Mailin’ It! - The Official USPS Podcast

An interview with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

Episode Summary

On this episode of Mailin' It, we're talking to the 75th Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, about his early entrepreneurial career, the Delivering for America transformation, and the future of USPS.

Episode Notes

On this episode of Mailin’ It, we’re sitting down with the 75th Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Join us as we learn about his career as an entrepreneur, his transition into his role at the Postal Service, and what he loves most about his role as PMG.

We’ll also be talking to Louis about the Delivering for America plan, including the 10-year transformation that USPS is undergoing and where the organization is headed in the future.

Read more about the Postal Service’s 10-year plan here: https://about.usps.com/what/strategic-plans/delivering-for-america/

 

Episode Transcription

Dale Parsan: Hey, everybody. Welcome to today's episode of Mailin’ It, the official podcast of the United States postal service. I'm your cohost Dale Parson,

Yasmine Di Giulio: And I'm Yasmin Di Giulio. In this episode of mailing it. We're excited to talk with our boss and get to know America’s 75th Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a little better. As background, the postmaster general is appointed by the bipartisan board of governors of the United States postal service.

Dale Parsan: We plan to talk to Louis about his life as an entrepreneur, before his government service and why he joined the Postal Service. We've got a lot of questions about the job of a Postmaster General, the transformation currently underway and where the Postal Service is heading in the future.

Yasmine Di Giulio: Louis, welcome to the show.

PMG Louis DeJoy: Good Morning, Yasmine. How are you? Dale - Good to see you.

Dale Parsan: Likewise

Yasmine Di Giulio: Before we get into today's topic, would you mind sharing with our listeners a little bit about your background?

PMG Louis DeJoy: Yeah, sure. And, I'm excited to be here and talk about all the things on the agenda today, but so, we'll spend a little time on my background. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I have, uh, a lot of different, uh, events in my life that led me to a point in my mid twenties to engage in, uh, uh, my own business and trying to drive a, a solutions oriented, uh, company for big, big clients. And I built it into a, into a large technology led a third party logistics firm and, uh, eventually merged it with a, uh, with a large public company and stayed there for a while. And then, uh, retired, went on a board and I'm here.

Dale Parsan: So being involved in logistics, how did you get interested in doing this? 

PMG Louis DeJoy: You know, my background was in public accounting. If you call being 25 and having a background, I was a CPA. I had audited a bunch of different industries and so forth, and I enjoyed the diversity of, you know, service and moving product and moving financial information, moving information and moving dollars and cents. That's really what the supply chain became to be. It used to be called logistics. It used to be called project management and, and so forth. And that was at the cusp of the introduction of, of it into, uh, into businesses, especially, uh, the logistics and the, in the, in the late eighties, I look for entry points for a new company where, uh, we could sell things that other people weren't doing at the time. And every dollar I had, I invested in a good tech, you know, good, good people, good technology, and, uh, went out and studied, uh, uh, client's businesses and came up with plans for their problems.

I adapted the service throughout, uh, you know, throughout my career. I adapted the business and the service and evolved, uh, to provide for solutions for what clients need. And eventually I built up a base of infrastructure that was, you know, brought a certain amount of expertise, uh, ease of design and ease of implementation, uh, you know, for, for our clients. And it became, uh, you know, very scalable and, and, and, and so forth. And I was actually quite selective in the types of work that we did. If, you know, I tried to only engage in, you know, things that were complex in nature, that if we pull it off, uh, we will be different than most of our competition. And we were, we were, we were successful, uh, you know, successful in doing that.

Dale Parsan: So you've been with us for about a year and a half now. How do you view the organization after this time in relation to our strengths, our role that we play for the economy, so on, so forth.

PMG Louis DeJoy: You know, the role that we play in economy is, uh, very, very important. And, uh, coming in, uh, during the pandemic, uh, was, uh, you know, for all the good opinion I had of the postal service, uh, throughout my life coming here and seeing what we were, what we were attempt trying to do under the conditions that we were doing... And then add to the fact, all the other extraordinary types of activities we had. It's, uh, it's extremely important, uh, both from the standpoint of, uh, serving the American people and to commerce, you know, uh, we're an enabler. So, uh, that, that, that's it with regard to the organization I am - as I travel the country - I am extremely impressed with the level of talent that we have throughout the organization and the engagement that I have had from all of our employees across the, you know, across the nation and especially our leadership team.

Uh, it has been very enjoyable, impressive, and builds confidence and inspires me to continue with the fight really. Cause, you know, that's what it's, uh, that's what it's about. And it gives me a great deal of, uh, you know, a great deal of, uh, uh, of, uh, of, of confidence. So I don't know that it was unexpected, but we have moved pretty quickly and we have produced results pretty quickly. So I think in a realm of, you know, how we have to move around here and we've aligned a board behind us to that's management, the whole management team, having a good plan that could convince many, you know, minds of a different, you know, ideologies and certain backgrounds and, and, and so forth. That's all of us joining together to drive this forward. You really can't come into an organization like that and expect that to happen as quickly as it, uh, uh, had.

Yasmine Di Giulio: It's really interesting to me that you talk about the importance of investing in people and in technology, because I think those are some of the main components in the Delivering for America plan that was introduced in March of this year. could you talk a little bit about the development of that plan?

PMG Louis DeJoy: You want to invest, you have to have a vision for where you want to take the organization. Uh, and we have that now, and that's a lot of what the Delivering for America plan is. We are a going concern. We have a vision for the future, and we have to take the actions necessary now as an independent agency, which is what we are, take the actions now to generate the cash flow, to evolve, to evolve the business so we can reinvest in it to continue to continue that cycle in the long term. So the Delivering for America plan is about having, having vision for the future and finding a way to get there. And that's really what the whole thing is about.

Yasmine Di Giulio: So the delivering for America plan really has sort of the two key components as part of our 10 year vision. We want to achieve service excellence and maintain financial sustainability. So can you talk a little bit about some of the changes related to each of those components? 

PMG Louis DeJoy: Yes. So I would always start with what is the main objective is, you know, find, achieve financial self-sustain of cover our costs, and improve our, uh, service reliability. But we also have to define the big thing in that. And it's in the universal mission. We're defining it and more or less has been legislated that we have to deliver it to 161 million addresses six days a week. And that's whether we have one letter, we got to go by the house. If you have no letters and that's a big cost, it's over half our cost. That is our mission we committed at. And then we committing to trying to get self sustaining, cover our costs. So when you think about the plan, everything in between, that's on the table, right? It has to be adjusted if your committing, you're anchoring yourself and delivering to 161 million addresses a day, that's the unique service that we provide the American people.

On the other hand, we won't be here if we continued in the path that we were heading, you know, losing $87 billion and, you know, so we have to find a way to cover our costs. Well, therefore you have to do things. What does that mean? We have to well, we we decided that changing a service standard, moving from, uh, three days to up to five days for, you know, uh, about 30% of the amount. That gives us enormous flexibility to adjust what we moved by expensive air to move by, into our empty trucks on the ground. We run 55,000 trucks a day that a 30% full, uh, so we could run those trucks 60% full and take a whole lot of mail and packages off of air. It gets down to how many retail centers we have so on and so forth. These are, in my opinion, these are refinements, uh, uh, uh, to achieve the, the big objective, deliver 161 million addresses a day, get the cost out that we need to get the cost out to, uh, to be self-sustaining.

And we still don't. We still don't get there. We take out about $35 billion over 10 years of doing those particular adjustments, but we also have a growth plan with USPS Connect that will add at least $25 billion over the next 10 years. And as you know, we have to get the legislation, which will be about 40 billion. If we do all that, it throws off some $40 billion that we can invest in what I see as our priorities. We have buildings in our network that we have to, we have to fix those. We have been, uh, you know, dramatically behind on investing in our IT system. And as you know, we have to invest in our fleet, which is we have a 30 year old fleet, uh, which is a significant amount of money. So these are all obvious things that must be done to get the organization back on, you know, on a trajectory.

Dale Parsan: Louis, the idea here is that the, uh, the Delivering for American plan was released about six months ago, and we're moving towards, uh, our strategy towards financial stability. where do things stand now in terms of service improvements, legislation, items like that?

PMG Louis DeJoy: So on service improvement, uh, we have stabilized the, you know, stabilize the service under the current environment. Uh, you know, a marketing mail had some of the best numbers we've seen in five years. First-class is in the high eighties with the standard change. Now it's going to be in the low nineties. And, uh, so it says we haven't made any network changes yet, and that's important, but we are stabilized with regard to the service. We have changed the first-class market dominant pricing that went into effect in August. That's going to be a help. We have changed the first class package service. Even if you remember the long-term, the plan is to get an integrated mail and package network. We're designing a network to deliver first class market dominant mail. And we want our package business to move along with that, because at the end of the day, it all gets to 161 million addresses.

And that's what we're trying to do. So aligning these standards is very, very important. For the first time, we are at peak season level career and pre career head count today, we have never been at full authorized earned levels in our plants in many, many, many years. Right. And that brings stability into the organization, which is why I'm so confident about peak season. That's, you know, that's job number one. I think we will plan for a 91% reliability against our standards for 22. And then up to the 95 in, in, in 23, as we get on that network, uh, you know, together. So it's moving along nicely. And then the legislation bipartisan bill came out of the house.

Bi-partisan bill came in the Senate. It's a, it's a good bill. I'm very impressed with how everybody has worked together to get a good bill. Uh, and, uh, it doesn't put a lot of operational restrictions on us, but what it does do is a lot of reporting, a lot of reporting against the Delivering for America plan, which I welcome, uh, this is what we're saying we're going to do, and we're gonna, you know, w we're going to be accountable for it. So, uh, in the bill, the legislation just, I think, just needs to find room, you know, in the process and it, uh, you know, it should get done. And I'm very pleased. It's an unfair burden that was put on the organization by Congress and Congress needs to, uh, you know, fix that. And I believe they will.

Dale Parsan: So a subset of the Delivering for America plan, uh, one of the strategies has to do with something called USPS Connect. Would you mind telling the listeners a little bit about that?

PMG Louis DeJoy: Sure. I mean, USPS Connect is an exciting new way to look at the Postal Service and its network. And it's reached 161 million, uh, uh, delivery points each day. When we look at e-commerce growth, it's the consumer, uh, you know, at their, at their home getting, you know, everything from used to be electronics and books, and now it's consumables and who better to deliver a big portion of this than the United States Postal Service? We’re going there every day. So we have models that help the main street, the local business person be as effective as Amazon in terms of delivering to address. They drop it off at the post office and we can deliver same day. Frankly, I don't think the American people want to see 50 different trucks running up and down their neighborhood streets, uh, you know, delivering the delivering packages. And we're going to, uh, try and make sure that we maintain our place in, in, in, in, in economy, uh, during a pandemic, the American people show that they want to use the postal service to deliver packages.

So we're gonna, we're gonna continue to help them with that as we move forward. Right now, we're running a pilot in Texas. We have 11 plants in Texas is 34/35 million people in Texas. We have 11 plants that you can enter at at, at night, uh, get processed, one truck and delivered the next morning, two 31 million of the 34 million addresses. So we're looking at a destination entry type of process like that. And then we have other services, uh, that we're going to change around the nation in terms of, uh, looking at our retail ground product, then, uh, you know, our priority product and so forth. But nobody in the nation has the reach that we have to the consumer. And every there's a lot of money in businesses chasing to build something out, to, to get that reach. Uh, and we're just, you know, re pointing our efforts and really it's not anything new we're doing. It's how we're marketing it and the contracting for it, and allowing, you know, our pricing and access to the whole nation, uh, when it comes to the, you know, delivering the, you know, the package market. And it's going to be, uh, a big deal for us.

Yasmine Di Giulio: Thanks for giving us some more information about the components in the plan. in the, in the news, it seems there's a lot of narrative around the fact that the public now going to have to pay higher prices for postage rates and receive a slower service through these service standard changes. Can you talk a little bit about that or explain what's going on from the postal service point of view?

PMG Louis DeJoy: Yeah, that'd be happy to. So let's first, let's talk about from the first service standard standpoint, and then we'll talk about the prices. On a service standard standpoint, we have not met our service standards in over 10 years. We were heading for disaster. And when I got here, we were supposed to run out of cash in September and lose $20 billion, right? So it's just so logical that if we commit to it 161 million addresses a day, and we can't get mail from New York to California without owning planes, we don't own any. And to make the standard, we would have to rev up the cost incurring, failing solution that we had. And that is, uh, you know, that's not the type of organization I think we should have. And Congress gives us the flexibility to make these changes. And if you look at what the GAO report said, uh, that just came out, they said that stakeholder resistance to change is a big reason why we haven't changed.

Okay, well, that's not going to be the case anymore. And that's, that is why by, by doing this, we think we could save costs and improve reliability, uh, against the perception that was eating a lot of costs and had no reliability. Right. And that's what was setting out to change with the service standard. And with regard to the pricing, this is a real problem, right? We are the most affordable postal service in the world. And when, uh, when the PAEA was passed and established a relationship between the volume of mail and the costs of, of processing that mail, you know, across the nation and then capped us at a CPI percentage, and, you know, froze that for 10 years. Uh, well, the volume of mail, those relationships of cost and volume were destroyed because of the decline in the volume of mail. And our cost inputs don't rise as CPI.

So that was a relationship that began this problem, and this, you know, this erosion. And we did that. We didn't try to, to, to change it. Then after the 10 years, the PRC postal regulatory commission start, it took four years to, to conclude what, what they concluded that diminishing mail mattered. But during that four years our losses accelerated. So now we have the authority and we need to use it, and I will continue using it until such time as we see that we have changed the trajectory of the organization, we do $80 worth of service right now, and charge $70 billion. And we got to bridge that in the plan, lays it out, see whether I've run out of cash tomorrow, or we run out of cash two years from now. We are still operating a business that is going to run out of cash. And that's the trajectory that I am that we need to change. And in the long run, this is important if we want to postal service that the way it exists today as an independent agency, 10 years from now.

Yasmine Di Giulio: So looking back a little bit, you joined the Postal Service as Postmaster General last summer. around that time and leading up to the election, there was a lot of scrutiny around the postal service, during the season. So many more people than usual were using the mail in ballots. And I think there was a lot of media and public concern that postal service performance and operational decisions around equipment and the processing network could impact the delivery and counting of ballots. So can you talk a little bit about what was going on then and what happened?

PMG Louis DeJoy: Well, first of all, none of that proved to be true, right? Because we had excellent performance for the election. There is politics in this town and there's suspicion and there's, uh, uh, a press. And, uh, the fact that the matter is that the discussion about moving machines, uh, were non-consequential. First of all, I didn't direct the, you know, the movement of the, uh, of these machines. this is something that gets done every year, and it was non-consequential to the mail processing, uh, you know, environment. In fact, the fact that we were frozen for moving those machines, got in away of our peak season performance, uh, afterwards, collection boxes have been going over the last 10 years… Uh, we have, I forget the number a hundred and something thousand collection boxes left out there over the last 10 years. It's come down about 30,000. Biggest year was about five years ago when it took out 6,000 last year, we took out when I got here, we had already taken out about 1500 and the operating process around the country was continual with, you know, it was continual. I got to show you with coming into this organization, that point in time, it was not one of my first order of business is let's go find some collection boxes to remove. But the fact that the matter is it was a sensitive time for the nation. Uh, these things were happening. Uh, however, it was construed, it got associated with me and the organization taking some type of action, which is why I froze those things from happening. But I will say that activity did hurt us during peak season.

Yasmine Di Giulio: So to be specific, what was the performance of the postal service during the election mail season?

PMG Louis DeJoy: Well, as you know, we published a whole report and I recollect that in the report, it said 99.7% of the ballots were delivered within five days, which is what we recommended to the public. And I think 98 point some percentage would deliver within two days because most of it is local mail. So we, uh, we did a very, very good job. I was extremely impressed in how the, the commitment and the extra extraordinary measures the organization took to make sure that every ballot we got our hands on, uh, and was visible, got delivered to, uh, uh, you know, uh, for the voter,

Dale Parsan: Despite everything the organization dealt with during last year's peak holiday season between the pandemic, the election supply chain issues, what changes are we implementing this year to deliver for the American people?

PMG Louis DeJoy: Uh, the fact of the matter is last year, after years of underinvestment in a network lack of, of, uh, and, and the pandemic, and the election season, uh, you know, coming off the election and, uh, uh, just a, uh, instability in our workforce to begin with compounded by the pandemic and, uh, uh, poor transportation network. We were, despite everybody's hard work. We were over, you know, over overwhelmed. And, uh, we had the performance that we had. So when we came out of peak, back in, uh, February, we had a number of different things we do to forecast, uh, what volume is going to be. And then everybody starts to plan around that. And that takes a long, that that took a long time. Last year, we bring out the data scientists, the economist, uh, the Ouija board operator. We took December's volume, all of it. And half of January, because we should have delivered December, January, and December and said, that's the volume. Now let's start planning. And everybody engaged at, across the organization. We immediately converted some 33,000, uh, pre career people to full-time that takes the turnover rate of that group down from 40% to about three. So we know they're going to be here, come, uh, uh, the peak season. And when we did that, enabled us to staff up with pre career in advance. Right? Last year, we kept talking about, we hired all these peak season people, well, hiring is not the indicator we need to work to because if we hired them and they walk into the building and walk out, which is what they did last year, that has no impact. That's just hiring. It's how many people we have in seats.

Have we met our staffing, compliment? We’re going to have pockets of issues. Uh, but we were in much, much better condition than we were last year. The other thing was space. We had no space, we were overwhelmed with packages and, uh, we had no place to go with them. So we went out early in the year who went out, we identified, we took down long-term facilities, uh, for, uh, 45 long-term facilities and about 30 short term facilities, but the 45 long-term facilities, uh, where we are making an investment in stability. Now that people that go to work there know that they have a job, uh, we put 115 or so package sorting, uh, machines in these things. And this was a race despite heavy competition for facilities in the nation and the supply chain issues. We can't get component parts. This team rocked. I mean, they did really, really good, you know, good work to get this done in record speed.

I say, I say this all the time, I've come out of the commercial marketplace, big, big projects like this we've moved as, as good, if not better than any commercial endeavor I have seen. So now we have, you know, almost 8, 9 million square feet of facilities around the nation staffed the, with sorting equipment in it. That particular volume will account for an additional 5 million packages a day. We're doing things with regard to transportation, uh, scheduling to get more better utilization. We have taken a lot off the air network, which failed us, and our planning… I mean, we're planning as a team together it's broad and focused and very, very, uh, uh, exciting. So as I, I'm very, very comfortable about the network processing. We have command centers set up across, uh, uh, across both the network and the delivery system. And, uh, I'm excited. I'm excited to see you play out. And, uh, I think it's going to be, uh, we're going to get good reviews.

Yasmine Di Giulio: All right. One last question. And this is a hard one. What do you like most about the job of being Postmaster General?

PMG Louis DeJoy: First of all, uh, it's important work and I like doing important things and, uh, and I don't come here. I mean, I come here with knowledge of - despite public opinion - that's written sometime, I come here with knowledge of what it is that we need to, uh, uh, do, especially that we're in the crisis that we are, we need to take action and it's pretty black and white. Uh, I enjoy that engaging in leading, uh, the transformational change that, that we need to make. And you see a lot of retired people in my, you know, it, you know, with my backpack round, they want to get on a spaceship to the moon or whatever they're doing right now. I, this is, you know, being a logistician and having my career where it was building a company and this serving the Postal Service over my, my, my past. I love the work. It's why I'm here all the time. And this is every days a week, you know, going at it because it is really satisfying to try and make the change and lead the lead, the organization, this committed organization of 640,000 people, and, uh, trying to come up with a solution for everybody. So we're here. Yeah. So that's what I love about it.

Yasmine Di Giulio: Louis, thank you so much for joining us today.

PMG Louis DeJoy: This has been great. What, what, uh, how many of you have these have you done so far? 

Yasmine Di Giulio: I think you will be our fifth.

PMG Louis DeJoy: Who's been your best? 

Yasmine Di Giulio: You of course. 

PMG Louis DeJoy: There you go, guys. You guys stay in these seats for awhile. Thank you very much. It was fun. I appreciate it.

Dale Parsan: Thanks Louis

Yasmine Di Giulio: Okay. Time for Did You Know. In this segment, Dale and I will each share a fun historical or cultural fact about the postal service

Dale Parsan: That's right Yasmine. As the name of the segment implies, this is a chance for us to shed some light on parts of the postal service and its history that most people probably have never heard of.

Yasmine Di Giulio: I'll get things started this time. Dale, I know, you know, your postal history, especially after our conversation with Jenny Lynch on an earlier episode.

Dale Parsan: That's right. Jenny's the postal service historian who came on our podcast to talk about mail during the colonial times in the U S.

Yasmine Di Giulio: Correct. Well, fast forward to the beginning of the 20th century and the postal service wasn't allowed to deliver packages - letters only. That changed in August, 1912, when Congress authorized the United States post office department, that's what it was called back then, to allow letter carriers to deliver packages for the first time.

Dale Parsan: That sounds like a good thing, right? Why do I feel like there's more to the story? 

Yasmine Di Giulio: Well, the first few years of personal, post-service, we're a bit of a mess. Starting January 1st, 1913, people began testing the limits of parcel service by mailing eggs, bricks, snakes, and other unusual packages.

Dale Parsan: I don't think it gets more unusual than mailing snakes.

Yasmine Di Giulio: Actually. It does. Maybe the strangest and most questionable use of the parcel service was parents mailing their children. 

Dale Parsan: Wait, are you kidding? 

Yasmine Di Giulio: No. And this didn't happen just one time. It was a thing. And technically it wasn't against postal regulations at first. In January, 1913, for example, an Ohio couple entrusted the postal service to deliver their eight month old son to his grandmother's house, about a mile away. The cost: 15 cents. Luckily for the family, James, that was the kid's name, weighed just under 11 pounds, which was the limit for parcels at the time. 

Dale Parsan: Not so lucky for little James though,

Yasmine Di Giulio: One Idaho couple in 1914, attached 53 cents in stamps to their five-year-old daughter's winter coat and sent her to her grandmother on the other side of the state, 73 miles away, riding in a train's mail compartments. It was cheaper than buying a regular train ticket.

Dale Parsan: You make the sounds so rational.

Yasmine Di Giulio: Get this: One woman mailed her six-year-old daughter 720 miles from her home in Florida to her father's home in Virginia. That's the longest trip we know of, but don't worry, Dale, this didn't go on for long. By 1915, the postmaster general at the time banned postal workers from accepting people as mail.

Dale Parsan: That's going to be hard to top, but I think I'll give it a shot. Okay. Imagine, take your pet to work day only your pet ends up sticking around for about a decade. And it keeps coming to work even after you leave your job. And then he ends up traveling around the world as sort of ambassador for your employees. 

Yasmine Di Giulio: I would say that my pet has loyalty issues.

Dale Parsan: Maybe so, but that didn't seem to bother Owney terrier mix, who ended up being an honorary member of the postal service in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Owney belonged to a clerk who worked in the Albany New York post office. In 1888, he started coming with his owner to work. When the clerk quit his job at the post office Owney ended up staying on as the office mascot. Apparently he liked the smell of mailbags and used to sleep on them.

Yasmine Di Giulio: Interesting, but I don't think I'll be trading my bed for a pile of mailbags anytime soon.

Dale Parsan: Owney soon began riding mail wagons to the train Depot. Later on he would ride the railway mail service train car down to New York city and back to Albany. Postal workers in Albany bought a leather color with a tag reading Owney, Post Office, Albany New York. As Owney's routes expanded railway mail clerks recorded Owney’s travels by attaching metal baggage tags to his collar to identify the rail lines he traveled on. At one point, it was said that Owney had traveled the length of every railroad in the country. It was also written in newspapers that Owney had seen the inside of more post offices than even the longest serving postal inspector at the time. 

Yasmine Di Giulio: Wow, Owney really got around!

Dale Parsan: He did indeed. In fact, postal employees, including the postmaster of Tacoma, Washington organized a trip to send Owney around the world. Owney ended up traveling more than 140,000 miles in all, including Mexico, Canada, Singapore, China, and Japan. When Owney died in 1897, railway mail clerks chipped in money to have a taxidermist preserve his body, which then was sent to postal headquarters in Washington DC for exhibit. Since 1993 Owney has been part of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington. On July 27th, 2011, Owney was even featured on his very own postal service stamp.

Yasmine Di Giulio: Wow. That was a pretty good one, Dale, although I'm not so sure about the taxidermy part, I think it was a much better idea to have Owney immortalized on a stamp on that note. We'll leave it there until the next episode.

Dale Parsan: So Yasmine how'd you enjoy today's episode with the postmaster general?

Yasmine Di Giulio: For me, it was really insightful to hear about how he developed the vision for the organization, along with a really clear plan to achieve that vision and getting stakeholder support along the way. What about you Dale?

Dale Parsan: For me, I really enjoyed hearing more about the recent investment decisions we're making for long term success, as well as how confident he is in our preparation for this year's peak holiday season.

Yasmine Di Giulio: That definitely came off. So I'm looking forward to see how we perform. Thanks for listening to our episode with the Postmaster General. If you're interested in reading more about the Delivering for America strategic vision, you can read the full plan on our website. USPS.com. Podcast updates are also available on the website, and don't forget to follow along on Instagram @US Postal Service, Twitter @USPS and on Facebook,

Dale Parsan: Subscribe to Mailin’ It wherever you get your podcast to make sure you don't miss the next episode.