How To Survive Trump’s Supply Chain Shock? With Richard Barnett – RFP 58 Transcript
Richard Barnett (00:00): The use and exploration of tariffs and tariff policy is moving so quickly that it has a disruptive effect very similar to the early stages of the pandemic. Even a one-year delay in planning has a massive ripple effect on hundreds, if not thousands, of other investments. This is not an incremental market movement. We’re seeing industries completely rethink what they’re actually going to produce, by product line, maybe for months, if not permanently.
Gordon Lamphere (00:31): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, the podcast where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Richard Barnett. Richard is Chief Marketing Officer at Supplyframe, the leading platform for global electronics supply chain solutions. He’s at the helm of strategy for Supplyframe, and he can translate market volatility into competitive advantage. He’s a frequent speaker on global trade, reshoring, and digital transformation. If you’re interested in better understanding the current tariff crisis and how global trade patterns may shape the real estate industry, this podcast is well worth a listen. Richard, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
Richard Barnett (01:26): Great to be with you, Gordon.
A Career in Global Supply Chains
Gordon Lamphere (01:28): Can you tell us a little about what got you into supply chains and the transportation industry in general?
Richard Barnett (01:36): I started my career in supply chain management and optimization in the late nineties. That was an interesting time, with the early adoption of global supply chain planning and optimization solutions, particularly for multinationals with very complex supply chain networks facing increasing competition. A lot of the competitive value was in speed, agility, managing inventory very efficiently, matching demand opportunities more quickly, and rebalancing capacity across global networks, because that was an early wave of globalization. That turned into a long career working with leading companies, driving innovation, and helping them think through what’s next in different industries: high tech, automotive, industrial and core manufacturing, and to a great degree, consumer goods and retail.
From Globalization to Regionalization
Gordon Lamphere (02:35): Globalization is at a very different point than it was in the 1990s. How have the tensions between globalization, regionalization, and nationalization played out from your perspective?
Richard Barnett (02:54): Multiple factors have shifted us away from a general focus on globalization to drive cost and efficiency in global supply chains. There really was a focus on developing relationships with the lowest-cost suppliers and manufacturers, and on balancing supply and distribution networks to flexibly meet regional demand centers in Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. That brought a lot of innovation in logistics networks and third-party logistics providers to add flexibility and visibility to global supply chains.
But there’s been a real shift away from lowest cost toward highest quality, and toward clusters of innovation and capability, depending on the market or industry. We saw that in automotive over a much longer period, because it’s one of the longest industry evolutions we’ve seen, going back over a hundred years, with highly integrated regional supply chains across multiple tiers of suppliers. In electronics, particularly in China initially, the advantage was the ability to build ecosystems around specialized electronic products and to scale and ramp up very quickly. It wasn’t just lowest cost. It was flexibility, the ability to ramp to volume, and having the expertise of multiple nearby suppliers and service providers around those industry innovation centers.
It’s different in industries still focused on very low cost. Footwear and apparel, for example, have stayed in that early zone. Production is highly concentrated in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and other low-cost countries because the processes are generally manual-intensive. The innovation there has been in the fabrics and materials that go into the final cut-and-sew operation. So across different industries, specialization has become more regional,
Richard Barnett (05:18): and the value add isn’t just lowest cost, but innovation, expertise, and know-how. Where it’s been capital-intensive, there’s been a lot of focus on automation, machine tooling skill sets, and new forms of robotics and industrial automation. So globalization has naturally shifted toward regionalization over time as companies balance where those investments and capability centers sit.
That’s why, when we look at the current review of tariffs, what the tariff goals might be, and geopolitical pressures realigning major power bases and spheres of influence, those forces are pushing back on early globalization. But given where investments have been made and how large and integrated global supply chains are, they’re probably more globalized and interconnected today than in the late nineties, even as we see pressure to move back to regionalization. So it’s a layered observation over time.
Lessons the Pandemic Taught, and Many Didn’t Learn
Gordon Lamphere (06:35): Speaking of layered observations, one of the biggest issues we consistently hear from occupiers in our industrial buildings and from tenants in our tenant brokerage practice is concern, in the post-2020 world, about the shocks that hit supply chains. Where do you see those risks playing out most in the current trade structure, and how are you seeing that with your clients?
Richard Barnett (07:17): In a weird way, the global pandemic was an unprecedented shock to every supply chain and every market, and it tested the fragility of global supply chains in different ways. We all saw the rush to buy toilet paper and the panic buying of consumer products. That was peak supply chain awareness for everybody, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in my view. As consumers and professionals, whatever our field, we should be more aware of how interconnected and dependent we are on the supply chains that connect to us.
We also saw very specifically how certain industries were hardwired for efficiency and were massively challenged. Automotive was the big one. At Supplyframe, in the global electronics market, we could see what was happening far upstream of automotive. When the big constraints on key electronic components started moving slowly through the system, those shortages surprised global OEMs viewed as best in class at managing their inbound supply chains, like Toyota, BMW, and Volkswagen. They had factory shutdowns and were surprised with two weeks’ notice, even though you could see it unfolding over six months if you had the right market intelligence.
The reason is that they had leaned out their global supply chains so much. They were just in time and just in sequence, optimizing inbound materials to meet just a few days of final assembly line demand. And they put a huge amount of cost and liability pressure on their tier one and tier two suppliers. So when demand shifted and the automotive OEMs said, “We’re not sure how many cars or trucks we’re going to sell, let’s pause,” there was no incentive to hold strategic inventory buffers at tier one, tier two, or anywhere upstream.
The other really interesting insight is that a lot of the electronic components used in car manufacturing are common components used in
Richard Barnett (09:35): other devices and end applications. So that demand and available supply immediately pivoted to the areas that were expanding very quickly: data centers and mobile services, because everyone was working and learning from home. Laptops became a hot commodity. They had been really boring, with about 1 percent incremental growth year over year, and suddenly they were a spike item. What that revealed is how interdependent key supply chains, particularly electronics, are across industries, because we’ve electrified so many of them. You’re almost competing industry to industry, rather than just having your tier one supplier manage inbound supply risk.
The problem, fast-forwarding to now, is that many global manufacturers didn’t learn the lessons of the pandemic, because there was so much firefighting just to survive. Where we landed was some incremental change: greater visibility and more focus on long-term agreements with critical suppliers. But generally, companies didn’t get to the root cause of how to design in more resilience and flexibility, both in product design, since every new product is essentially a new supply chain being designed and built, and in their supply chain networks.
Tariffs as a Pandemic-Scale Disruption
Now we’re in another incredibly unprecedented time, but not an externality. This is specifically being led by the current administration’s aggressive use and exploration of tariffs and tariff policy, and by the responses of our key trading partners. Because it’s moving so quickly, it has a disruptive effect very similar to the early stages of the pandemic. We’re seeing tons of forward inventory buying and inbound shipments trying to beat tariff exposure, which is very artificial and outside any normal demand or supply pattern. So we’re highly constrained again. Cost increases and the effort to buy time to shift sources of supply will clearly lead to market imbalances: long lead times and maybe too much of the wrong stuff, or delayed production schedules and new product launches. We’ve already seen all of that happen,
Richard Barnett (11:59): even with the current uncertainty in the market. There’s a drive toward reshoring, more flexible localized operations, and holding inventory buffers. Some of that has consistently moved forward in key supply chains because of the pandemic, particularly in North America. But the scale and potential medium- to long-term impact of the tariff changes that are in effect, proposed, or actively being negotiated far exceeds the general flexibility improvements we’ve built into our supply chains.
Where the Biggest Risks Sit, Sector by Sector
Gordon Lamphere (12:37): You mentioned some of them briefly, but where do you see the biggest risks from the supply chain shock created by tariffs? We’re talking to occupiers on both the tenant and landlord side, and they’re worried about various sections of the market. For the market as a whole, what should landlords and tenants be watching?
Richard Barnett (13:07): There’s a sector-specific set of risks and timing considerations. Look at fast-moving consumer goods and anything related to warehouses, logistics, and distribution centers. Global retailers and e-commerce fulfillment marketplaces are going to rebalance fairly dynamically, aligning inventory and shipments to cost and then sensing and absorbing shifts in consumer demand. That’s an easier zone in which to see the immediate impact, and it’s much more dynamic and flexible in readjusting to new cost levels and consumer demand. That’s the first wave of impact. The uncertainty is the biggest near-term risk, and within a three- to six-month timeframe, there should be enough visibility into the impact of the changes to start rebalancing.
The biggest concentration of risk is in inbound products from China primarily, and from related Southeast Asian markets, particularly in apparel and footwear. We’ve seen the markets react very carefully to Nike and other global brands depending on where the tariff impacts land. That may be more structural. It might slow new product launches, and there may be strategic repositioning of inventory, product lines, or assortment planning because of higher costs and uncertainty about how to absorb them.
It’s on the discrete manufacturing side that I think we’ll see more structural changes, but they’ll be more visible over a three- to nine-month view, because of the complexity of the sources of supply and of absorbing those costs. That’s anything in industrial automation and automotive. Even lower-volume, higher-mix aerospace and defense might
Richard Barnett (15:26): be a little buffered in the short term, but they also face supply chain risks. In large discrete manufacturing with final assembly locations and capital-intensive investments, the switching cost to realign and optimize cost of manufacturing and supply runs anywhere from two to three years. Final assembly can sometimes be ramped fairly quickly, or you can work with manufacturing partners like EMS providers to sustain a shift. But new semiconductor fabs, which are already underway, are a five- to six-year, multibillion-dollar capital outlay.
So you’ll see indicators of risk in structural changes: “We’re going to ramp up new manufacturing very quickly,” or “We’re going to ramp down a site because it no longer makes sense to build or final-assemble products there.” That can be very binary. You’ll also see a need for greater certainty before continuing planned capital investments with three- to six-year build-out schedules. Those major capital projects are highly visible. In semiconductors, the key states are Texas, Utah, Arizona, and others. But even those planned commitments are being relooked at, because the cost of capital might be changing. It’s very important to look at the ecosystem that has to be built up around them: logistics, transportation, and tier one suppliers that co-locate into those new hubs. All of that add-on investment, and its timing, will be looked at with fresh eyes, because the investment calculus has shifted dramatically.
You can get ahead of it, but you have to look very carefully at the ecosystem impact and the timing and speed of the knock-on investments attached to a major capital investment.
Richard Barnett (17:53): We need to get out of this period of uncertainty for that to rebalance effectively. Right now, it’s very hard to read, because it’s a very dynamic situation with an over-under on whether it makes sense to keep developing a product line or making a regional investment. A lot of global supply chains tried to move to a China-plus-one strategy, ramp up alternatives, or get their suppliers to relocate to Mexico and Canada to serve the North American market. Now there’s potentially no safe haven unless we renegotiate USMCA, and we’re right on the fine line of whether content up to 70 or 80 percent will be protected and tariff-free, and whether that can be extended. There are really competing narratives, and that’s what’s so frustrating for large global manufacturers that de-risked their supply chain networks and thought they were making the right decisions. Now that’s not clear.
It’s not really feasible to nearshore or reshore all that manufacturing capacity, not just to the US but to anywhere the in-market demand is. So it’s a sticky, complicated, layered situation. I think there will be a better read in about three to six months. Right now, making any specific forecast decision is too risky and too uncertain.
The CHIPS Act and the Semiconductor Ecosystem
Gordon Lamphere (19:23): Something a little more certain, though there’s still a lot of confusion around it, is the CHIPS Act and how it has played out in US manufacturing. Many of the folks who invest in a wide range of our industrial listings and land holdings are also investors in companies that have benefited greatly from the CHIPS Act. How are you seeing it play out from a larger economic and structural perspective, and what can American chip and chip-adjacent manufacturers expect going forward?
Richard Barnett (20:12): Generally, we’d view the CHIPS Act as well designed, because it tried to be somewhat holistic from an industrial policy perspective. It provided incentives for new manufacturing investment in the United States, including new fab and foundry investments, but it also looked at supporting talent through partnerships with universities and others. That’s a key constraint on building out the specialized skills needed to operate these new foundries, and there’s an ecosystem around them that creates demand for value-added services and a newly trained workforce. It also focused on investment in startups and innovation related to semiconductors, which now ties into software and semiconductor design, with AI chips from NVIDIA and others.
The CHIPS Act also provided incentives for large non-US-headquartered players like Samsung and TSMC to build out fab capabilities in the United States, as well as for US champions like Intel. Intel has been struggling to find its path forward, because part of its business is IP-intensive chip design and part is a foundry business, similar to what GlobalFoundries does as a foundry for fabless semiconductor companies, alongside TSMC and others. I think the approach was right, because the capital required for any new fab or foundry is so high that there are only five or six players in the world that can make those investments. So it was heading in the right direction. We saw a bit of a reset in timing, with the end state of some of these capital projects moving out a couple of years, but
Richard Barnett (22:29): the grant funding and investments got new ground opened and underway in almost every major commitment under the CHIPS Act. What we’re seeing now is the current administration revisiting and challenging the CHIPS Act in some way, though it’s unclear what the specific concerns are. And because of the extent of the tariff regime, the view of the full cost, the likelihood of success, and in-market demand patterns for any of those large foundry investments is changing again.
What’s interesting about the semiconductor value chain is that while you may have a fab producing chips, the OSAT, the outsourced assembly and test and packaging, may happen in Malaysia before the chips go to a final assembly or tier one supplier and come back into the United States in, say, an automotive product. So even with this intensive fab piece of the value chain onshore, the flow of chips and electronic components is still highly global. The CHIPS Act anchored new investment and supported flexibility and resilience in the overall global semiconductor supply chain, because there’s inherent risk in concentrating supply and foundries in certain geographic locations, particularly Taiwan. Something like 90 percent of advanced semiconductor fab production, particularly with TSMC, happens in Taiwan. Everyone benefits from diversification.
So the CHIPS Act moved us in the right direction. The question is whether near-term tariff impacts slow down or reverse that direction. My view is that there will be a general desire to protect those investments, so they’ll continue, but maybe with an additional delay as plans rebalance and settle and there’s more certainty on the cost side
Richard Barnett (24:47): for all the related investment. Take Samsung’s new foundry in Taylor, Texas. There’s a huge amount of investment happening in infrastructure, logistics, service providers, and new suppliers setting up in the huge industrial park they’re developing. Everything looks like it’s still on course. But there could be slowdowns, and even a one-year delay in their planning has a massive ripple effect on hundreds, if not thousands, of other investments tied to that overall production schedule. That’s what I think we have to watch very carefully.
Bottlenecks at the Ports and Borders
Gordon Lamphere (25:34): One thing I know everyone is watching carefully, whether they’re real estate or industrial investors, is potential bottlenecks. I’ve been talking with a number of people we do business with in Southern California and around the Port of Los Angeles who are concerned about the number of ships currently moving out of China. We also have concerns about bottlenecks in Mexico and in some of the logistics networks coming out of Canada, from Ontario into Michigan. What potential risks are you seeing at these bottlenecks where trade has halted, and how might that affect other parts of the system?
Richard Barnett (26:33): Whenever you have a shock to the system, as we saw with the pandemic and now with high-impact policy changes like tariffs of well over 100 percent on China, even if they’re in a near-term negotiation phase, you see this. Logistics networks are highly efficient and very leaned out, as we talked about. That’s very true in automotive, but also across every consumer market. You’re not holding two or three months of inventory in warehouses anymore. There are a lot of fast-moving consumer goods patterns. So it’s no surprise we’re seeing crazy whipsaw effects from accelerated inbound air and ocean shipments into the United States. I think Apple reported shipping something like 1.6 million units by air from China into the United States, and now we’re seeing a huge volume of inbound shipments from India, just for iPhones, in the near term.
That will create massive ripple effects and inefficiencies in container and ocean transport capacity, because if you don’t have balanced trade port to port, you get massive imbalances. That quickly changes spot rates on ocean cargo lanes, and all of it is being massively recalculated. Nothing looks like it did four or five months ago, and that has a huge impact on the Port of LA in particular, because of all the trans-Pacific trade.
In Mexico, you have a similar disruption, but it’s more concentrated around automotive. It involves regional port-to-port shipments on both the Pacific and Gulf sides, and a lot of intermodal rail-to-truck routes, with the same high congestion at customs and at every port of clearance.
Richard Barnett (29:00): What I think we’ll see is a ramp-down, because uncertainty about end-product cost and demand makes it hard to front-load manufacturing and final assembly plants. That will ripple through all the tier one and tier two suppliers, particularly in automotive, where there’s very tight alignment to an end product and to one OEM’s final assembly plant schedule. That could be binary. It could mean a reset of vehicle production volume allocations that won’t recover for other suppliers, and therefore reduced utilization of certain transportation modes and of small specialized logistics providers doing air freight or tied to a specific port of operation. There could be a massive reset in their business, and they might have to pivot and diversify. All that adjustment takes months, and there will be winners and losers.
In Mexico, though, there were already transportation lane capacity constraints because of the build-out and the ongoing investment to facilitate faster, more efficient rail-to-highway lanes running up and down between four or five major manufacturing hubs. This might alleviate some of that near-term imbalance, so maybe it becomes a bit more efficient. But again, this is not an incremental market movement. We’re seeing industries, particularly automotive and high tech in Mexico, having to completely rethink their total capacity allocation and what they’re actually going to produce, by product line, maybe for months, if not permanently. That’s really hard to absorb.
Building Redundancy: Outdoor Storage, Flex Warehouse, and Specialized Manufacturers
Gordon Lamphere (30:56): One of the biggest things we’ve seen in the market is a number of our clients looking at onshoring additional storage and building redundancy. Just the week after Trump was reelected, some raw material suppliers, in areas like timber, and some of the more resilient suppliers started trying to develop redundancy. We’ve seen it in IOS, industrial outdoor storage, as well as in cheap redundancy generally. Are you seeing that play out in the markets, or are people still in shock?
Richard Barnett (31:56): We’re already seeing a shift toward redundancy. When you’re talking about outdoor storage for bulk products, that could be timber, but it could also be bulk metals like finished aluminum or steel. That’s an opportunity, because it’s so cost-intensive to hold and store bulk items that you need to think about co-locating near your consumption areas rather than in centralized hubs. A lot of supply chain network design was already underway. What you’re seeing now is redundancy in the form of more flexible manufacturing locations, and in understanding where you might have more optionality for short-term warehouse capacity to balance
forward buying of inventory well ahead of normal demand patterns. I might want to hold strategic inventory for six months to a year, and that isn’t aligned with my manufacturing or warehouse capacity, so I have to find it through a partner. There’s a spot-buy market, if you will, for near-term inventory balancing.
In manufacturing, something that was already underway but will accelerate, and that doesn’t get headline news, is specialized manufacturing. There are something like 5,000 US manufacturers doing additive manufacturing, whether 3D printing or specialized CNC tooling and cutting operations, serving multiple industry ecosystems with short runs rather than dedicated mainline investments. That marketplace is really beginning to scale and grow. The profile for those manufacturers may be $5 million to $20 million in revenue, but they’re specialized and able to serve multiple end markets. It’s interesting to see investment already scaling there, because it addresses the needs of many manufacturers now scrambling to nearshore
Richard Barnett (34:21): more efficiently without investing in scaling their own manufacturing capacity or asking their major tier one suppliers to do it. That’s an interesting profile to watch from a growth perspective: which of those specialized manufacturers, not the largest global players, are feeding this new demand and have the flexibility to stand up new lines or accept new tooling. I think that will be a vibrant near-term area that continues to scale.
The issue is how much of this expanded yard storage or flex warehouse capacity is sustainable, based on companies’ market forecasts and their six- to nine-month or annual views of utilization, for long-term contracts versus spot-buy arrangements. The mix will depend on how things rebalance toward certainty so companies can commit to usage and allocation. That uncertainty is really hard for everyone, because if you’re not sure about your allocation and utilization, it’s very hard to price.
Commodity IQ and the Value of Real-Time Market Intelligence
Gordon Lamphere (35:35): We’re all in this period of uncertainty right now, and a lot of people are looking for more certainty. I know you’ve worked on Commodity IQ to help understand where there’s potential distress. Where can folks go to learn about Commodity IQ and understand where potential distress could come from with tenants?
Richard Barnett (36:06): Thank you for that. We developed Commodity IQ during the pandemic because we were watching things happen in real time, not just in electronics but in other key commodity markets. We added specialty metals, and we’re now looking at over 400 commodity categories. What we realized is that if we could triangulate and provide more market intelligence, understanding what’s happening at both a geographic and an aggregated commodity level, and then combine that with forward-looking demand signals, not just short-term purchases and lead time and cost dynamics, but the longer-term demand drivers, particularly around engineered products, everyone could have a balanced near-term and longer-term view. We then started developing a six-month outlook, where we have the data volume and density to predict where price, lead time, cost, and inventory are moving.
That kind of third-party market intelligence is incredibly critical at a time like this, because there’s so much more uncertainty. What worked for us before, or what our models showed in the past, is sometimes insufficient. You really need external intelligence that’s close to real time, not just a periodic quarterly update, because these dynamics are playing out in complicated ways, and it’s not obvious what the market response or timing will be. Any company interested can go to supplyframe.com and learn more about Commodity IQ. It’s very easy to subscribe and get on board. Our customers use it for direct materials procurement, for product positioning and placement, and for understanding multi-tier supply chain trends that help them think about sources of supply and how they build out their supply chain networks. That becomes incredibly valuable if you’re focused on a specific sector or geography and need context on everything happening around those big anchor investments.
The Final Four: Where Trade Goes in Five to Ten Years
Gordon Lamphere (38:26): Big investments can play out years down the road. We do something called the Final Four: four quick questions that give us a roundup of what to expect going forward and how we can adjust to be better real estate investors and better human beings in general. Speaking of forecasting, where do you see trade five and ten years out? Are we going to stay in this crazy world forever, or will things mellow out with a little more certainty?
Richard Barnett (39:07): There will be more certainty, for sure. The markets and the dynamics around trading partner realignment will play out. In four or five years, we should be in a better place on certainty, but the world might look very different than it does today in terms of where investment is concentrated, with more regionalization and more flexibility in global supply chains. I don’t firmly believe in the full decoupling view, particularly with China. I think there will be a lot of rebalancing and diversification that will be healthy for the market overall. But it won’t look like it does today.
Advice for Young Professionals: Check In With Yourself Every Six Months
Gordon Lamphere (40:00): We also love to take a step back. A lot of people who listen to the podcast are earlier in their careers. If you had one minute of career advice for your younger self, what would it be?
Richard Barnett (40:18): Great question. When you think about your energy, your commitment, and what drives you, it’s really important to be intentional about where you invest your time and learning, and to check in with yourself every six months to make sure those choices still resonate. If new information has come in, adjust and pivot more quickly. Sometimes we get caught up in a story we tell ourselves about what we want, our ambition, and our drive, and then it doesn’t serve us later, and we feel trapped or overcommitted to something that isn’t working. It’s really important to check in frequently and realign, because our lives and careers keep evolving. Maintaining that curiosity and realignment with your authentic self and what drives you is really important to being truly successful.
Book Recommendations: Chip War and From Source to Sold
Gordon Lamphere (41:21): I couldn’t agree more. One of the ways we like to evolve, beyond talking to people and learning by doing, is learning by reading. Is there a book our listeners should pick up, particularly something trade or business related?
Richard Barnett (41:45): Chip War is an interesting one to go back and review. It was written around the pandemic and covers electronics and the semiconductor industry. It does a really good job of describing the history and evolution of the US semiconductor industry in particular, and how it evolved and globalized with a lot of public-private investment. It’s really useful for understanding the dynamics and context of what’s happening right now on a global basis. I also have From Source to Sold, an interesting compilation of interviews with global supply chain leaders across different industries about how they’ve driven innovation.
Books like these are worth reading. In general, if you haven’t spent time understanding global supply chains and the key imperatives and strategies global supply chain leaders are focused on, now is the time to get educated, because we’re all part of the conversation. We’re all being affected by the response to tariffs and the repositioning of global supply chains in response to market dynamics, so we all need to keep getting more educated in that area.
Who Should Be Our Next Guest?
Gordon Lamphere (43:05): The last question, and I won’t let you get away from this one because it’s the whole reason for the podcast: we firmly believe the men and women in the arena, whether in trade, commercial real estate, industrial, or logistics, tend to know the right next person to talk to. Who should we bring on next who’s trade related?
Richard Barnett (43:38): That’s a great question. There are some folks in the logistics ecosystem who are really on the front lines of understanding what’s happening in final-mile dynamics. Adrian Gonzalez is really interesting in that area. From a global supply chain perspective, Lora Cecere, a longtime analyst and a friend, has a great perspective on the over-under of what’s happening, and she has great pattern recognition from decades of analyzing global supply chains. So there are definitely some great experts we could tee up for the next conversation.
How to Reach Richard Barnett
Gordon Lamphere (44:24): Richard, I truly appreciate it. There’s one final question, and it’s important as well: if somebody wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way to get in contact?
Richard Barnett (44:32): They can reach me directly by email at [email protected]. I’m also on LinkedIn and happy to connect there if that’s easier. And definitely visit the resources section at supplyframe.com. There are tons of great articles and insights we publish and share for free. I’d love to connect and continue the conversation if it’s helpful.
Gordon Lamphere (44:51): Richard, thank you so very much. I really appreciate it, and we have to have you on in the future.
Richard Barnett (44:55): Thank you, Gordon. I appreciate it as well.
Gordon Lamphere (44:57): Thanks again to Richard. We really appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a follow, and a five-star review. Your interactions and subscriptions truly matter, and they help us continue to bring on quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with The Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for watching.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.