George Jagodzinski (00:00):

Today we learn what 13 years of obsession with one problem actually looks like. And that sometimes the thing that kills your first company is the very thing that makes the second one possible. I'm joined by Andy Ellwood, founder and CEO of Stretch. Andy spent more than a decade trying to bring price transparency to groceries. An industry whose core framework hasn't fundamentally changed since the Roman Empire. We explore why the shopper has never had the right seat at the table, what food insecurity actually looks like, and what AI is finally letting Andy build that wasn't possible over the past 13 years. Stretch is truly an inspirational mission, something to help those struggling to put food on the table that makes a positive impact to our communities. An actual story of AI doing good. Check them out at stretchgroceries.com, download the app. Please welcome, Andy. Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward.

(01:05):

If you're looking to actually move the ball forward rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski. Where I wanted to start is you look at your resume and you go from selling private jets for Warren Buffet to a string of community impact initiatives. How does that journey happen?

Andy Ellwood (01:34):

The thing that I learned when selling in the private aviation space is how the other side lives. It was very, very different than the way that I grew up. I grew up with almost to four kids in Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas. We always had enough, but we had, in hindsight, exactly enough. My parents did a really, really good job of making it seem like getting the hand-me-downs from my friend Josh was cool as opposed to we needed to have clothes for me because I was growing so fast. There wasn't family budget for that. When I had the opportunity to work in private aviation and I got to see how the billionaire, celebrities, and athletes of North Texas lived, I realized that the future is here, but it's just not evenly distributed. They had access to things that I'd never seen before. They had access to family offices who were a bunch of experts that could make sure that everything that they did was done in the best way possible.

(02:26):

So when I started to get into startups and technology, I just was like, "What does it look like to democratize things that have previously been held for the people who live in the classes and bring in and take it out to the masses?" And I think that's been maybe the hallmark of the things that I've attempted to do in my life.

George Jagodzinski (02:43):

I love it, man. It's inspiring. And I love that you focus on groceries because when it comes to human needs, that's right up there, right? And you've been working on this problem for how long?

Andy Ellwood (02:52):

The first crack at it started in 2013. So coming up on 13 years, I've been thinking about food and food insecurity, and how the systems that control food infrastructure in our country are very seller aligned. They're very, very good for people that are selling you food. They're not so great if you're a buyer of food. No shade on the grocery retailers in the world. They solved the problem they were tasked with solving, which was how to increase bottom line and how to make it sticky, and make sure that they're getting the most out of every transaction. But the shoppers have never had a seat at the table, and I think that it's time for that to change.

George Jagodzinski (03:32):

Man, that's a level of perseverance and stubbornness just speaks to my soul. I love it, man. The threat I'd love to pull on groceries is you just hinted at it, but there's been a structure and a framework in place for what, hundreds of years that hasn't really changed. When people get scared about technological advancements, I always like to focus on, okay, but what systematic frameworks are behind this that no level of technology is going to really change? So I'd love you to maybe elaborate on how long has this framework been in place? What is it? How is it changing?

Andy Ellwood (04:05):

Yeah. So if you think about the origins and the grocery store, this goes back to the Roman Empire, right? We're talking about marketplaces where it doesn't make sense for me-

George Jagodzinski (04:14):

We're talking thousands of years now. I love that.

Andy Ellwood (04:16):

Thousands of years, right?

George Jagodzinski (04:16):

Yeah.

Andy Ellwood (04:17):

If you go back to first principles, what grocery stores are enabling to do is all the food in one place that you can buy and take care of your family. You can feed your family. But even going back to the Roman Empire, you'd roll up to your local marketplace and you'd hope that the stalls were carrying food that you wanted, and you hoped that they would charge you a good price. But you're not going to four different markets and four different towns and checking prices. You're stuck going to the one that's closest to you. Then we think about the current form of grocery stores. A lot of that had to do with the cold storage systems that were developed when refrigeration arrived, right? The reason that there are so many intermediaries between pulling the food out of the ground and putting the food on my plate is for things that needed to be refrigerated, there were multiple people who had to hand it off as you went through.

(05:00):

It was refrigerated railroad cars, then refrigerated semi trucks, then refrigerated distribution systems to a refrigerated store, right? So everybody's taking a piece of the thing that was pulled out of the ground before it gets put on my plate. That made sense when there was only one place that you can go for that. And the distribution systems, and as we saw during the pandemic, the supply chain, they can get disrupted if there's a slight mess up a little bit of the way through. But the fact that we still all gravitate towards one of the seven 40,000 square foot stores within a three-mile radius of our home, and we don't know which one actually carries the products that we want today and carries them at a price that is what we are willing to pay, even though it's all literally right there. It's all even structured in their apps or on their websites now. It was a problem that to me seemed like we should definitely solve this, right?

George Jagodzinski (05:52):

Mm-hmm.

Andy Ellwood (05:52):

The information is available, it's just not structured very well. And that's what we've been endeavoring to do in building Stretch over the past 10 months.

George Jagodzinski (06:01):

That's fantastic. I'm certainly privileged in that. I tend to only notice the grocery prices when it hits me over the head that is ridiculous. I just picked up a bag of apples the other day and it was like $22. And I live in Apple orchard country and I was like, "What the heck?" But it's easy to lose touch with what percentage of families out there that truly are struggling. I wonder if you have some stats in your back pocket on how many are struggling and what it's like.

Andy Ellwood (06:29):

Yeah. Yeah. We did a survey the end of last year where we talked to over a thousand families across the country in 47 different states, and 84% of them said that they weren't going to be able to afford groceries next month the way that they paid for them this month. And what we saw was that the biggest shift in grocery behavior was not happening in the blue collar and low income families, it was happening in the middle and upper income families. Because grocery prices have gotten so outrageous that for the first time ever, you're feeling it, I'm feeling it, and we're trading down or we're buying less or we're going to stores that we wouldn't have previously gone to, to make sure that our family's okay, to make sure that there's food on the table. A lot of the privilege that a lot of people have enjoyed for a very long time. Grocery is up 25% since the pandemic.

George Jagodzinski (07:24):

It may.

Andy Ellwood (07:25):

And 25% in five years, it made sense. Supply chain has disrupted, global shortages of things like, okay, cool, right? The supply goes down, demand stays where it is, prices change. But then prices went high and never came back down. And I'm not saying that there's some sort of collusion around this, I'm definitely not saying that. But if, "Hey, are you going to lower your prices? If you're not going to, I won't. Like I'm just going to keep them where they are, great." And there's no accountability to the fact that grocery prices have stayed where they are. And I think that that's just a factor of information asymmetry, right? Grocery stores know more about me than I know about the grocery stores. And that seems like an information asymmetry that's worth fixing in 2026.

George Jagodzinski (08:10):

Totally agree, especially with what's happening with gas prices now. Are you seeing things already trend up? Are you predicting what things are going to do?

Andy Ellwood (08:19):

Yeah, I think that there have been some things that preemptively trended up, and people are just... "Oh, it's an opportunity for us to raise prices. Great, let's do it." There's a little bit of a lagging indicator from when it will actually hit supply chain and then show up on the consumer's pocket. So by the end of Q2, I think that we'll see a lot of things that require transportation that are being imported. If it wasn't the tariffs previously, it'll be the cost of importing things because of the cost of higher fuel.

George Jagodzinski (08:53):

That's sad and scary. So I read one stat, I'm not sure how accurate or out of date this is. It was 25% of online grocery purchases, they're doing Buy Now, Pay Later. Is that right?

Andy Ellwood (09:07):

Yeah, it's a grocery, not just online, that there are 25% of Americans in 2025 used Buy Now, Pay Later at least once. So it's not 25% of all transactions, but at least 25% of people have done a Buy Now, Pay Later transaction for food, right? That's not what that's for, right? That was an emergency, your car broke down and your next paycheck is in three days. It's not for feeding your family. Another stat that really blew my mind in the survey that we did last year, 17% of the shoppers that we spoke to had skipped a meal in the past two months so that somebody in their family didn't have to. So parents skipping meals so that their kids can make sure that they get their food. And we live in the richest country in the world, and the fact that there's food insecurity like that just breaks my heart.

George Jagodzinski (09:59):

Now, one of the places that you tried to solve this problem was that Basket, and Basket had some momentum and then it had a failure. And I'd love to hear about that a little bit and what you learned from it.

Andy Ellwood (10:11):

Yeah. So mentioned, I've been thinking about this since 2013 and just exited a company and was thinking like, all right, I love the idea of collective dollars. I love the idea of if you have a piece of information, I have a piece of information, and we put that information together, it is a much more bountiful piece of information for both of us. And I helped build a company called Waze, the Traffic and Navigation App. And after we sold to Google, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. And the idea of taking collective knowledge and bringing it to food and price and transparency and grocery was something that me and my former co-founder decided to kick off with a company that would eventually become basket.com. And we ended up raising about $20 million across three rounds of funding. And at our peak, had about 650,000 families that we were helping save money on our groceries.

(10:59):

A series of crazy things happened, one of which was our lead investor died in a plane crash three days before he was going to fund our next round of financing.

George Jagodzinski (11:11):

Oh, man.

Andy Ellwood (11:12):

And we were counting on that money, I'll just put it that way. And so we had to scramble and try and figure out how do we recover, how do we keep a team, how do we keep our users? How do we keep the revenue that we'd built? So that was in early 2019. And so we survived 2019 by the hair of our chin chin chin and we're like, great, 2020 is going to be our year.

(11:31):

And then this global pandemic happened, and our entire business model was predicated upon people going into stores to collect pricing information, and then people going into stores to buy groceries. And when there's a 3 to 4 month period where no one goes in store for anything and the supply chain is completely disruptive and prices are completely out of whack, not following any of the previous patterns or whatnot. We were already pretty crippled from our investor challenge the previous year. So eventually we just had to wind Basket down, but it really did show that there was a demand for the idea of pricing transparency for groceries. The fact that there isn't in the grocery industry surprises people a lot of times, they're like, "[inaudible 00:12:14]. I'm sure there is." And you're like, "Think about it." For travel, there's Expedia. For homes, there's Zillow, for fuel, there's GasBuddy, for pharmaceuticals, there's GoodRX.

(12:26):

Pricing transparency exists in a lot of the major industries, for most of the major industries that we spend money on as a household. But for groceries, the thing we buy most frequently, and that now for some families, it's the number two expense behind their home, right? It's exceeded their car payment, it's exceeded their electricity bills.

George Jagodzinski (12:44):

That's insane.

Andy Ellwood (12:45):

We don't compare, we don't have prices, right? The fact that Expedia made it seem crazy to buy a $500 flight without comparing prices. Stretch, we want to make it seem crazy that you spent $7,000 [inaudible 00:12:59] on groceries without comparing prices. And we think that that's the power that we want to give shoppers is to let them know, "You don't have to do this by yourself. You don't have to download all of the circulars. You don't have to go look for all the loyalty prices. We're going to do that for you. We're going to go up, like you fell like it. We're going to [inaudible 00:13:14] all the local stores, bring you all that information, and then put it in your hands and say, "This is what's available to you this week. And if you go to this store, it'll save you time. They'll go to this store, it'll save you money. What's your priority?" And let the shopper choose.

George Jagodzinski (13:26):

Oh man, you just gave me a flashback to when I was a kid. And we would add all the coupon and circulars out on the table, and it was this big strategic thing to try and figure it out what we were going to do. And in theory, that should be easier today but it hasn't been, which is crazy.

Andy Ellwood (13:43):

Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting thing when you look at just industry-wise, grocery shopping was the last industry that e-commerce came to. Everything else was online before groceries because the promise of e-commerce was we could get you things that were not available at a store near you, right? The headphones from Japan, the dress from Paris, the suit from London, but there's groceries close by. But the reason that it actually took so long for it to all get online is because there's 40,000 different products inside of every grocery store in your neighborhood, like 40,000 different SKUs, right? To figure out how all of those SKUs get online, keep all the inventory track, keep prices all on track. And then most people's shopping lists is 30 or 40 things. You've got 30 or 40 different variables that you're trying to figure out which one's the best. When you're buying a flight, you're like, "Which airport, which airport, and what time," right? Three variables, right?

George Jagodzinski (14:39):

Yep.

Andy Ellwood (14:39):

Not a whole lot to it. And it's all structured in a way that is accessible. Every grocery store has a very different way of cataloging and pricing their information. And I think that's the really interesting part about this story from my point of view is not just that I get the chance to build in this space again, but to build very, very differently. Because of the pandemic, grocery stores structured their data down to a zip code level in a way that they never had before. And 13 years ago when I was building around this idea, the in store price was different than the online price. If you were willing to pay two or $3 more for something, they'd ship it to you. But it was a national online price. And then the in store, it was like two or $3 cheaper, but you didn't know that unless you went to the store and compared.

(15:26):

Now, online price and in store price are the same. And then the delivery companies and the curbside pickup might put a convenience charge on top of that. But there's actually parody between what you're seeing online and what you're seeing in the store. And so the fact that there hasn't been a way to structure that information so the shopper really truly knows what's available to them. And then to your point, where coupons or discounts or loyalty opportunities are is crazy. And we think the time is now to put that power in the shopper's hands.

George Jagodzinski (15:54):

Interesting. So the thing that killed your first company, Basket, actually laid the foundation for what you're now able to do at Stretch.

Andy Ellwood (16:03):

That was the revelation that made me decide to get over my PTSD and jump back in and try and build this again.

George Jagodzinski (16:10):

Yeah, because I was going to ask, man, it's tough to get investment. It's tough to get something off the ground. You get the momentum, and then you get punched in the gut, and you shut it down. Most people at that point would be like, "You know what? It was a good idea. I guess, it's just not going to work. Let me move on to a different idea." But you persevered.

Andy Ellwood (16:29):

I took four years off, four and a half years off from working on grocery. And during that time, I had over 20 people reach out to me and they said, "Hey, I thought that I came up with the idea for pricing transparency for groceries. I did a little bit of research and I found you and basket.com. Can I pick your brain?" And I said, yes to all 20 people because we were right. I told all of them, Basket was right, but it was early, right? And someone should build this. And if you figure out the data piece, if you figure out how to crack that code, I'll be your first angel investor. I want this to exist. I want this to exist for me. I want this to exist for every family like the family that I grew up in. My mom had a cookbook called Once a Month Cooking, and she had her monthly allowance for food from the family budget, and she would go to the grocery store one time.

(17:20):

She would've rearranged all the recipes in the book and was like, "You can use these items from this recipe to supplement the items that you need for this recipe. So go to the store one time and you'll be able to make all of the recipes and all the dinners for this month." But that meant on the 29th of the month, there was nothing in the pantry or fridge like waiting for dad's next paycheck. And to your point, clipping coupons and figuring out, "All right, here's the math," right? It literally looked like a crazy person on some CSI detective show with strings going here, connecting recipes to coupons. But I remember that very clearly. And so much of what I want Stretch to be is just healing that pain.

George Jagodzinski (17:57):

Totally.

Andy Ellwood (17:58):

Like taking away the fact that people need a PhD in math to feed their families. What is wrong with the situation? It should not be this guessing game. It should not be the prices right every time you go to the grocery store.

George Jagodzinski (18:11):

Absolutely. Do you still have that book?

Andy Ellwood (18:13):

I believe it's on my parents bookshelf, yeah.

George Jagodzinski (18:16):

That's awesome. I have an addiction to cookbooks, and there's some of them are in the background here. The way that you talked about solving that pain, I'm curious, it's always tough to find the right things to measure in a company that line with what does success mean. I'm curious, what do you measure at Stretch?

Andy Ellwood (18:34):

Two things. There's three different moments that Stretch gets to interact with the shopper. One is the, I need that moment, that I have intent to go buy milk. I'm out of creamer. I need peanut butter. Open the app quickly, add it to shopping list, close the app. So how many items are added to a list, and over what period of time from intent to actually go into the store is an interesting stat, right? You think about what a shopping list is, it is the only place where pre-purchasing tent is captured in the industry for a bunch of items, right? But a shopping list is me signaling to a piece of paper or to a text from my spouse, or to an Apple note. Like I'm going to go buy this thing in the next 24 to 72 hours. That's the consideration window that we measure.

(19:22):

So that's one thing that's really interesting. And that's actually been incredibly interesting to people in the industry. People in the industry are like, "Wait, you know what people are going to buy before we do," right? Because unlike the dress from Paris or the suit in London or the headphones from Tokyo, I'm not doing research online to figure out. I'm not leaving my intent trail in a place where a bunch of cookies can follow me across the internet until I buy the thing, right?

George Jagodzinski (19:46):

Yeah.

Andy Ellwood (19:47):

I just write it down on a piece of paper and say, "I'm going to buy this." And so capturing that in Stretch, very interesting. So the intent capture moment were how many items and over what period of time, the recommendation moment. So when you get recommendations, Stretch is going to go out and look at every local store that's on the platform, and tell you your list priced locally. So how many different stores were considered, and what store was recommended. That's information that retailers have been very, very interested in having access to.

(20:18):

Like how many times were we considered? And then, how many times did we have the winning list for distance, for price, for convenience? And then finally, in store mode, how many things did you check off your shopping list when you were in store? And I think where that gets really interesting is it's over a $10 billion industry of grocery data, right? The Nielsens and the IRIs and the SPINS of the world. All of that information is post-purchase information, right?

George Jagodzinski (20:44):

Mm-hmm.

Andy Ellwood (20:44):

It's what happened when you checked out. But my shopping list right now, I've got 25 items on my shopping list. I'm probably going to go to Whole Foods on all way home because it's the store that's between me and my home. And when I walk out of Whole Foods tonight, I'll probably have 18 items in my basket. And Whole Foods, the post-purchase information industry is going to log that as a successful 18-item shopping trip. But what the industry doesn't know is that I didn't find seven of the items I was looking for or they were not the quality of that I was looking for, and I'm going to go buy those at another store. And maybe what it also doesn't know is that of those 18 items that I purchased, 16 of them were on my list, but two of them were impulse purchases. So it's actually nine items that I didn't buy at that store that I had intended to. And so being able to pair pre-purchase intent with post-purchase transactions is a really, really interesting future product that we're considering.

George Jagodzinski (21:41):

Interesting. Yeah. One measurement I heard you, I think I heard you talk about was you were save X families Y amount a dollar per month or something like that. Could you elaborate on that?

Andy Ellwood (21:55):

Yeah. I think when we break it down, the average American families spend a little over $800 a month on groceries. And we're seeing savings on the low end around 20% for our shoppers just by simply opening the app and turning left and turning right. So 150 bucks per month on the high end, closer to 70, 35%. And when we start to add coupons and discounts in, they'll be even potentially higher. And so we're looking at 150 to $250 a month simply by downloading our free app. That's real money, right? Thousands of dollars a year. One of our shoppers said, "I know how much money I'm going to be able to save between now and the summer, and we're going to take a different type of vacation as a family because of what Stretch is doing for us." Those are the stories that just get us really excited because it shouldn't be so hard to know how much you're going to spend this week to feed your family.

(22:51):

You should be able to think about what you're going to do with that time. What are you going to do with that money? What are you going to do with that feeling of satisfaction? Like yeah, I did the best thing, right? Sometimes you go to the grocery store like, "Oh, is that how much that costs? I definitely did something wrong." There probably was a better way to do this. And that feeling of a failure if you're not knowing, like we want to take that away with what we're building with Stretch.

George Jagodzinski (23:14):

Yeah. Oh man, that's got to really rally a team around it. I've seen teams rally around how many sneakers they're selling in a given month, but when you're talking about the real impact to real families and communities, that's huge.

Andy Ellwood (23:26):

We think about it [inaudible 00:23:27] the me, we, and world. So eventually as we continue to grow, how much have we saved me? How much have we saved your community? And then how much has Stretch the global community saved? And just think about how much impact that could have back into local communities back into families is, as you said, something that the entire team really rallies around.

George Jagodzinski (23:48):

Yeah. When you see a problem like this that just makes all the sense in the world, but it hasn't been solved yet. You talked about some of the frameworks there, the structures that have been in place, and some of the data that wasn't there, like the pricing, but do you have any ideas or thoughts on why wouldn't have some of the retailers tried to solve that pre-purchase intent in a better way? Because we're talking about the pure intentions of this and community impact, but from a capitalist perspective, having that pre-purchase intent, they'd be able to make more money. And I'm curious why they haven't solved it.

Andy Ellwood (24:20):

Yeah, they have solved it as long as you buy it at their store.

George Jagodzinski (24:27):

That makes sense.

Andy Ellwood (24:28):

People do what they're incentivized to do, right? And the incentive is, I will do a lot of things that are shopper-centric, not shopper first, but shopper-centric, right? It helps the shopper in this way, as long as the path leads to my register. And you can't fault them for that. Like that's their job, right? But to take a universal view and sit above all of that, and provide a layer of intelligence and get closer to the moment of intent and the information that's shared, that's where we get really excited.

George Jagodzinski (25:03):

Love it. We're 26 minutes in. I think we haven't talked about AI yet, which is pretty awesome, but I do want to talk about it because I think different industries are coming out of trough of disillusionment. And I also love seeing when it's actually used in real tangible ways, especially when it's someone like you who you've been trying to solve a problem forever and you're like, "Oh, now I can." So I'd be curious to hear what advancements AI or just other technology and data in general that's allowing you to do what you can now.

Andy Ellwood (25:35):

Yeah. Building a product master catalog that is retailer agnostic is really hard, right? So every grocery store carries 40 to 50,000 products. There are already 28 chains that are on the Stretch platform. That means we have a master catalog that's retailer agnostic of over 550,000 unique products, unique SKUs in the database. And we have to understand how they all map to each other. Like is this product related to this product? Because when you're building a shopping list, in Stretch, you build a list, not a cart, right? So you're not picking the exact item you want, you're picking the intention that you have. So I need peanut butter. There's a lot of different things that could fulfill the intent of peanut butter, and they're all carried at different stores. Some of them are store brands, some of them are regional brands, some of them are national brands, different sizes, different styles, crunchy versus smooth.

(26:31):

And so what Stretch needs to get to know is, does that shop or what is their actual intention? Is it crunchy? Is it smooth? Is it family size? Is it travel size? Those are all things that we try and do in a very smooth, seamless way. And then we remember the more that you use Stretch. AI allowing that personalization of understanding what the shopper's intent actually meant is very important. But then also the equivalencies of this product at this store equals this product at this store is something that's never been done before so that we can serve the shopper and actually truly give them as close to apples to apples comparisons across every local store. And so those are just a couple of the ways that we're using AI. We've got some agents in the future that we'll be hopefully bringing to bear so that shoppers have a companion that they are able to communicate with and work alongside in that research to your point of laying out the coupons and all that sort of stuff.

(27:26):

We're going to do that for you. You just got to let us know what's on the list this week and we'll take care of the rest. And that's the problems that Stretch is going to fulfill.

George Jagodzinski (27:32):

That's fantastic. Forgive me, but I'm going to have a geek question here just because 20 years ago I was working on GDSN backbone. And for those that don't know, that's a global data synchronization network, which was a global data standard meant to be a universal product catalog, independent of retailers. But over time it got bastardized like all data standards, and everyone was just interpreting it for themselves. And it wasn't really retailer specific anymore. And I'm like, are you leveraging those types of GDSN formats, or what are you leveraging?

Andy Ellwood (28:06):

Yeah, every retailer use structures of their data a little bit differently. And so being able to understand how it sits inside of our catalog is a big part of the data moat that we're building to be able to serve the shopper. Are there future B2B implications of that? 100%. Is that super interesting to CPG companies? Is that super interesting to retailers that want to understand more about the competitive landscape? Absolutely. But we are just super heads down on anything and everything that we're structuring is around the idea of helping the shopper not feel alone in the grocery shopping process, and that they don't need a PhD in math to solve this mystery of how much did it cost this week to feed my family. But yeah, we're building it all internally in our own data structure, and there are a lot of legacy systems out there.

(28:58):

And with those legacy systems, there are a lot of entrenched inefficiencies that we're having to work around and have not yet found a way to work with. And I think that that's part of the reason why it's so exciting to be building a company from the ground up in 2025 because we started with the advantage of having AI at every single layer. And thinking about this workflow can be done faster, easier, and better with the super intelligence that's now available to us.

George Jagodzinski (29:27):

I mean, having that advantage plus a mission that's truly inspiring has got to be the perfect combo. And that's really just a part of, I think what your overall worldview here is like... Also looking at your resume, it seems like you would just really gravitate towards community impact, and you have your make room for many. I'm curious if you can expand on what does that even mean, make room for many and... Yeah.

Andy Ellwood (29:51):

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it comes from an Emerson essay called Power. And in the essay, he says, "There's always room for a man of force, for he makes room for many." And my favorite movie is The Princess Bride. And in the movie, Fezzik played by Andre The Giant, is running through the town square with Wesley and Inigo Montoya. And the two smaller characters can't make their way through. And Fezzik just yells, "Everybody move." And the crowd parts, right? And he made room for others to get to where they were going a little bit faster. And I've been told that I have big brother energy. I'm the oldest of four, and I want to be the big brother that helps you reach the thing on the top shelf for get over the fence a little bit faster, because I've been given a lot of privilege and I've been fortunate to have a lot of things go my way.

(30:47):

And so can I take some of what has been given to me and make it more available to others has been the underpinning of a lot of things that I've done in my career. And I think that, as I said, the future is here, but it's just not evenly distributed. And I think that this moment that we're just getting started on what AI could do, I am still an optimist. There's so many ways to distract yourself and just be beaten down every day. I have the lowest information diet I've ever had. I do my best to guard my brain throughout the course of most days, and maybe I'll glance at what happened at the end of the week, or if somebody sends me a note and says, "You should pay attention to this." But there's so many things that we can't control in the world that I just keep coming back to what are the things that I can control. Who are the people that I can serve.

(31:40):

And that is probably the best thing that I've ever been able to do for my mental health. And hopefully, that gives me the ability to serve others even better.

George Jagodzinski (31:48):

I love it. And yeah, I mean, when someone's struggling to put food on the table, just the fact that they're not alone and that you and Stretch can help there is commendable. What I love to finish here with is, it's a fun question. You might've just answered it though, but let me ask it again just in case there's something else, which is in your life, in your career, everything, what's the best advice you've ever received?

Andy Ellwood (32:10):

You have a 1000% success rating of making it through the hardest day of your life. You have what it takes no matter how high the highs are or no matter how low the lows are. And you don't have what it takes for tomorrow yet because tomorrow's not here. But for today, you are already equipped with everything that you need. And I think that is just somewhat piece of truth that I try and ingrain in every moment that I'm walking into. It's like, I already have it. It might be deep inside of me. It might feel like it's a stretch to get there, but it's there. Like I can access what's needed for today. And I think having that confidence of walking through the world, knowing that you're already walking with everything that you need to change your life in the way that you learn with seeing it changed is a pretty great gift and one that I would love to give to everybody else.

George Jagodzinski (32:59):

That's fantastic advice. And it's definitely the advice of someone who's been solving the same problem for 13 years, and is still pushing hard. Andy, thanks so much for being here, man. Really appreciate it.

Andy Ellwood (33:09):

Absolutely. This is fun. Thank you.

George Jagodzinski (33:12):

Thanks for listening to Evolving Industry. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform, and pretty please drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and smash the bell button for notifications. If you know someone who's pushing the limits to evolve their business, reach out to the show at evolvingindustry@intevity.com. Reach out to me, George Jagodzinski on LinkedIn. I love speaking with people getting the hard work done. The business environment's always changing, and you're either keeping up or going extinct. We'll catch you next time, and until then, keep evolving.