Simone Givney believes in life-long learning. Her businesses, Ingredior and Skill Fault, focus on business connections and partnerships, and knowledge and growth in business and in life. Through her work, Simone helps business owners raise their self-awareness through education and challenges them to think outside the box. In this episode, Simone and I chat about her fascinating journey into entrepreneurship, why she didn’t like the constraints of corporate life and shares how businesses can grow through connections and the right business opportunities.  

Whether you’re just starting a business or are looking to grow and expand, this episode is for you. To learn more about Simone and her businesses, visit the Ingredior website, or follow her on Twitter or Instagram, or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Full episode transcript

Karen: Hello there, everyone. Thank you for joining me for another Small But Mighty Biz Story. Today, I'm excited to speak with Simone Givney, the Managing Director and Head of Partnerships and Marketing with Ingredior, an Australian-based company that specializes in growing and scaling businesses. Simone, thank you for being here. Please tell everyone about yourself.

Simone: Thank you for having me. Yes. Generally speaking, when I explain myself to people, crazy is probably a word that I should use but essentially, I'm a person with multiple interests that has one core underlying factor to it, which is to help raise people's self-awareness. Everything I do rotates around that and all the different things that I get involved in, all of them have a common thread and that common thread is to help in some way raise self-awareness through education and using different activities, different ways of working with people breaking into their biases and breaking down their misconceptions and/or confirmation perceptions around what it is they think and challenging their structure to think outside the box.

I'm a massive believer that when you learn, you grow and when you grow, you thrive. When people are thinking about how they might grow and learn, you don't necessarily do that on your own. You need others to challenge your thinking, not aggressively challenge but challenge your thinking by way of what you may have been raised with or what you may have learned over the course of your life. All of these organizations that I'm involved in, all these businesses that I have are centered around that.

Karen: That's great. You've mentioned all these businesses. What are all these businesses? Now I've mentioned Ingredior which is you help businesses grow and scale through a multi-disciplinary group of services that are available, but I know that you have a few other businesses on the go. Tell me about that.

Simone: Ingredior is I guess what you would say the concrete to the foundation of a house. It's the stabilizer that helps the other businesses function. That's because I firmly believe that if you have multiple interests, you can actually chase them, you can achieve them if you create the structure to allow you to do so. Ingredior is the business that holds the resources, that holds the staff. It holds the structure that allows the other businesses to thrive.

One of the things that I have done is recognize first and foremost that I can't do it on my own. None of this can happen on my own. For each of the businesses that I have that I'll get into in a second, I've actively sought out business partners that I can work with that complement my skills so that there's always two people working on the business at any given time, which obviously allows that to benefit more.

Karen: Oh, fabulous.

Simone: It helps it grow a bit more and it helps me with accountability, it helps me challenge my own thinking of how the business should go, but it also allows a different level of expertise to come into the business to help it do what it needs to do. The other businesses that I also have is Wellness in a Box which is based around health and wellness, wellbeing, and well mindfulness. We use the five senses of the body that underlying current to Wellness in a Box's psychology. What we try and do is have a box that gets delivered to your home every month with a different theme and that box is designed to tantalize you by way of learning more about yourself through tactile items. Say, the 10 things that come in that box, you might not know anything about it, but that's actually the beautiful part about it because you'll begin to open up your mind to learning if you actually start to play around with it and just get a bit curious. I think that's the X factor for me, curiosity and being insatiably curious in everything that I do.

The next one is Wealth Monster which is financial literacy. It's a game that is designed for tweens and teens. What that does is teach kids about financial literacy, not just the math of financial literacy, but how it works. What is money for? How can you use it to your advantage? When you get paid, yes you get paid for the hours that you do and the work that you do but what can you do with that money? Why should you do different things with that money rather than just spend it? It's about using money wisely. We do it through a really fun game. It's cute little monsters. We had a kid design the artwork for it. We've had experts in audio production do all the music for it. It's quite a fun little game. My daughter plays it and she kicks my butt each time she plays it which is very embarrassing.

Then the other business that I have is Skill Vault, which is an e-learning platform. It's generally a hosting platform for people to bring their expertise. Way back when in 2019, I sat down with my business partner of Ingredior and I said, "Look, we need to start doing some recession planning." Inevitably, these recessions come in cycles roughly around 10 to 12 years. It's going to happen. It does. That's just the inevitability of the economy that we live in and that we work within. We started building Skill Vault as a recession plan for Ingredior. My prediction was the around end of 2020, something was going to happen. I didn't anticipate a global pandemic and the impact that would have, but nonetheless, we were very prepared and ready to go.

We kicked off Skill Vault in March 2020, and that gave access to consultants to create a course that they could put onto our website and continue to get revenue, even though the world had been shut down. That was just very good timing on our part. Good planning as well because we'd done a recession planning session but also good timing. That's how Skill Vault came to be. Then the other one we have is Mini-rain, which is an investment company.

We invest in medium-sized businesses who are at that phase where they're ready to grow but they need working capital to do so. Sometimes we do just cash investments, sometimes we do cash and services. Ingredior would provide services to the investment, smart capital, smart equity, as well as just capital investment, and we use that to A, from our perspective, it allows us to better service our investments to ensure that we have that degree of oversight. The reality is we have invested interest in making it work.

When we start to do the smarter equity play, that's usually when people get the best solution and the best possible outcome because we are significantly driving that whole process. That's when we look at all of those businesses, they all have an education thread to it, which comes back to my raising self-awareness and just wanting to help. On Ingredior, for example, we spent two and a half years just producing free content, free worksheets, free booklets, free articles, we go into significant depth and levels of information around finance, marketing, partnerships, equity working capital, purely just because I have this belief that when you create value and when you give freely, inevitably people will seek you out and come and come to find you.

Karen: Yes. I firmly believe that as well. I love that you have this, seemingly on the surface very different group of businesses, but you have a really clear common thread of that curiosity and self-awareness piece, which drives the development of all of them now. I assume Ingredior came first or was it something else?

Simone: Crazily, sorry to use such a word. They all came at the same time. So crazy. In 2014, I was actually hit by a truck and I couldn't really walk, I couldn't stand, I had a five-month-old baby at the time, I couldn't hold her, I couldn't do the things that you would normally be able to do. I then had to go on a journey of recovery, and rebuild my body again. It was at that moment that I thought, I came from corporate enterprise, I was in line to be CEO. I just thought you know what, that's not really who I am. I always knew deep down, I would go off and do my own thing. I knew that I had more to give than what corporate enterprise could allow me to give.

I always felt very, very restrained and confined by corporate enterprise. Even though I enjoyed the roles I did, I still felt restrained. Not that I want to toot my own horn, but I understand people, I've got this thirst for knowledge around behavioural science. That drives a lot of what I do. When I see something, or I hear something, and I get a feel for something just based on monitoring patterns of people and communities, I try and put forward good solutions. A lot of the time, it's just a little bit too outside of the box, or it's just a little bit too ahead of its time.

Corporations can't really jump on it because they themselves are restrained. I just found that really a vicious cycle for me. After being hit by the truck, I went, you know what, it's time now, I think it's time that I reviewed what I'm doing, and it's now whenever, which is the thing everyone says, but it's not necessarily true, I could have done it later. I figured, why not take the opportunity that's been presented to me?

I started working out how that could work. I had a few things I had to do, by way of-- I was also the way to work when I had the accident. I had work cover and lawyers and things to deal with. There were things that I had to do that prohibited me from running off and doing exactly what I wanted when I wanted. I still had that plan in place ready to go. After I went through that process, and the court case had been finalized, and the parties had been charged, and so on and so forth, I was free, I was able to just do whatever I wanted.

I had surgery. When I launched all of these businesses, I was also having knee surgery as a result of the car accident. I thought, why not? It can be done. If it's meant to be, it will happen. I will drive this forward. They all came at the same time. I really quickly recognized that Ingredior was always going to be that foundation, that engine that drove everything else. Those other businesses, paying Ingredior to do the work that it does. It doesn't do it for free. It really is its own commercial product.

When we started doing smart equity, and we started doing work for my other businesses, Ingredior, I mean, when Ingredior was doing work for those other businesses, I thought other businesses need this support, they need this help. Surely, I'm not the only one that would be sitting here thinking, hey, why do I need staff when I can just use Ingredior? We started offering it to a more broader market. Yes, the rest is history as they say.

Karen: That's quite an interesting origin story for this because I can't imagine. What I find so fascinating is, you were saying that you could have done it later, and you always knew that you were probably going to leave corporate, because corporate is so constraining, and I know so many people can relate to that feeling. I know I do. I just left the corporate world last year. It's wonderful to have that – be the captain of your ship and go in the direction that you want to go and not have those constraints that happen in the corporate world. How do you operate differently as the CEO of your own companies, then you would in the corporate world?

Simone: I find that I'm able to be significantly more agile and responsive to the market. One of the things that I do try and do very heavily is stay on top of what's going on, and talk with my team and make decisions in an hour or half an hour, as opposed to putting together a report, putting that up the chain, having other people discuss it on whether it's got merit or not, and then it eventually coming back down to me, and by then, we've potentially lost the edge.

One of the things that I do with my companies and with my team is that, if something drops in the line, I run it through a critique. One of the things that Ingredior does for businesses and for our clients is, we give them a baseline. We do discovery sessions with them and we do strategy with them, so that we say, "Okay, here's your baseline, you can take opportunities, but we're not going to let you fall below the line." Which most businesses do, especially small businesses.

So many businesses fall prey to what I refer to as chasing that shiny ball. One of the things that I think is very detrimental to businesses is, not every opportunity is a good opportunity, you've got to run it through a gauntlet, a critique. What I do for my businesses, and what I help other businesses do is really just drive that baseline and go, "Yes, that is a brilliant opportunity, but does it do these five things?" If any of those five things is a no, I don't do it. My team know that I operate like that.

If something comes up, I'll immediately run it through that gauntlet, because I've documented that, I know what that critique is, and I know what my criteria is for allowing opportunities to flourish. I then talk with the team and go, "Team, what do you think? Do you think we should do this? What are your objections?" To pull them into the fray and get their buy-in. Because inevitably, they'll be helping me drive it so I need to make sure that they're there with me, and that they equally agree to it. Then if the answer is yes to all of those, we go ahead with it.

Karen: What are some examples of the different critiques that you make? Are you looking at the alignment of values? Are you looking at the financial opportunity? What are some of the things that you're looking for in the various potential opportunities that you're pursuing?

Simone: All those things and more. Looking at it from a perspective of, does it speak to our objectives and goals as a business? Will it, in fact, be beneficial for both parties? Because the second that you sit there and think to yourself, it's beneficial to me and my business, then you've potentially lost the game. It has to be beneficial for both parties. Otherwise, there's an unfair slant and advantage and someone at some point will start to become resentful, or you'll get malicious intent starting to come through. Making sure that it benefits both parties equally, and being able to actually identify what that is. Knowing whatever the opportunity is, knowing how that benefits your counterparty as well as yourself.

The other thing is obviously finance. Making sure that if there is money to be spent on it, that it is of value to both businesses who are engaging in the opportunity, not just one or the other, because again, when it comes to money, that is the breaker of relationships in all aspects of our lives generally. On that front, it's extremely important to make sure that, that's very clear but also my team. Will this be something fun for the team to work on? Will this help them grow? Will this build their own portfolio? Is it something that can be fun in market?

One of the things that-- part of my background is doing major festivals. While I was at university, I volunteered for, I think it was 50 odd…I volunteered across 50 opportunities over the course of one year period. The company that I was doing, my volunteer work with while I was at university while I had three jobs. One of the ladies left. I was six months out of graduating and one of the ladies left that was the only lady left there, actually, because it was a very small business. The owner said, "Hey, what's this chick like? This chick, Simone, what's she like?

Then the lady that was leaving said, "She's brilliant. She's really on top of it. She's given so much to us already." So I got the job. I left university six months out. I was very lucky actually, I was still able to graduate because my teachers worked with me and I was able to do it via correspondence, which these days wouldn't be a problem. Back then, correspondence didn't really exist. Doing your university degree by video didn't really exist. I did it by correspondence. I still graduated, but I had a full-time job six months before I'd finished. Doing those sorts of things really allow you to step outside, but it also makes you really attuned.

During those festival days, I'd be doing 60-70 hour weeks on $23,000 a year, which is quite low here in Australia. The average wage here in Australia is around $60,000; $50,000 for an entry-level, $60,000 for like a coordinator role, and then go up from there. So, as you can imagine, for 60-70 hours a week, the $23,000 is not that much, but I would do it again over and over because it was the director and I, we ran these major festivals and I came out of that experience 10 years ahead of anyone my age, because of what I'd learned during that time. I think it's really important that when you're looking at opportunities that get presented to you, I could have sat there and said, "$23,000 a year, no thanks. I'm worth more than that because I've gone to university and I've graduated."

Yes, I could have taken that approach, but I didn't, I thought more strategically about it. I think inevitably that's the approach you need to take is thinking what is going to be the long-term value out of what this opportunity brings is there something further down the track that we can look at? How will it benefit both parties? How benefit firstly, and fore mostly our consumers? That's a really important part of the criteria. A lot of businesses, I was only seeing this today at a luncheon. A lot of businesses do actually look at it from the perspective of, "Oh, this works for us and that's the product we want to put out there, or that's the service we want to put out there."

It doesn't actually matter what you do or what you say in the world. It's how it's perceived that matters. You could be the best company in the world, if your message is not landing and it's not perceived the way you intend it, then it's pointless and you can never judge or force someone to receive the message in the way you want them to perceive it. Everybody will take it how they want to take it. Having that perspective with all these opportunities that come to you is really important.

Karen: That is so very true regarding the messaging and whether it's clear and interpreted accurately. I get the sense from your background that you're not someone who likes to sit still for very long.

Simone: Look, I think, again, it comes back to being strategic. I like learning new skills. My whole purpose is curiosity. I just have this insatiable thirst for knowledge and information and my curiosity factor just always drives me. I thought to myself, over the years, my first foray into the workforce, through that role, I was telling you about with major festivals. I thought, "How did people get good at what they do?" They get good at what they did by trying to master their skill and apply it across many different situations and experiences to see how well they go. My purpose then became, how many in different industries can I find that I can apply this skill that I have? Which was well beyond just managing festivals.

There's so many components to it! There's sponsorship and there's partnership and there's operations and there's media and there's managing volunteers, managing expectations, and managing my boss. I was literally the glue that kept it all together. How do I take that skill and how do I apply it to different industries and sectors so that I craft that skill honing on how to knuckle it down a bit more, refine it like a beautiful sharpened knife, and then look at learning other stuff along the way. Without no knowledge in disaster resilience whatsoever, I managed the state government's disaster resilience initiative, and not because I needed that disaster resilience experience. I had plenty of people within government that had that experience of 20, 30, 40 years.

That's not what they needed from me, what they needed was someone to pull everyone together, to move to a common purpose. That's the role I performed. My role was to bring everyone together to find that common thread, to be like, "Hey guys, 26 different departments of state government; we're in this together. How can we better manage this messaging going out to our people, and looking at how that worked." I equally applied that knowledge in news enterprise, same thing, bringing editorial and advertising together, as you can imagine, was a whole barrel of fun. Advertising wanted to deliver to their clients to bring in revenue, which is obviously very important, but editorial is a very legacy-driven sector and industry, and they wanted to have integrity within the editorial pieces.

You'd constantly have advertising saying, ''Hey, we need to do this, and editorial would say, no, that's not practice, that's not how we do this''. We've got to have journalistic integrity, which is true because people won't read the newspaper or what people won't read news or media if there is no integrity. I had to try and bring in that balance of like, "Okay guys. Inevitably, we all have to work in the same sandpit. How do we do this more effectively?” The same as I've worked for a medical research institution doing the exact same thing, trying to apply that skill to pull together researchers, scientists, donors, philanthropists. All these different people, all these different components. I think, when you think long game, all the little nuances in-between don't really matter.

Karen: Would you say that that ability to bring people together to work toward a common goal, do you think that that's one of the most important skills for a business leader to have?

Simone: Absolutely, without a doubt. If you struggle to bring people together to a common goal, how will you ever be able to deliver? I think people get really wrapped up in, "I have to do it myself because I have to be seen as the person that is delivering this. I have to be seen as the person who's trying. I have to be seen."

The number of small business owners and medium-sized business owners that come across my desk, if you want to call it that, it's very much an I scenario, so "I want to run it like this. I need to do it like that. I'll do that." It's like, "No, no, you definitely don't need to do that. What you need to do is be the CEO of your company and allow your people to deliver for you."

I say to my team all the time, "I'm here to support you. I'm at your mercy, you're not at mine." That's really important because it gives them a degree of faith and trust in me that they know that whatever happens, I've got their back. I'm there to support them. I'm going to let them try first, and if they can't do it, then yell out to me. I'm here for you but try. If many of these businesses stepped outside of, "I need to do this myself so I get the kudos and I get the credit," they could actually achieve so much more, so much more if they step outside of that space.

Karen: Something came to mind when I was doing some early morning thinking one day, and I just wrote down, "You have to let go to grow." I shared that with my business coach. It's one of those things that comes up on a regular basis. What I'm finding is that it's so common that as business owners, we will hang onto things that we think that only we can do, or we think that we have to be the one to do when we don't really.

There's lots of different reasons for that. What are some of the reasons that the business owners you encounter hang onto things that they should really be letting go of?

Simone: A lot of it comes down to they start their business because they have an expertise in a particular area. I suppose most people feel once you've gotten to that point where you've mastered that skill, having to hand that over is almost to a degree like, "Well, why did I bother? All that heartache, all that hard work, everything that I've done to master the skill, and now I'm just handing that over." I think there's a degree of control that business owners want to keep because they have to feel as though they matter, they have to feel as though they're contributing, they have to feel as though they're driving this because it is theirs to drive.

If businesses were treated a little bit more like kids by way of, for the first few years of its life, yes it does heavily rely on you, yes it needs you, yes it needs to be stroked, and loved, and told that it's wonderful. Once you hit year three, four, five, six, seven, you've got to really start to let it do its own thing and just be there to guide it and be its hand of reason.

I think when business owners do tend to approach their business, they get so used to being in the doing that they then forget to let go because you have to start the first few years really heavily involved. Then what happens is they get used to that, that becomes their identity, they identify themselves as that person who works their butt off and doesn't have a life and has nothing else but this, and so then that becomes a part of who they are. What psychology tells us is that once you have deemed something as your identity, it is exceptionally hard to let go because that is part of who you are. If you take that away, what do they have left?

Karen: That's a real battle I think for so many business owners just trying to start to separate yourself from the business and form a more full identity because you've probably been in those first couple of years, working nights, weekends, and trying to push hard for the growth you want.

Simone: Absolutely. A lot of the time, it's not even their fault that they feel that way. It has a lot to do with knowledge. If you go into business because you have a particular expertise, let's for example, use a hairdresser, that's a very niche skill, like cutting hair. You get groomed in this hairdressing environment throughout your career and then suddenly, you said, "I would like to open a salon myself, thanks."

You do that because you love being a hairdresser, you love people, you want to create an environment that you feel that people would love. Inevitably, hairdressing is your skill, not managing a business, and so what tends to happen is they will want to grow, but they don't know how. They grow with what they know because they don't want to seek out help because their identity is their business and they need that kudos and credibility to say, "I did it. I did this."

Then they get in this vortex of the horse before the cart, or cart before the horse because they want to be able to grow, but then they don't really know how. They don't want to seek out help because they want to do it themselves. They know they're doing things wrong, they don't know how to fix it, so they'll run off and try and research it themselves and they end up falling down the rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland. Then what happens is the business starts to suffer, they then jump on any opportunity they can, and it completely takes them on a parallel path to what they originally wanted their business to be on.

Karen: Well, one of the examples I always use is bookkeeping. Unless you have a finance background, you don't start a business knowing how to maintain the books and set a budget, necessarily. It's not the same as the process for doing it for your personal life. Although, as you know, because of your app, not everybody knows how to do that even in their personal life because it's just not covered in schools.

Simone: Definitely not here either. These are global problems, hence the app.

Karen: Absolutely, yes, makes those apps really helpful. Just that whole process of going from not having to manage finances in a business to doing it for yourself, that's a huge learning curve because it's not just about recording expenses and revenue, it's also about the tax considerations and the structure of your business, et cetera. There's so many things.

Simone: Absolutely, without a doubt. Look, managing a business is different to being able to be a HR person to manage staff which is different to understanding supply chain, and then actually having the skill to perform the work that you as your business has promised they can do. There's a lot of hats that you have to wear, and a lot of it requires you to be on the ground in the dirt, doing the do. The last thing you then want is to have to be pulled out of that to then have to go off and learn how to do the other stuff.

What inevitably happens is they don't and then they either maintain at the level they are which to some might be okay, to others is extremely frustrating or they fall to pieces. That's why the business, the survival of businesses beyond five years is so low. The prevalence of business failure is so high for that reason because they get to that five-year mark. They don't know how to grow. They start to understand the ramifications of the naïve business decisions that they've made in the last five years for no other reason, other than just lack of knowledge or access to people that can help them. Inevitably they burn themselves out because they've done it themselves the whole time through and either haven't sought out help because they haven't wanted to don't believe in it, haven't been able to afford it, whatever the reason is. That's why majority of them fail.

Karen: Then that's how you work in Ingredior is to help educate business owners and offer them services to support them and allow them to grow without making some of those naïve decisions that can lead to unfortunate outcomes.

Simone: Absolutely. For those businesses who really just think you know what, "I need help. I don't even want to try and guess this. I just need people that know what they're doing." We've got things to help them with that. We come in and do the work with them, for them. Our team becomes their team for a time. We don't really hold businesses for longer than say two years, because the whole point of coming to us is that we come in, we help you strategize, we help you kick start that strategy delivery using our teams so that you don't have to divert from your core business operations.

You can still do you and you can still engage your audience and consumers and focus on that. We help you deliver strategy to get you that baseline. Then we either A, continue to work with you, or B, we help you by then you would have built your, your working capital and your revenue. We then help you find the relevant staff members required to take over whatever it is we've created. We train them. Then we let you free range in your beautiful little paddock that you've created for yourself. Alternatively, there are a lot of business owners out there that do feel that they do know it already. If they do that's okay, what we have created then is a series of worksheets on our websites.

We'll do booklets worksheets, articles, and they are designed as like peace piecemeal size. You need to go to the supermarket and you to get that like pick and mix chocolate, where you could like pick what chocolate you wanted and put it in the little bag. It's the same onset where you can make style. The worksheets and stuff are designed to just challenge your thinking around certain things that you either think you know or that you just have no like no clue about and we do it in small increments. We try and build education over time.

Now, if you wanted to, you could go on our website, download all the worksheets, get all the booklet, like the e-booklets and things, and really attack it yourself and have a red hot go at it because we don't hold back on information that we offer. However, that's, if you've got the time to do that. If you do have that time awesome. Well done you, you're obviously doing something right. If you don't have the time, then we're there to help do it for you. Then we step aside after a year, two years, depending on what you need.

Karen: Well, it's interesting because when you are creating a strategy and also trying to implement - because often you actually have to be moving forward while this strategy is being developed. It's a bit like driving trying to change the tires while the car is driving and juggling both of those things at the same time is an extremely tricky process. I love the whole idea of what Ingredior does of taking that whole strategy development off the plate of the business and working independently on that while they keep the run rates stuff going that's so that's the dream.

Simone: I think a lot of businesses for those that want to grow and really understand that they can't do it all themselves. They're the ones that find us because they have that understanding that no matter what happens, they are the birth mother, the founder of that company. They will inevitably get the kudos and credibility they're looking for if that's what they're chasing. Alternatively, if they want to make an impact on the world, then how do you do that faster is by surrounding yourself with those who have expertise that can help elevate you. Again, inevitably you will get the kudos and the credibility that you're looking for. That misconception around, I have to do it so I look good is just a narrative that no longer needs to exist in the business world.

Karen: Simone, this conversation has been so much fun. I really, really enjoyed getting to know you and about the work that you're doing with all of these different businesses. Can you tell everyone how they can connect with you and find you online?

Simone: You are more than welcome to go to ingredior.com.au because we are in Australia – it’s .com.au. That's where you'll find a lot of the resources that I've been referring to. If you are keen to challenge oneself, we do a lot of little quizzes as well that you can get on there and do some quizzes because everyone loves a good quiz. It'll challenge you on different perspectives. You can also find me on LinkedIn, which is Simone Givney. Also on Twitter @simoneandevents; a throwback way back to my event days. You can also find me on Instagram at Simone Givney. Instagram is a bit more of like work and personal. Twitter is very much around conversation. LinkedIn is more about, "Hey, this is what I'm hearing. This is what I'm seeing. This is what's going on in the zoo. Check it out."

Karen: That's fantastic. I will definitely be checking it out some more and I hope everyone who's listening will as well. It's been such a pleasure speaking with you.

Simone: Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. I hope everyone's got something out of this in some way, shape, or form.

Karen: I have no doubt they did. Thank you.