia. Just for me, the big thing is noticing the differences in how people do things outside of the office. Meals in particular. Going out for, you know, [00:10:00] just to socialize outside of the work environment. 

 That to me is where it's been most interesting to see how different cultures handle, Hey, what do we do when we go out for dinner? What do you do after a meal? How long does the event go on? Those kinds of things. What kind of breakfast do you have? That's a big one. I, I enjoy getting up early and getting a good meal. 

And, uh, the breakfasts around the world are always the, you know, really intriguing thing to me. How different that is, depending on where you are.  

Wendy Pease: Okay. So give us some examples, like meals or socializing and then the different breakfast you've had. I'd love for you to dig down in and tell us about them. 

Tom Gallagher: Ah, well, one of the things I am grateful for is that the time I've had working with German companies, I've had the opportunity to spend some time in Europe and I love the way the Europeans do breakfast. I love the cheeses and meats and things like that, that they do more often than not in the places I've been. 

I do also like the fact that they do [00:11:00] coffee a little bit differently than we typically do here.  

Wendy Pease: What did you notice about the coffee?  

Tom Gallagher: Well, I mean, it's pretty typical here for most Americans to have regular drip coffee, I mean, okay, we have Starbucks and people do a lot more now than they did, 10, 15 years ago, but just the prevalence of cappuccino, espresso, and other drinks like that versus the straight up drip coffee. 

 That's a piece that I've enjoyed quite a bit. And you would have seen this, for instance, when you go to Singapore, the thing that surprised me there was the number of toast places that they have there. Mm-Hmm. For avocado toast and things like that. 

And matcha tea is another thing that you don't see as much of here that's much more prevalent there as an example. So just a couple of things like that. Annie. Now we compare notes when she travels and she's been to Korea several times and she really enjoys the kind of food that they have there. 

In fact, actually, one of her [00:12:00] colleagues slash friends took her to a gourmet cooking place when she visited one time and she actually got certified to prepare bimbimbap, which is probably her favorite dish. She is, she's a certified chef for that. 

Wendy Pease: Oh, right. Well, we're going to have to figure out how to get from Massachusetts, Kentucky to have that. That's one of my favorite meals too.  

Tom Gallagher: Oh, she loves it.  

Wendy Pease: Yeah, yeah, that's great. So you were talking about the most differences are outside of the offices. So the socializing and going for meals. So talk to me about what you expect in the US and then, an example of something that kind of threw you because it was so different.  

Tom Gallagher: There are some things that aren't too surprising, but they're just a little bit different. A lot of times my German colleagues, for instance, they will enjoy taking a walk after a meal, after lunch or after dinner. 

That's something that has [00:13:00] been sort of a steady theme. I've seen whether, you know, I work with company A, B, or C, some of those individuals that's been something I've found to be sort of a regular rhythm for how they do things when we go to visit.  

Wendy Pease: That's so healthy. How long would they walk after a meal? 

Tom Gallagher: Oh, maybe 15 -20 minutes, something like that. Or intentionally choose restaurants that are more than a block or two away from the hotel, partly for that reason, to get a little bit of fresh air and things like that going to and from. One of the things that we ran into years ago now, a lot of Europe has different ideas about work schedules and things like that than we do. 

And we ran into a situation at one point, we had a really, really large opportunity that we were chasing and I traveled to meet with my colleagues and work on a proposal in Germany. We were in Nuremberg at the time. And, We, uh, left the office to go get something to eat with the intention of coming [00:14:00] back and working probably until 11, 12 in the evening and start again early the next morning. 

We got back and we discovered that the government had passed the regulation about workplace health and safety, and the law required companies not to allow employees back into the facility after so many hours of working for a day. And all of these guys had worked too long, and so we literally couldn't get back into the building to continue going. 

So, uh, you know, there were some things like that we discovered midstream. We had to make some course corrections on how to get our things done.  

Wendy Pease: What country was this?  

Tom Gallagher: That was in Germany.  

Wendy Pease: That was in Germany. 

Tom Gallagher: Yeah, but since then I've worked at other places here that we've had offices, And Italy is the one that really stands out is, you know, there's a lot of Europe that they take long vacations in the summer and we were on a conference call with our Italian colleagues [00:15:00] in July at one year and he said, okay, we're working away feverishly to get this project on schedule and get things completed and built. 

 And we get to sign off the call and they said, okay, well, we'll see you in September. And we said, what? And he said, yeah, we're going to be on vacation in August.  

We said, what do you mean? And they said, yeah, the whole month. And I just, I couldn't even wrap my mind around how that worked. So definitely need to know about those kinds of things when you're working with colleagues outside the US.  

Wendy Pease: Yes. Yes. I have been in Europe in August vacation. Everything is packed if you're on the beach vacation, but September is wonderful because it's so quiet and the weather is so nice still.  

Tom Gallagher: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.  

Wendy Pease: Yeah. Now, how about fears? You know, when you've done international work, what have been your biggest fears personal or business?  

Tom Gallagher: For the most [00:16:00] part, I've never really struggled in that particular area. There's other things that over the years have had concerns about, but mostly my concerns, you know, when I have been chasing things internationally, if we're whether we had the right partner for the country that we're pursuing working. We had developed at one point a group of partners that we were chasing work all through different parts of Europe, whether it was Italy or Spain or parts of Germany, France, and all of a sudden we got to some opportunities in the UK and we tried to pursue the work with that same group of people and we quickly found out that once you crossed over from the rest of Europe into the UK, some of the working parameters and the costs changed quite a bit with them. So those were concerns we had. 

And I think the other thing was in the Asia Pacific region, going into some countries [00:17:00] where you couldn't necessarily produce equipment from one region and take it to another because of some intercompany kind of frictions. I always had some concerns about whether or not we had the right team to be able to fully execute and cover all the costs, particularly the import export costs and things like that that start to come into play when you're shipping equipment. 

So that's probably my biggest fear was just making sure we had the financial elements all covered with what we were pursuing.  

Wendy Pease: Okay, so when you were talking about friction, you're not talking about friction between the people, you're just talking the friction between the business processes and the equipment as to whether it would work and align. 

Did I get that right? Okay.  

Tom Gallagher: Well, there's some of that. There's some technical pieces of it. But for instance, not too long ago now, we actually were bidding a job we were asked could we support jobs in Hong Kong and Vietnam? Okay. [00:18:00] Leadec has an office in China. All right. 

But when we talked to them about work in Vietnam, they quickly told us, yes, well, you're going to have to find another place to get equipment because Vietnam was not going to accept equipment that was coming from China, that's just kind of a standing problem between those two countries there and Korea. 

I know when we bid some jobs there, similar border restrictions with receiving goods from other countries that are in that area, China in particular. So that created some logistical issues for us to figure out where can we get the equipment if we can't fabricate it where we would normally do in our home location in China. 

So now we've got to go to Malaysia or Thailand or someplace else and develop different relationships.  

Wendy Pease: Oh, interesting. Because coming from the United States, you know which countries [00:19:00] that would cause problems for here. So as America can go into another country, you've got to be aware that it's going to vary. 

Tom Gallagher: It does. Yeah, it each one of those locations. You really need to have a knowledgeable partner that's in the region that can help you navigate through those things understand where the where the tripping points are.  

Wendy Pease: Right. Yeah, when we talked earlier to get ready for the call you had mentioned something about negotiating and how difficult or frustrating that can be. 

Can you talk a little bit about that?  

Tom Gallagher: Sure! Even if we were just talking about here in the US, working with one customer to the next, there are all sorts of different styles of how companies do business, and how they approach that whole process of getting to the final price and the final terms and conditions. 

One of the things that we ran into that was more of a logistical problem, I guess, is we were bidding [00:20:00] work for DHL and, um, they're a really good company to work with, but the way that they procure their services was they would put out a request for proposals, you would respond to that, they would evaluate it, and they would give you very good feedback about that, and then you would respond, and if you were successful in your response, they would say, okay, now we want you to come to Milan, let's say, you know, we've been a couple of jobs in Milan and they said, all right, we want you to come and meet with our selection team in Milan, we're going to have a two-day meeting, you come in for day one, and we will sit down and review your proposal, make sure we clearly understand what you've offered, we can point out if there's anything where you've quoted something that doesn't make sense or it's incorrect. 

And then we will meet with you the following morning again. So whatever corrections that you need to make, you need to make in that 24-hour window or less and come back to the table and be prepared to put [00:21:00] your final offer on the table right then and there. And some of the people on the selection committee wouldn't necessarily be English speaking. 

 But they would have technical questions. So we would have interpreters trying to navigate it through answering questions of the team in language for them, and then dealing with walking out from day one meetings, coming up with the revised answers. And then in our case, going back through at Honeywell, we had a whole approval process. 

We had to get back to our people in the States and try to get approvals before we walked in the door the next day. So timing wise, you're six hours off. Now we're in the middle of the night trying to get approvals from our people back in the States. So there were logistics like that timing wise because of the way the customer chose to do the negotiations. 

Wendy Pease: That's crazy. That's a quick turnaround. Oh, yeah.  

Tom Gallagher: And that was their standard way of doing [00:22:00] things.  

Wendy Pease: And that was standard for DHL all over the place or typically in Milan?  

Tom Gallagher: You know, interestingly, it was the case all through Europe and Eastern Europe, we also pursued some work in Asia as well. 

 Same process there, but in the US, it was not like that. They did it differently here for some reason, which I was grateful for. We still had a lot of the same process, but not that piece of it.  

Wendy Pease: Yeah, that's really interesting. How much more time did you get in the US?  

Tom Gallagher: It would range anywhere from a couple of days to a week or more, depending on the size and scope of the project. 

Wendy Pease: That surprises me.  

Tom Gallagher: Yeah, it shocked us the first time too.  

Wendy Pease: In the US we have such a reputation of being impatient and want to drive things along. Whereas In the rest of the world, relationships are more [00:23:00] important. And so, it seems kind of flipped from what I would have expected, but maybe there's some efficiencies in there. 

Tom Gallagher: Well, I think the one thing that they do in that particular case is they spend a lot of time on the front end vetting their suppliers and making sure that the suppliers have all the right credentials. And you have some ongoing relationships and meetings with those folks outside of the project specific, you know, opportunities. 

So to some degree, the reason you're at the table in the first place is that you've already got the relationship with the organization, if not necessarily all the people at the table, usually some of the procurement people we would know because we worked with them ongoing, but the local folks that were on the selection committee would be people we often would have never met before. 

Wendy Pease: Okay. All right. Yeah. That makes more sense to me then, but, interesting way to do it.  

Tom Gallagher: I really [00:24:00] actually liked their process a lot. That part of it was challenging, but from the perspective of getting information, they were really better than most about helping vendors put their best foot forward. 

Wendy Pease: Yeah, it seems like there was a lot of communication the first day. So you kind of understood what you needed.  

Tom Gallagher: But we did always have to have a partner that was capable of speaking the language of whatever the region was, we had to have that within the team, and if we could get multiple people, we would do that as well. 

Wendy Pease: You know so let's jump over to language because that is a big part of global marketing. You said at the beginning you wish you would have learned German better but you've been all over the world so you could have kind of picked German to learn or Spanish to learn or Chinese to learn. So is there a specific reason?  

Tom Gallagher: Well, I've thought about that. Annie and I've had a lot of conversations about that specifically. And the typical top two for us are German [00:25:00] and Spanish. Because partly, we do have I guess a little bit more activity with our Mexican and South American customers, people that have operations here in the States and also south of the border. 

 But also, and I don't know what it's like where you are, but here in Kentucky, we've got a very large Hispanic population. We've got a lot of Spanish speaking people around. And also interestingly, my youngest son married a girl from Brownsville, Texas who her whole family is Mexican and most of their family they're bilingual. 

And just to have better interactions with them, it would be nice if we were able to converse in Spanish as well. So we go back and forth with those two, but those seem to be the biggest for us. And Annie also speaks a little bit of French, so she can sort of survive if she's put in that environment. 

Wendy Pease: [00:26:00] I speak a lot, and so I'll often tell audiences, well, you only need to speak one language well, and then you can hire an interpreter to help facilitate the conversation. But it is difficult to pick that one language and who knows where your world is gonna take you. 

And it can take years to learn another language.  

Tom Gallagher: Well, what is your best secondary language?  

Wendy Pease: My best secondary is Spanish, but I went to first and second grade in Mexico and then I came back and took it all through school and college. I can do vacation travel, but the people we have working for us, they are fully bilingual and they specialize in different areas. 

So you might have a marketing translator and you might have an engineer who specializes in technical documentation. So they really deep dive into the area of specialty. That's great. So you've worked with translators and interpreters. I'd love to hear your experience with that.  

Tom Gallagher: You know, we've been pretty fortunate. 

I can say that we've worked [00:27:00] with a number of really good people. Some of them, fortunately for us have been people that we already had on staff that just happened to be able to speak the language where we're going. So, the best people that we work with. And for me, Specifically, that's some of the people that I work with that happen to be my colleagues. 

It was really great because we're in a technical business and so when we go and sit down with customers to have discussions, the discussions invariably revolve around a number of different technical issues. And to have somebody that can both translate and understand at a technical level what the customer is asking for, they can kind of fill in the blanks between sometimes, even when you're communicating in the same language, technical issues can be difficult for a whole set of different reasons, because it's almost like its own bit of a language itself, and you have to understand what somebody omitted when [00:28:00] they were asking a question or when they were making a statement and if the translator doesn't have that additional understanding in their head you literally are losing things in the translation. 

That has been my experience. The best people have been those that have the technical background in addition to what we're doing. But we've certainly had a lot of good people doing things from sitting in meetings, design meetings, or negotiation meetings, we have people that translate documents for us, either specifications or working documentation, manuals, training information, things like that. 

 To me, it seems like there's almost a subset of people that, yeah, not just know the language, but also know the business a little bit. And those have been the folks that have done the best service for us over time.  

Wendy Pease: Right, right. And people do when they're in that industry. 

So it's good to hear from your standpoint as you can feel it as they're helping. [00:29:00] The best people are the ones that have that specialty. And that's as an agency, we work really hard to match those people up rather than just putting someone there or the whole AI for people that haven't had the experience. 

They're thinking, Oh, this is going to change the industry, but you lose that specialization.  

Tom Gallagher: I don't think AI is nearly well versed in those kind of nuances at this point.  

Maybe in time, but not today.  

Wendy Pease: So, we're getting to the end of the time, and I know that I have I forewarned you that I'm going to ask you this question, and I think it's going to be a German word. 

So what's your favorite foreign word?  

Tom Gallagher: My favorite foreign word really is my favorite word because of my family. So, years ago, when I first started traveling to Germany, we were just at the place where our kids were very young. And they were [00:30:00] just pre-reading. So, at one point, I was there, and I always tried to get something to bring back home for them when I got back. 

And, uh, I happened to be in a store, and I found a book. It was a Sesame Street book. And it was an alphabet book. It was bilingual and it showed all the different letters of the alphabet with a particular word like apple, and it would be in English and in German. And it went through the whole alphabet that way. 

 Our kids just laughed and laughed and laughed when we got to the letter U because the word that they used for you was underwear. The German word is unterhosen. So unterhosen is my word for that reason. And to this day, we still talk about, they talk about it with their kids now, which is doubly funny to me. 

Wendy Pease: That's fantastic. And what a happy smile memory that it brings back with it [00:31:00] when your kids were that age.  

Tom Gallagher: It's a lot of fun in our house every time that word comes up.  

Wendy Pease: That is a good one. I love that. Well, do you have any final recommendations for our listeners?  

Tom Gallagher: Well, the one thing I would tell anybody, and it doesn't matter what business you're in, what you're doing, if you have an opportunity to do something internationally, even if you've never done it before, do not hesitate to say yes. 

I think it is one of the best experiences that you can have to travel to different parts of the world, meet different people that live different ways, they have different cultural traditions. That's something that really, really widens your perspective. And if you're worried about failing in business, boy, I've been doing this for a long time. 

And you may fail. You know what? And that's okay. Because when that happens, [00:32:00] if you're smart, you'll think about it, you'll learn from it, and you'll be that much better for the next opportunity. So I would just say, say yes. If you get an opportunity to do anything internationally, go for it immediately.  

Wendy Pease: Such fantastic advice and exactly why I started the podcast is that less than 5% of US companies export, and most people have a fear of language and culture, and that's what holds them back. And so your episode's been so great with talking about how to handle that, and then your final recommendation, it nails it. So where can people reach you if they'd like to know more about you or Diversified Automation? 

Tom Gallagher: Oh, well, I guess you can get me on LinkedIn. I don't really spend a lot of time on Facebook. I know a lot of people do. That's not my thing, but I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me Tom Gallagher. My contact information is all on there. So yeah, I would just look me up for Tom Gallagher under Diversified [00:33:00] Automation. And you can check us out that way. And if you want to look at our Diversified Automation website, it's diversified-automation.com. And if you're in a business where you need some industrial controls, we would love to talk to you.  

Wendy Pease: Perfect. Thank you so much. So thank you listeners for hanging in here and learning so much good stuff from Tom. 

We're definitely going to send this out to all the other people that we knew at Penn State during the years that we were there. So they can catch up and hear what Tom and Annie are doing. Two of the favorite people in the group. If you don't happen to know Tom, but you learned something, why don't you share it with somebody else or give us a five star rating so other people can find The Global Marketing Show when they're thinking about doing international business. So, Auf Wiedersehen. Is that how you say it, Tom?  

Tom Gallagher: Auf wiedersehen. Good to be with you. Thank you so much for the invite. This was really a lot of fun. Thank you.  

Wendy Pease: Oh, it was. It [00:34:00] was. 

 

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