William J. DeLaney
Management
Okay. Well, those may connect here. If I don't handle the second one, come back to me on that. So what I'm really alluding to there, John, as you look at this thing, clearly, this isn’t a typical Sysco quarter in terms of what we were able to leverage or not leverage. And so in the short term, there are just some basic things that we need to readdress and to bring a little bit more intensity to. So basically, we need to flip the gross profit dollar growth and the expense growth. So if we can get to where the gross profit dollars are growing 5% to 6% to 7% and the expenses are growing 4% to 5%, then we'll be fine. Now how do you do that? Clearly, we need to continue to work really close with our customers and understand that the value package has worked in both ways in terms of the service and the pricing. And then internally, we saw pressure on productivity, in operations, in particular, in the transportation side, even x fuel and, to some extent, in selling. So selling, potentially some of that has continued to invest in the sales force. But there's opportunities for us just to manage the business a little bit better here, I think, on the cost side and get our productivity improvement to go along with the cost improvement. So I don't want to sound too cliché-ish here, but there are some blocking and tackling fundamentals here that we need to improve somewhat here over the second half of the year. As far as the pricing, we are, in different ways, and have been for the last year or 2, working with some different forms of what, I guess, would be characterized as scientific pricing. We have -- as we have moved into this stage of the business transformation work, we have looked at opportunities to decouple some of the things that were essentially integrated into the software, whether it be CRM -- we've talked a little bit about inside sales. Pricing would be another one. I'm not going to tell you today that there's anything imminent there, but that's certainly -- I would put that more into the long-term strategic initiative bucket that I talked about, along with strengthening some of our supplier relationships, a more fundamental look at our cost structure overall, as well as obviously what I did speak to, which was business transformation. I also think you'll see us continue to improve our understanding of our customers and customer engagement. We hired a gentleman here this quarter, Bill Goetz, who's going to start up our marketing department with a lot of focus initially on the customer side of things. So there's several things we're working on there for the medium term, and we'll be able to explore those a little bit more with you here later in the year.