John Shegerian: Get the latest Impact Podcast right into your inbox each week, subscribe by entering your email address at ImpactPodcast.com to make sure you never miss an interview. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit ERIdirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Close Loop Partners. Close Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Close Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and this is a very special edition of the Impact Podcast. It’s from Fresno to Paris, and we welcome today our guest, Benoit Leblanc. He’s the deputy CEO of the TRIGO Group, and he’s in Paris tonight. Welcome Benoit to the Impact Podcast.

Benoit Leblanc: Thank you, John. I appreciate the invitation. Happy to speak to you today.

John: It’s great to have you with us. Benoit, before we talk about all the important things in ESG that you’re doing with your colleagues at the TRIGO Group, can you please share a little bit about your background, where you grew up, and how you got on this wonderful and fascinating and important journey that you and your colleagues at TRIGO are on together?

Benoit: Well, I come from France, as you can hear, maybe. I grew up in the center of France, in a semi-industrial, semi-rural area. And I grew up there, and as many French people, when I wanted to study, I went to Paris, because that’s where a lot of the interesting stuff is happening. So I made my studies in political sciences, economics, and business out in Paris. I studied, actually, a year in the States, in the Bay Area, at Berkeley, for one year. It was a pretty great experience, very happy about that.

And then I moved back to France, and I started my career, not in industry, but in the finance industry, and then for investment funds, so a pretty financial start. And then, at some point in my career, I met the folks from TRIGO, and this company caught my eyes and ears, because it was very much a growing business, active in the services industry for the automotive sector at the time only. And I was fascinated by the growth trajectory of that business, and the value it was adding to the customer. So I got along with the management team, and I decided to actually join the adventure.

And I resigned from my investment job in the center of Paris, and moved on to that journey in TRIGO with the team, that was 10 years ago, exactly. And since then, maybe I’ll describe TRIGO a little bit more, but since then, we had an interesting journey. The company was multiplied by four in terms of size. We went from a pretty much Europe-centric business into a pretty global business. Our number one country today, number one geography, is actually not France anymore. France became number two, and the number one is now the USA.

John: Wow, wonderful. How many employees do you have around the world right now, approximately, Benoit?

Benoit: So we have 10,000 employees in 26 countries. So that’s quite a sizable group.

John: Very sizable. And I don’t want you to give away any, obviously, proprietary information, but for our listeners and viewers who aren’t familiar with the TRIGO Group, and by the way, for our listeners and viewers to find the TRIGO Group, you go to www.trigo-group.com. TRIGOgroup.com. Who are some of your clients that you could talk about so our listeners and viewers can get a little taste of understanding of who you service and what your mission is there.

Benoit: Yeah, so our customers are essentially large manufacturers of the automotive, aerospace, railway, and heavy transportation industries. So just to name a few, automotive, we’re looking at Stellantis, BMW, Tesla, and the likes. And a lot of their suppliers [crosstalk].

John: Understood.

Benoit: And then in aerospace, we’re looking at Airbus in Europe, and then a few of the defense industry manufacturers of the USA.

John: Understood. One thing in my travels, running my recycling business was I’ve learned over the years that historically, Europe, especially France, Germany, and many of the other great European nations are more DNA, ESG, circular economy, sustainability, forward than North America was historically. Talk a little bit about that. Growing up in France, am I correct in my belief that it was culturally and socially more a part of your culture and DNA as a resident of France than it would have been for me growing up in North America, in the United States? And how has that informed your career as well?

Benoit: Yeah, thank you for that question, John. I absolutely agree with you. And I want to compare, and I’ve lived a little bit in the US, not so long, but I think I can still make a few comparisons, but clearly viewed from Europe, from France especially, I think environmental aspects are on the top of the political agenda now for a while. One thing that we don’t have in France, as you know, is oil.

So maybe that’s one thing that deterred the public away from fossil fuel. And it’s a fact that we don’t have any. And therefore, we might have had to look at alternatives early on in order just to survive and to fuel our economy. But I think there’s not only pragmatism behind that, there’s also some maybe more, let’s call them, ideological or political views behind and a strong push from the Green movement also that has put those matters on top of the agenda.

And I think it’s true across Europe. I think it’s as true in France as in Germany, for example. And as a consequence of that, there’s a lot of political push in favor of environmental matters. A lot of new rules, new regulations that apply to companies and that every company needs to think about.

John: So with that in mind, talk a little bit about this fairly new phenomena, let’s say five-to-seven-year phenomena of the trend towards ESG behavior. And what is your ESG strategy look like at TRIGO that you’re the most excited and proud about?

Benoit: Clearly that those ESG matter, whether it’s in Europe or in the States, we saw a clear acceleration, as you said, over the last five years. And this is from 360 degrees around us. We’re talking about our employees, they want us to state what we want to do and what we do well and how we help the planet, essentially, and our people, because it’s not only environment in ESG, there’s also the social and governance aspect, which should not be left aside. I think we talk a lot about the environment, but there’s other things.

So the employees, our shareholders and our financial institutions around us are now asking us to report on ESG, to fill in a lot of questionnaires, to say what we do to improve on a number of things. So our shareholders, stakeholder group is now raising the bar in terms of what they expect from us as a company in terms of environment, social governance matters. For example, we’re being audited now more and more by external parties just to to support the fact that we’re acting on the ESG matter. Some of that auditing is regulatory. We have to solve it is just because our stakeholder group wants it. And it’s part of their own strategy. Also the third dimension, so employees, stakeholders, and customers, of course, our customer base used to just inquire about ESG, are you are you doing any?

And from that, it then became a requirement, said, “Okay, we want you to do this and we want you to report on it.” From their point of view, it then evolved into not only we want you to do it, can you help us with it?

Actually, can you help our own ESG with our supply base, et cetera? So clearly, we saw that massive evolution and we had to raise our game a lot internally at TRIGO to transform this sort of multiple faceted requirements from all kinds of stakeholders into a plan, into a plan going forward, into something that’s meaningful, something that we can articulate and we can then communicate to our stakeholder group, our employees, our customers. And that’s palatable for them. And that makes an impact because at the end, that’s what matters. It’s the impact you make.

John: It’s truly no longer a zero sum game when it comes to being the leader like you are as the CEO of TRIGO Group. You can’t go it alone. It’s a multichannel approach of sustainability and ESG has and with, like you said, clients, employees, Wall Street and investors, and even now your suppliers. Talk a little bit about suppliers, because not only are your clients looking to you for inspiration and guidance on ESG, I assume your suppliers are also now being asked by you to report on their ESG and sustainability impacts which will further inform your ability to execute on your ESG strategy.

Benoit: Yes, yes, absolutely. It’s absolutely true. John, TRIGO is a service company. So what we do is to actually provide a human service to our customer base, which is big manufacturers of the transportation industries. So our main force is our employees. So we have a few suppliers in IT, in workforce suppliers, but to be quite honest with you, what matters most for us, it’s not our suppliers because we have a few that we handle and that we are asking ESG criteria about, but what matters for us is our customer suppliers.

So for example, if I look at a large automotive manufacturers, they are going to have all kinds of stuff to do with their supply base, because that’s where most of the, for example, carbon emission of their manufacturing will come not from their plants, but from their supply base, from the manufacturing of their components, from the logistics of their components, from the choice of who they decide to work with, how these suppliers manage their manufacturing sites, manage their people, manage the integrity. We look at our suppliers, but more importantly, what we’re now increasingly looking into is to provide a service for our customers, the manufacturers, to help them assess.

John: Understood. Let’s go back to the reporting aspect. Do you put out an annual ESG and impact report every year?

Benoit: Yes, this is something that we’re now doing. Again, part of that last five-year emergence was, okay, guys, let’s stop talking and let’s start measuring, because we’ll not do it. I think that’s the short version, John, and I think…

John: I like it.

Benoit: I very much agree with it. So before you start to declare, I want to improve this, I want to improve that, I want to do this, and I’m going to have an impact, well, what impact do you make if you don’t measure anything? The first step of our plan, and that’s like a couple of years back, three years back, you start measuring what you do in terms of carbon emission, in terms of employee wellness, in terms of governance, integrity, and all kinds of things. So what we did at TRIGO is that we built a plan, and phase one of that plan is everything we want to do in the future, we start by measuring it systematically across the company.

John: Got it. So what’s measurable is manageable, and that further informs your execution on your ESG and green and sustainability plan by measuring it and then reporting on it, openly reporting on it.

Benoit: And reporting on it, exactly. And then once you make it transparent, then you can start activating level one, level two, level three, to actually improve stuff. So I’ll give you an example, for example, we started measuring our own CO2 emissions, our own carbon emissions. So we had a full methodology that was deployed across our 26 countries. And we got to the conclusion that we generate 2.4 tons of CO2 per employee, and then we kind of benchmark it against other service companies and we see what we can do with it.

We also saw that most of that, and this is only what you get when you start to analyze, most of our carbon emissions are actually not what we produce, because we’re a service company, we don’t manufacture things, we serve these customers. So it’s actually people traveling around and going to work and going back from work. Once you know that, and this is where we are today, then you can start having an impact and acting and deciding where you will make more of an impact.

John: I assume Benoit, but I want to ask you first, that your impact report lives in perpetuity on your website, TRIGO.com, T-R-I-G-O-group.com, it lives on that website?

Benoit: Yes. The one that you will look at today is actually, I think, a version from a year and a half ago, and we’ve actually gone quite a long way since then. As I said systematic measurement of things such as employee wellness, carbon emission, we were doing it in many subsidiaries, especially the big ones, but we really started to systematize these things over the last 24 months.

And then we had objective measurement of what our impact is and what we want to improve. And based on that, we refreshed our plan. So we’re actually probably going to issue a new report. So I encourage your viewers to maybe connect on the website back in maybe six months from now, something like that, where we’ll have the refresh plan, which will, I think, be a little sharper in terms of where we want to move things up.

John: But it’s true. I mean, even as a CEO of my company and you being the CEO of your company, I enjoy every year the report coming out because I actually then feel the palpable and tangible improvements that we made instead of, like you said, just talking the talk. It’s no longer okay. You’ve really got to walk the walk in there. And that report makes everybody prove out the walk that they’re on inside the company and then report on it. So I agree with you. It’s sort of really a fun moment every year that we publish ours as well.

Benoit: Yeah. It’s also in that kind of report as a leader of a company, just like you, once you commit in a report, once you declare that you want to do this and that, then you have to live up for your word. And that’s very much, I think, the whole ESG ecosystem, that’s how it’s evolving people to declare intentions. But once they have[?] declared intention, they know they’re going to be on the spotlight looked at and they have to deliver on them. And we really want to impose that on ourselves because we think it’s a very virtuous thing to do, actually, to say what we want to do and then to commit to it.

John: And then also there’s a wonderful part to that because since we all have started to realize as leaders that it’s not a zero-sum game, that this is a collaboration, and the better that you do and the better that others do as well and that we can do makes the world a better place. And ultimately, we all win when the environment gets more decarbonized and it improves all of the living conditions for all of us, whether we’re in Paris or New York or Mumbai or Shanghai. The environment is only one. And all of us working together can really collaboratively make the environment get better together. So I think there’s a real elegance and beauty and collaborative spirit around the reporting and getting inspired by each other’s works as well.

Benoit: Absolutely true, John. Do you say in English emulation?

John: Emulation. That’s a great word.

Benoit: Emulation between peer companies, I think it’s actually, again, pretty virtuous.

John: Talk a little bit about manufacturers and OEMs who are also in your client base. How can they learn from you and historically, what has been some of your greatest benefits to them and inspirations that you’ve been able to share with your OEM and manufacturer clients?

Benoit: Well, one thing before learning from us, they actually benefit from our impact. And let me tell you why.

John: Yeah, let me hear.

Benoit: We’re in the quality business. So what we do is to improve the quality of the components by inspecting them and making sure that the right components go into the right vehicles and that at the end, the cars and the planes that are produced are conformed and efficient. And what we strongly believe, and again, we have now measurement to actually evidence it is that the quality of the manufacturing and the quality of the parts will lead to more efficiency and then less waste, less waste of parts, less waste of energy to produce non-conform parts.

Because if you waste energy in producing non-conform parts then at the end, you don’t even mount into the cars because you just throw them away. It’s a waste. It’s a wasteful [inaudible]. So that quality process for us is a strong lever to reduce the waste in the industry. This is spot on what TRIGO does. We check quality and we make sure that the quality of that manufacturing process is the right one. We said, okay, let’s try to measure that, okay? Essentially what we do is that by providing quality services and appropriate checks, we reduce scrap. For example, we rework parts that we check they are non-conform and instead of throwing them in the bin, we can rework them so that they can then be mounted into a car and still be conform and don’t impair the quality of the car. So that’s waste avoidance.

John: That’s huge.

Benoit: It’s actually pretty huge. We try to approximate the savings that we make, that we generate for our customers. We think that those savings are actually twice as big as all of the carbon that we emit with our staff all year long. So it’s a pretty sizable game that we can generate.

John: Benoit, for our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Benoit Leblanc on. He was kind enough to stay up late in Paris tonight. So we’re doing a Paris to Fresno discussion here. He’s the deputy CEO of the TRIGO Group. You can find Benoit and his colleagues and all the wonderful work they’re doing in ESG and sustainability at www.TRIGO-group.com. Two of the biggest trends in our lifetime of recent times is this trend of virtual reality, robotics and AI. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re leveraging some of these new trends and technologies for carbon emission reduction?

Benoit: Yeah, thanks for the question. That’s a theme I love to talk about, John. So I’ll try to be clear. But cut me if I get too long. So yeah, we at TRIGO, historically we’ve been pretty much a human-based inspection company. So a lot of people check in components. But recently we decided, okay, hey, let’s innovate. We don’t want to be disrupted by any technology. So instead of being disrupted by alternative technology, robots replacing humans, essentially, let’s do it ourselves and let’s try it on ourselves.

So for example, what we did is that a year and a half ago, we acquired a startup company based in Paris, which is doing automated optical inspection machines. So essentially cameras to inspect parts with an artificial intelligence software to run it. So what this machine does, and I’ll describe it in a few words, because then it will illustrate how we think it saves carbon emissions at the end, is that you’re going to be inspecting parts with a camera, then the software will learn what a good part is and what a wrong part is with machine learning. Okay, so it’s an AI software basically that will learn and that will improve with time and that will set its own parameters at the end to only reject very precisely the wrong parts and keep the good parts. It’s essentially doing what a human can do, but finer, faster and in certain conditions, not all of them, but in certain conditions, it can be a very interesting technology.

What’s the result of that? A big challenge in quality, quality control is to reject the wrong parts, only they’re wrong. But you don’t want to over waste parts that could be good, but then you’re not too sure, so you throw them in the bin. That’s a waste. That’s what we call over quality. Over quality means that you want to be on the safe side, so your check is a little bit too constraining, and then you throw too many parts that you could have kept had you done a finer check, okay? With AI, the machine will learn so well that it will narrow down the criteria so that it will only reject the parts that are rreally not the good ones.

It will keep as many parts as possible in the process that can then be mounted in a car, in a plane or anywhere. By doing that, you reduce the scrap rate. Reducing the scrap rate means more money for the customer because less waste, and obviously less waste for the planet, because this is materials, raw materials that have been produced that went through a very heavy manufacturing process that can be kept in the system instead of being thrown away. So [inaudible] AI is, for us, one of the strong levers that we use to improve the quality.

John: And suffice it to say, you’re so excited about that. You believe that its future is large in terms of the ongoing ESG-related help that it was going to continue to give you to inform your clients in terms of predictive analytics and other information that will continue to make them more waste-friendly in terms of meaning less waste, more diversion.

Benoit: Yes. Well, you mentioned something which I think is an interesting angle, John, it’s predictive analytics.

John: Yeah, tell me about that.

Benoit: You can do that with AI, but you can do that with just any data that you gather. And that’s the second area in which we’re really taking a hard look at the moment. It’s how all of that data that we’re gathering about the non-quality of our customer base can be transformed into predictive analytics and therefore preventive actions to prevent that non-quality from happening and therefore to, again, reduce the waste.

And then once you have that data gathered, you can run, indeed, an AI software on it to do predictive analysis. So this is something that we’re working on. We have a few sort of R&D stage projects that are showing pretty interesting results, so quite promising. Indeed, we strongly believe that data analytics powered by AI can lead to significant efficiency gain. And when I say efficiency, as always, I mean dollar and I mean carbon.

John: It’s so great that you just said that. Benoit, you’re a leader. You have a very big company. You serve as some of the greatest, most iconic brands on the planet. Is it your belief that good sustainability practices, because a lot of people are very worried. They think that being sustainable means costing them money. But is it more true as a leader that gets to touch so many great brands with so many employees that you believe that good sustainability and ESG practices really mean savings when done correctly?

Benoit: Very strongly believe in that, John. I can give you just a very practical example in [crosstalk] life. When you’re a carmaker and you have a supplier which is facing trouble, because they cannot keep up with the production rate or because their factory is not efficient enough to be sustainable. And therefore, it’s risking to just go bust, to go bankrupt. It can be operational. It can be financial reason.

It can be a systemic event that impacted… Any reason. Sustainable in that means that this supplier must go back to normal operation, go back to what they call an automotive run at rate, and to just continue producing efficiently. So part of the job we do is to send our engineers to suppliers like that and fix them. Fixing them means, okay, guys, you have an issue with your logistics flow. It’s not efficient enough. You have an issue with your layout of your factory. Your flows are not optimal, and therefore, we can improve. You have an issue with your production plan that’s not optimized.

Then as a consequence of all of that, you consume too much energy. And this overspending on energy cost is what’s killing your P&L, and it’s what’s killing your accounts. And this is what’s making you unsustainable. And therefore, this is what’s making me, the assembler, at risk of you failing to supply me. So this is a very systemic thing. Interdependencies are huge. Sustainability here, for me, I’m not talking [inaudible] only.

I’m talking just the economic sustainability of that operation. As a consequence of fixing that efficiency matters, you’re going to be saving a whole lot of energy because you’re going to consume less electricity to run your plant. You’re going to produce less non-quality, less non-conformity, therefore, you’re going to throw less components to the bin, et cetera. Again, for me, as you said many times, it’s not a zero-sum game where if the planet wins, the dollar loses. No, it’s actually both. Both will.

John: Makes so much sense what you say. We talked about your 26 offices around the world, and now your second largest is in France, but your largest now in the United States. Talk a little bit about rail systems. Rail systems are coming more and more in vogue here in the United States. They’re already, obviously, very much in vogue in Europe and heavily used in Europe. What’s your hopes for the rail systems in terms of ESG sustainability in the years ahead?

Benoit: Well, if I may, before talking about the U.S., I’m going to just give you a hint on how France works. France is a very centralized country around Paris. The beauty is that we have the high-speed train network, which is organized as basically a star, and the center of that star is Paris. So me, as a true Parisian, I have the luxury of being able to go pretty much anywhere in France within three, four hours with a fast-speed train. And for us, this is just like normal stuff. So this is, I think, very different from what an American would feel.

John: Yeah, you’re very true. In the United States, we don’t have that opportunity. I’m a native New Yorker, so we have the subway system in New York that, yes, we can do that just in New York City, but outside of New York, we don’t have a high-speed rail yet, and we can’t get easily to all over the place like you can in France. You’re right. We’re behind. So what’s your hopes? What do you think is coming? Obviously, you get to have much more visibility than myself and just our normal listeners and viewers. So what do you think and what do you hope is coming in the future for the rail systems?

Benoit: Well, I have big hopes because I’m a believer in rail. Maybe that’s my French bias, but I think also it applies to the US, maybe not for New York to LA, obviously, I think for obvious reasons, but for anything like shorter loops, I think it makes perfect sense. And based on the European example, which is probably ahead of the rest of the world in terms of rail infrastructure and the intensity of the usage, I strongly believe that the only way is [inaudible] for rail in the US. For us, in TRIGO, our rail activity, because rail customers are one of our key customer base, is growing 40% per year at the moment. So it’s really a strong growth business for us in Europe, not yet much in the US, to be honest with you, but probably coming.

John: Without giving away any names or brands or specific information, do you feel from what you’re hearing and seeing that in the US, there’s going to be more of it, even though we might not be France in the future, we’re going to be much better than we are today with regards to our rail opportunities?

Benoit: Yes, I believe so. And our teams that are involved in the Americas are telling me….

John: That’s very promising. Talk a little bit about ESG related risks and supply chains. What’s your plan and what have you been working on to help your clients minimize their supply chain, ESG related risks?

Benoit: Yeah, thanks for asking, John. This is something that we’ve recently addressed, actually. Our clients use us to assess suppliers from an industrial point of view. So, for example, a large automaker, will tell us, okay, I decided to qualify a new supplier for, I don’t know, a new component, like an engine piece or a new battery or whatever. But we need to assess them to see if they are mature enough to supply us. Otherwise, they would put our production at risk. So they use us for that. It’s really an industrial purpose.

Our thought process was, come on, for you, it’s now becoming equally important to assess these suppliers, not only from a production industrial standpoint, but also from an ESG standpoint, because you impose that on yourself and regulations are actually forcing you to also make these ESG assessments on the supply base. So what we did is that we developed an audit offering, an ESG audit offering that we are now proposing to our customer base to say, okay, if you’re going to use us to make an industrial process assessment of one of the suppliers, you might as well use our ESG audit grid to also assess them on ESG criteria.

John: Since you run a multinational company with huge presence in the EU and in North America, talk a little bit about you create this ESG scorecard checklist to help your clients. But is [inaudible] part of the challenge about creating a sort of a one size fits all scorecard that we not have yet harmonized ESG rulings at the SEC and ESG rulings in the EU. And do you hope that comes in the future? And can we get better at that? So with more harmonization will be more standardization and will make it easier on[?] other multinational companies that you advise to perform and have more consistency and continue to reduce their risks?

Benoit: Yeah, this is a, John, very relevant point. The automotive industry, for example, they are very good at standards, very good at standardization. There’s multiple production norms that now apply to most of the global automotive production industry. So we’re not there yet. So the one size fits all ESG scorecard standard does not exist yet in the automotive industry. But we’ll get there for sure, because it’s just going to save all of these manufacturers a lot of effort to assess their suppliers on the same set of criteria on a standard grid.

And we’re kind of trying to participate in that because our scorecard, the one our audit offering that I just described, is pretty much that. We’re transforming these multiple sets of criteria into a reasonably standard scorecard. Obviously, we’ll adapt it to specific needs, but it’s reasonably standard. So we want to play our part in that standardization. But at the end, TRIGO is not a standard setter. At the end, there needs to be an official organization that will stamp the standards and make it…

John: Harmonize, help harmonize all the rules around the world.

Benoit: Absolutely.

John: Talk a little bit about renewable energy. That’s a hot topic now. How can that sector continue to improve and what’s TRIGO’s involvement with that?

Benoit: Renewable energy, if we’re talking wind, solar, this has not been part of our main areas of focus. As I said, we’re really focused on the mobility sector.

John: Yeah, understood.

Benoit: [crosstalk] Yet, as part of our plan, our ESG plan is to support industries which will contribute to decarbonization.

John: Understood.

Benoit: So to achieve electrification, obviously. Railway, as you mentioned. So we really want to grow into railway also in order to contribute to that decarbonization and renewable energy. So we’re doing this for the moment in a bit more of a surgical way. So the first initiatives we have with wind turbine makers and solar equipment makers, we have a few initiatives in Spain. So that’s our pioneering country out of Europe. And then time will tell, John. We will see, depending on the size of that opportunity, how much we want to push.

John: We’ve covered a lot tonight and it’s getting late in Paris, but I do want to ask you, four times, as you said at the top of the show, since you’re joining TRIGO, you and your colleagues have 4X the size of TRIGO. It’s now 10,000 or so employees, 26 offices around the world. Unbelievable track record in a very mere short 10 years, which when it comes to some of the iconic brands around the world, 10 years is not a lot of time. You’ve been on a sprint. What gets you most excited about the next five years to come that you’re working on currently as the CEO of TRIGO Group?

Benoit: John, I’m excited by development, continuing that track and growing, for me, it’s the excitement, not only for me, but also for all our teams. And that’s also how we bring more value to customers. If I had to select, to be a little bit more precise and select a couple of attributes, I think technology and innovation is the part that we have a lot to do. I mentioned automatic optical inspection, predictive analysis with AI. These things are one area that we will clearly focus. And then obviously, we’re being automotive.

So the whole electrification and the whole potential for us in terms of battery, battery repair, battery recycling, battery analysis. For us, it’s a huge lever that our customer will need and where we can bring value. It’s also a huge lever in terms of environmental impact, recycling or being able to analyze batteries and repair them and recycle them and help automotive manufacturing that process. Clearly, we make a difference for the industry. [crosstalk]

John: And you’ve been on quite a journey at the TRIGO. I just want to say thank you for your time tonight. Thank you for staying up late. And please take me up on my offer[?]. Come back on the impact because, as you and I know, sustainability and ESG and circular economy behavior and shifts, there’s no finish line. It’s a journey. We’re on this journey together. And I’d love to hear the continued success of your journey at TRIGO.

For our listeners and viewers to find Benoit and his colleagues and all the important work they’re doing in ESG and sustainability-related work, and to find some of their most recent impact reports, please go to www.TRIGO-group.com. Benoit Leblanc, thank you for your time. Thank you for your wisdom and your vision. And thank you and your colleagues at TTRIGO for making the world a better place.

Benoit: Thank you, John. Appreciate the words.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.