Warm welcome for Andrew Kosowski. Thanks. Thanks. I appreciate it.
So if you haven't noticed, I am just a, a little passionate about when I, when I deal with things in life, whether it's work or personal, but that's how I've embraced it. And I've learned that through a fuel that I got from my parents because they had to go through so many changes to themselves. And so that's why I wanna share some of the stories of my parents, that, as a matter of fact, that picture on the left is the four, uh, Chevrolet Motor Company in South America. It was where my dad got his first job after World War II. And then the right side is involving manufacturing of tomorrow using AI.
My dad and his two brothers were born and raised in Warsaw, Poland. Happy life, middle class family. Everything's great. They love hunting and fishing. And then suddenly what happened, the Nazis invaded Poland and suddenly change, thrust into a world of turmoil, the entire planet, and particularly my parents' family who lost their entire home, the eldest brother, old enough to join the military, drafted into the military. The two younger brothers decided they were gonna help the effort by joining the underground. My father at the time, in this picture here, 16 and his older brother, 17, unfortunately, after they were doing some stealing of maps, they were captured by the Nazis. They spent the last two years of the war in a forced labor camp. There's two kinds of concentration, camp death camps, labor camps. They were not Jewish. So they were sent to a forced labor camp at a a young age. This is my father's identification card. If you didn't have the card with you at the time, what happens? You get shot on site Again, change my mother. She was born in Havana, Cuba. I'm the first to be born in the United States. So how did they get together? You're gonna find that in a second. She was a smart woman. Went to a bilingual school. At the time, pre Castro schools were required to teach English and Spanish. My mother ended up being the valedictorian. As you see, you're there on the right. Life was good, ready to start her life. Then what happened? My father, after World War ii, that's him on the left as a young man, his first job was as a tools warehouse assistant at the Chrysler Manufacturing Plant in Kakas, Venezuela. Later on, he got promoted, became the plant manager of their space division. I dunno if you know this, but Chrysler made the mercury rocket is for nasa. The only reason why they're not in the space business today is 'cause they lost the design for the space shuttle. Otherwise they'd be doing it today. So there's my dad there working with the rockets and, and his crew, uh, wonderful life again, change some new opportunity despite the fact what he went through as a young man. What happened? My father, for some reason runs in the family, was speaking at a conference, uh, it was in Havana, Cuba, I guess it runs in the family, speaking at conferences. Uh, they, my mother was working for the marketing division, marketing division, Havana, Cuba. They met at the Tropicana Hotel. My dad said, okay, I'd like to, uh, go on a date with you. And my mother's response was, well, I'm required to have a chaperone. And so there you see my grandmother chaperoning them on their first date. A year later, he proposed to the Tropicana. There was a new singer by the name of Naquin Cole, playing at the Tropicana, handing out 40 fives. I still have that 45 today. And again, change, right? A new life together.
Then what happened? The morning of my mother's bachelorette party, gunfire in the streets. The revolutionaries took over. Castro took over. The churches were all shut down, we're communists. No more religion. And so change. What did they do? They packed up. My father still had family in Venezuela, and they said, let's hold the services of Venezuela. And they got married in Kakis change. Then what happened? They said, well, where do we want our family to be raised? They say, you know what? Ruckus is doing good second to the United States in GDP at the time. But you know what? We want our kids to be born in the United States. We feel there's opportunity there. Boy were they prophetic in that because fast forward 20 years later, you had Chavez, they became communist. Now they're one of the worst in inflations in the world. They never imagined that would've happened. But that's the decision they made. Again, now change.
My own personal evolution has been filled with changes. Andrew 1.0 was in the United States Air Force where I had the privilege of being in manufacturing, representing the Air Force. I was with the C 17 program and the McDonald Douglas plant that was eventually bought out by Boeing. I got to see the first six planes built from the first rivet through first flight. An experience I will never forget. That's my fir my crew there. When we did the first a hundred hours of the very first T one aircraft of C 17 test, one of C 17 and to this day, we're still wonderful friends. That was 1.0, 2.0 is in the corporate world. I was testing so much that I got phone call after phone call, Hey, we need testers. And in the mid nineties, if you're old enough to remember, there was something weird called the Y 2K and they said, Hey, we need somebody to help us to test this 'cause it's the end of the world coming up. And so I got recruited not in aerospace, even though my undergrad was in aerospace. I got recruited by a company called MCIA telecommunications company. And that started Andrew 2.0. My telecommunications career where I eventually moved up through the ranks, had the privilege of leading teams in Asia, Africa, and in Latin America. My last posing was as CIO for the third largest telco in the world in Nairobi, Kenya. My family had a wonderful opportunity to live in all these different countries. And I said, you know what? At the time of our last posting, should I retire or not retire? Well, I have too much energy in me to retire. So we decided, let's move to Florida where we are planning on retiring, but let's find a business. And as a result of that move, it reminded me of all the changes my family's been through. My own son, our own son. My wife's here at Sydney. He went through three different high schools. We have moved 27 times in our life. That's not, that's a big number. Changes of new governments, new countries, new cultures, new friends, saying goodbye to friends. Constant change. But we met it very passionately and we met it with an opportunity to grow personally. And these are some photographs of some of those changes that we've been to. You'll see some rider trucks that are multiple times as well.
Once we got to, uh, Florida, we said, Hey, let's try to find something in manufacturing, because I really loved manufacturing, but I also wanted to apply some of my business acumen that I learned in the corporate world as CIO. I had a staff of over 2000 people across 17 countries. I held my, had my own HR department, my own legal department. I had to manage my own balance sheet, my own p and l. So I had that business experience as well. So I combined the two and said, let's find a business for sale. And we did. This is the old shop that we found. Not very pretty. Who was, I think somebody was talking about it. Uh, Dan was talking about the before and after pictures of how companies transform. This is a 5,000 square foot facility. Been around for 27 years. 10 foot ceilings. No, they had one ventilation fan that sometimes worked. And as you can imagine, hottest neck was one 60 in this place. And by one o'clock everybody was ready to be carried out. It was so exhausting, especially in Florida heat. But we love the bones of the company. One thing I did as we were going through the due diligence process, you wanna remember to share the change, you know, as they say that the problem shared as a problem. Half, same thing here. So I went out to my mentors that I've known for many years, and I decided to, uh, connect with my brother-in-law who also had bought and sold several manufacturing plants. This one in particular involved abrasives. He had a an abrasives company. You know, you do, uh, sand blasting and be blasting. He made those things. He also had an eyewear lens company where they made the concave part of eyeglasses as well. So I sought advice from him. This is my brother-in-law who sadly, uh, passed away last year. Uh, a mentor, a brother, a friend. One thing he said to me, take advantage of opportunities with substantial, but calculated risks. Don't take a risk blindly. Make sure you have a plan in place. You've calculated the risks, the ups and downs, but take advantage of them. Don't let 'em pass you by. And so I've taken that to heart. And as a, as a quote that I always remember, my brother-in-law, Neil, of course, uh, the old shop, um, was one that we were going to embrace for change. This is at the old office, which by the way, did not look like this when we bought it. It had some really nasty ripped up carpets that they found in some closet. Put it on the floor. We painted everything. We made it look nice. A more inviting atmosphere. You can see, uh, my good friend Chet there from Steelhead on the left hand side, who, uh, by the way, we met in 2021 and I'll tell you that a little bit later. On the right side was also getting our certifications for hazardous waste. So we started implementing changes to this new business, but we were embracing it. And you notice there, I'm not embracing it alone. I'm embracing it with my team. I wanted their buy-in. I wanted their feedback. I wanted them to have skin in the game. I wanted to have, feel ownership in the change process. I wasn't gonna be one of those people who says, we're gonna do it. It's, I own it. It's my company. We're gonna do it my way. That is not my approach and never has been my approach. And that's why all my teams in the past have been high performing teams because of that approach. And I highly recommend you taking the same attitude. We started embracing the change because we weren't gonna stay in that little dungeon. I called it, uh, an Al-Qaeda cave. I mean, it was just terrible. And what we did was we started to build a new building. We wanted to go to building 'cause we were gonna grow. And I could see the growth coming. And there are groundbreaking. There's the rendering of the building, which is what exactly it looks like today. There are some of my suppliers. We had 22 suppliers across eight states and two countries. And there's, uh, my wife there and, and my daughter. Little sweat equity. We painted the walls again, change. The other thing is part of that change. I didn't want that change to be one that I felt, okay, it's good for me. I wanted to be good for all age groups. When you're making change, you gotta remember age gaps in our, in our particular plant, 17 to 63. That's the age range. So whatever we did, we had that in mind. Can the generational gap adapt to change? That's an important part of the change process. Change can be inspirational. Sometimes people change blindly 'cause they're so excited. They see the new objects, they see the shiny thing. Great advertising, a great salesman that sells you something. But be careful. The cautionary tale is you want to take a step back, a breathe back. That's why you wanna share that change. Don't just jump in blindly because it looks good. Does it fit your business need? And I'm gonna talk about that in my second part. Here's again that on the left side is the, uh, the Chevrolet manufacturing plant, which by the way, you see it moving because I used AI to move it. So if you're not using AI already, you should start diving into it. My father here, a picture of him as plant manager. He would've loved everything we're doing today. He would've loved AI for sure. He got the first phone that came out. You know, the brick, if you saw the movie Wall Street, he, he had that phone. He got the, uh, his first computer was an h and PA hundred megabyte hard drive with a 1900 bod modem where you plug it in and you hear the, you know that stuff, right? Yeah. I'm sure many of you remember that. He loved technology. He would've loved ai. So attribute to my dad, I want to have some parting words from an AI version of my dad. You are all here for some sort of change. It could be a change in technology, a change in services, or just a simple change of scenery. I hope our family stories my son shared with you will be your fuel for your own personal journey of change while you attend Steelheads revenue. Riptide 2025. Because my friends change is inevitable. Alright, thank you and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thanks Dad. Alright, let's hear it from my dad. So I wanna talk about how I apply that fuel for change in the business in Veterans Medal. First of all, interaction. How many people have had a change in their business? Some sort of change in the last two years? Raise your hands. Okay. It's amazing. By the way. Change isn't about just services. You heard it flood. New businesses. Hiring an employee is a change. Firing an employee is a change. Replacing equipment is a change. Adding new customers is a change. All these changes impact your financials. Both sides of your balance sheet and to some extent could be small. Could some be some big? Are they disruptive? Every change is disruptive, but it's up to you to manage that disruption to plan for that disruption. I can tell you that when we bought Veterans Medal before we bought it during a nine months due diligence, we had a written 10 year plan, a written 10 year plan. We knew what we were gonna do for the next 10 years. It's essential that if you're going to go through a change process to have a documented plan, don't just get a visit from a supplier or a vendor trying to sell you the next big thing. Have a plan of what your goals are, what your objectives are, follow that, share that with your leadership team. Have them buy in. Have them have a stake in that change Of the changes you guys made and gals, how many great show of hands wish you would've made the change sooner? You Yes sir. Staffing. Yep. And yourself. Staffing. Absolutely. Initially when I bought the team, there was only six employees. We have 20 today and we gave everybody a chance. Well, we didn't know who they were, right? I, there was no foreman. So I said the most senior person there had been doing it for 25 years. I gave him the chance. I gave him some tools, a little training. Unfortunately he didn't cut the mustard. He's still with me today. But he was not the right fit to be the foreman. Staffing was definitely a change that we could have done sooner. By recruiting the right people sooner, I probably could have accelerated faster change to real growth. In veterans Metal, we have what's called inflection points. In 2020, uh, September we acquired the business. It's making, the best year they ever had in that time was $380,000. They only had three things. Anti ice type two chem film, ation, that's it, nothing else. 54 tanks in a 5,000 square foot facility. We became NCAP accredit in 2022, only for one thing, anti ice. Why? I didn't do 'em all because I wanted to test it. I wanted to find out small scale first if we can get it done right. I didn't jump into the deep end of the pool. I said, can we at least make that? We got quality management 7,004, we got 71 0 8 dash eight anodize. And we successfully accomplished that. My predecessor had zero accreditation certificates of any kind. 2023 digital transformation. That's of course with steelhead. Little antidote there. When I met them in the fall of 2021, I already met with the CEO of Paperless Jo, paperless parts Job Boss. They wanted to create a Frankenstein monster for me. I did not want to, my advice to you as a technology guy is cots commercially off the shelf. Do not buy software that somebody has to customize. Why? 'cause every time they come out with something new, you gotta pay for it. Buy commercial off the shelf. And, and suddenly I got a phone call the last day of IMTS. I got a phone call from some guy named Chet and I was tired. We'd walked for four straight days, my wife and I. And I said, okay, listen, I already said yes to the guy, so I'll go. They had a little five foot square, 21 inch screen and Chet's talking and I'm looking at the screen and I swear it was a Charlie Brown moment. All I can hear Che was saying, WWWW Wawa. 'cause I'm looking at the screen and I'm saying, that's what I've been looking for. That's what I needed. That's what I had planned for in 2020 as part of our 10 year plan to digitize and get rid of all these traveler cards. All this paper and all this pencil whipping. And if you're military, you know what pencil whipping is is where you fudge the numbers. Fudge the data. I didn't want that. I want real data. 'cause how can I control quality? How could I know if I have good quality if we're making it up? So we started transforming in 2023 when we implemented the new facility. That's uh, that's our team. Some of our team members there, that's our new general manager being held up. J Jesse French. We then became in 2024 merit level NA cap accredited for everything. And we were the first in the country to use steelhead to get NA cap accreditation. All the reporting, all the job audits came outta Steelhead. The ones I sent them, uh, 30 days in advance. And when they were on site, we pushed the button, we spit it out and the guy looks at it and go, wow, what is all this other stuff? ...on customer portals. That was great with steelhead. I remember I told 'em about the pizza HU application thing. It's reduced our call volume by 80%. What's happened there? Are you in the business to sell phone calls? No. That's a transactional cost. We're in the business of coding, not answering phone calls. So what happened? Customers were calling status of my part, status of my part. They'll drop it off 10 minutes ago. Status of my part, right? We're not Amazon, right? Which we have to remind them now all our customers are on the portal and the feedback has been phenomenal. They love it. They love the transparency and they hold us accountable when they say, why is my part still in receiving after four days when our av, our turnaround time, average dock time in my plant is 1.7 days. That's how fast we turn things around. 'cause we're super efficient. So they hold us accountable. That particular part got stuck on a shelf in the back that one of my employees was a little short, didn't see it, it was back there. And so I love the portal because it also holds us accountable, but it also reduces my transactional costs. Digital transformation, a wonderful change. Certifications and recognitions are all about your change as well. You want to be recognized for all that hard work you're doing. In our case this year, we made top shop for product finishing magazine. Only one of two in the state of Florida. 33 of them nationwide. We also have merit. We also were recognized as a Grow Florida company to watch Second stage company. Uh, we also support our local charities. Uh, the bottom left there is a robotics teams that we sponsor through stem. The cupcake crawl is through a company, uh, an organization called Celebrate Birthdays, where they make sure every foster child has a birthday. HEP is homeless empowerment program where they support veteran homelessness. Why don't we do that? We do that because we also wanna give back to the community. But I'll be very frank from you, it's not bad for marketing. It's not bad for our advertising to show that hey, we're not just collecting money, we're giving it back too. And our customers love that because they are also proactively in the community. So there's a relationship, a symbiotic relationship. Hey, I'm doing that too. And suddenly the relationship grows because of that same shared values. Here's some universal growth levers. There's a bunch of 'em, but I'm gonna put six up. Customer driven change. Listen to your customer. Don't make assumptions of what the market is calling for. Do the surveys, do them frequently. Call phone calls, text messages. I talk to my top 10 customers all the time. We have many more than 10. But I talk to the top 10 and I always listen, what is it you're needing? What is your coming down the road? What does your pipeline look like? Those conversations happen on a frequent basis. Incremental innovation, a lot of things people do. Big bang, I've never liked Big Bang implementation. I like doing things incrementally. And what happens when you do 20 incremental things? It becomes a really big thing. But it's manageable. It's manageable from a risk perspective, it's manageable from a cost cost perspective. It's manageable from an implementation perspective. When we did Steelhead, we didn't implement all of it overnight. We started with quoting. That was the first thing we did before we moved into the new building. Then we started implementing QR codes. We implemented quality, we implemented invoices. That is just my style of implementation. I like doing scaling small bits at a time. And then over time. Then finally you got the whole shebang. Diversification, expanding your services and market. In our particular case, we don't just stick with one particular vertical by predecessor. He just stuck with one particular thing. We do military, we do auto parts, we do gun parts. We got our FFL seven license, which are now listed there. So we diversify. Why? Because markets change. There's peaks and valleys. Some things are seasonal, right? Military, seasonal. You gotta wait till they pass the annual budget. If they pass the annual budget, right? And then you got the auto shows, you got the motorcycle shows. They happen in certain times of the year. So you want diversify your portfolio. So when we grew, we gotta focus in our growth to make sure that we looked at different types of verticals, build partnerships. We have a partnership with a local metal finishing shop. They don't anodize and we don't gold plate or silver plate, but they do. So we advertise for them. They advertise for us. There's no revenue sharing, but we work cooperatively together. So when they get quotes and they see a blueprint that says, Hey, it needs anodizing then and suddenly. And, but I have this other part for go. They call us, they say, Hey, here's a customer for you. We do the same in return. It's been a wonderful mutual benefit relationship. Many of my colleagues when I first started, oh, I don't want you to know what I do, you know, close to the chest. You know, it's, it's a secret. I don't want you to steal my customers. That is bs. There is so much work out there. There isn't enough plating shops or metal finishing shops on planet Earth to cover all the work. Otherwise there wouldn't be 12 week lead times if there was. So we share, we share, we share talent and culture. We mentioned that a little bit earlier today. The focus is on the team. The attitude is on the team. It's a mindset. If the team doesn't have the mindset of quality communication, then forget it. You're not part of veterans medal. That's just how it is. In five years, we've hired and fired 19 people that did not measure up to the core values of veterans medal. It's just a waste of time, guys. You're, you're paying salary for no reason. So you want to have that mindset among the team, especially those that it can appreciate what's coming down the road. Technology automation. Oh, I've met so many of my colleagues that are still, when when I got the company, a ledger book that they bought at Office Depot, they were writing checks for payroll. They were calling taxes in over the phone to the IRS. The first thing I did on day one is that I picked up the fax machine and I threw it to the dumpster. That's the first thing I did on day one said, no, this is not where we're going. We are getting out where 19 80, 19 70, 1990s. We are coming up to this era and beyond. So embrace technology. It's part of the change. If you want to grow as a, as a team, if you wanna grow as a company, change, change, change. But don't change for the sake of change. Have a plan. Speaking of a plan, financial discipline is strictly important. Where Shannon, Shannon is my office manager. Shannon, how often do we look at numbers? Every single day? Corey, what kind of numbers do we look at? That's my production manager. We do that every day. Now you might think, oh my God, I don't have all data spent on this. You have to be disciplined on it. We have 30 minute leadership meetings. Very specific agenda, very tailored. I have a separate meeting with quality assurance, 30 minutes, very specific, very tailored quality assurance. 30 minutes. I'm the leader, right? So I have these individual meetings, but they're very specific. You're in and out. Get, get to your numbers. Where are we? Is that an issue? What do we do to address it? Who's got the action item? That's it. It may sound like it's gonna be all day. It doesn't have to be. I did this in the corporate world all the time. So what's your, what's the biggest thing today? What's your number one issue today? That's what I did in the corporate world. Two questions to my leadership team. One at a time. That was, it lasted 60 minutes and I had 22 members of my leadership team in the corporate world. You can do it, but you gotta be on your numbers every single day. What we look at, we look at revenue growth rate, we look at gross margins, we look at operating costs, cash flow, customer concentration, my predecessor, his number one customer, 47% of his revenue. What happens if they have a bad day? He's dead, right? I don't allow any customer to be, and I heard somebody mentioned about 5% our, our top customer is 9%. We do not allow customers to get to dibble digits. How do we fix that? We get more customers or we increase wallet share of existing customers, more business with them. But our driving force is not to allow that risk. It's a risk. If you're so dependent on one customer, ROI on service and equipment, our, we, we do, when we invest, we invest to focus on the ROI. How fast are we gonna get the, if, if we can't get that ROI fast enough, forget it. Paint, powder, coat. When we did the evaluation six month ROI, we didn't buy new. We bought new paint booth, we bought a used oven, right oven. 65,000, new 12,000 used had to change the relay. Had to change the controller. Three, 3000 more dollars. That's a no brainer. And I, and I already had standing orders for paint two months ago, PEOs, so I knew it was gonna get paid, but it was a six month ROA the last one. A lot of people don't look at this number. Rp, revenue per employee is statistically, if you look this up, you'll find statistics. If you have a low rp, you are slowly dying as a company. Revenue per employee. What happens if your revenue's static? What's not static every year? You gotta pay more than your employee. More insurance. Uh, your suppliers increase their rates, you know that's going up, but your revenue's static. So what's going at your profitability drops. Your margin drops. So you gotta focus that rp. You wanna keep looking at raising that revenue per employee. A healthy company has at least $120,000 per employee annually at least. So we are a really healthy employee is 200,000, 250,000 per employee. That's a healthy, super healthy why? 'cause that's money that you can invest back in the company and backing your employees with 4 0 1 Ks, bonuses, other perks. So you wanna look at rp. If you haven't looked at RP the fast, I strongly suggest you look it up and, and take a look how it'll good. H two. We have strategy meetings twice a year. My leadership team six hour session, we review what is the written plan against the old 10 year plan for the next six months we say, and we look at all the financials, we look at new services, we look at how it's gonna impact revenue margin, RPE. And then we hand out action items. And after three months, we have a quick six. That was a six hour session. We have a one hour session to decide, okay, where are we in the action items? I did h meetings in the corporate world. They were fantastic. 'cause if you don't have a strategy, a written strategy, you're, you're gonna get lost. It's just a fact. Here's the uh, action framework. Identify the opportunity, assess it through ROI and rrp. Test it. Small scale. Don't go big bang, do a little bit first. If you're gonna implement a new service, try it with one or two customers before you start advertising to everybody. Hey, we got this wonderful new service. No, first try it with a few customers. That's what we did. And we said, okay, we worked out the bugs cooperative customers. They know we're going through a growing pain. We tweaked it, we dialed it in. Everybody knows that phrase, dialing it in. And then we went ahead. Full marketing, full deployment. And then scale recognition is important apart from the ones I mentioned. I also have the honor of being recognized. Industry champion from Broad Finishing magazine. You'll see that in November's issue of the magazine. And we also got recognized by the Tampa Bay Business Journal for an innovation award that's coming out in January as well. One last thing quote to remember. Growth isn't about resisting change, it's about steering it, steering it with a plan. Don't grow or change for the sake of changing change for the sake of growth with a plan that's worked for us. Right now. I told you we had a 10 year plan. We're actually completed five years. We're on year seven of our plan right now. Even though it's fifth year. And by the end of next year, we're gonna be on year nine of our plan. We've gone from a small job shop in revenue to a medium job shop in terms of revenue. And by the next 18 months, cross your fingers. We will be a large shop in terms of revenue. With that, I'll take some questions. You mentioned about, uh, sharing with, you know, the network of middle finishers. What do you say to those middle finishers who don't wanna follow the quote on the last side? They don't want to steer it. They don't want to change. What do you say? Well, their response is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right? That's an old saying. I say, you know what, that is your choice. But at the advent of all this new technology, especially with ai, AI is gonna, is a game changer guys, no matter. I know there's some issues with it right now that people are controversial, but it is a game changer. I said, you're gonna get left behind. 'cause I can tell you that the, remember we're third tier, we're not second tier, we're not first tier. We're not the US government, right? So we're, we're a little bit lower in the towing bowl. I can tell you that the US government is gonna mandate changes in speed and inequality and efficiency. The primes are gonna follow suit because if they want that contract, they're gonna do it. And the shops, the CNC shops that are fabricating it, it's gonna be part of their contracts. What do they have? They have 2, 3, 5 year, 10 year contracts and it's gonna be in there. Whether it's cybersecurity, whether it's the use of business intelligence, all kinds of things in technology. If they don't adopt or start looking into it now, they will be left behind and they'll be surprised what happened. Right? It's, it's going to happen. So when I talk to 'em, I say, Hey guys, you don't have to do this tomorrow. Do it incrementally, but I'm telling you're gonna left behind. Now some of them are a little bit older and I spoke to the uh, state of Florida Senate Commerce committee. I was one of two manufacturers representing the state of Florida. And when I spoke to them, I said, our biggest problem today is that we're aging out in manufacturing Owners are right, it's 70 or 80 years old, right? And they don't have anybody to leave it to. And so we have an issue here in Florida, and I mean, not here in in Florida, we're in Michigan, but in Florida we have an issue that we have an aging out problem manufacturing. So I'm telling them, Hey, there's no reason why you can't transform, you can't leave it to the next generation past the torch. But they, some of 'em just can't be bothered. They don't. Change is fear for, for many people, people don't like they're comfortable, right? But what they're not gonna be comfortable with is when they realize they start losing contracts because of this other shop. Like in my shop, 1.7 day turnaround. That's why people come to us because of that, our turnaround. 'cause they want speed, but they want quality too. And they're paying a premium for that quality. We're not giving it away for free. Uh, who had another question? Got one here I thought I saw. Got one che back There. Yeah, Andrew. So you've pulled me into your, uh, presentation twice now, so I feel obligated to participate. Um, So we've known each other for a long time. You, you had the six levers that you've pulled for change and for growth. Um, I'm wondering, I've seen many, many more that you've been able to implement and change. What are you doing next? Or what's the last one that you Yeah, yeah. And I talked really fast. Hey folks, 'cause first of all, you're all digesting your food, so I wanna get you before you fall asleep. That was the first goal. And then of course there's so many more sessions, but there were other things I wanted to include. One in particular, I, I'll do this one really fast, is when you're investing in new services or new equipment, you should make it a requirement line item. Is it scalable? I'll give you an example. So we've, when we build a new building, we bought a fully automated stainless steel ate system. Fully automated. So all the tanks plus a processing unit. The processing unit sucks. The liquids from back and forth flushes the line, it rinses the parts and even dries my parts love it. But I didn't buy just that model. I bought a model that was adaptable to add more tanks and adaptable to add another processing unit using the existing tanks that made it scalable. So instead of spending, and that cost me, I don't mind sharing with you, it was about $200,000 for the fully automated passive based system. Now I just have to spend a fraction of that to buy one additional tank for, let's say, 'cause we do nitric acid, citric acid, but the system is adaptable with a hose connection already built in to be able to scale that for citric acid passivation, the master unit has two more connections to be able to add two additional processing units where the parts go in. Again, what's that cost? That unit by itself cost a fraction of the price of the whole thing. So when you do start to look for changes in your, in your business, in, in implementing new services, new processes, find out is it scalable? Because what you don't wanna do is buy something and then you're maxed it out. You wanna have something that has potential for growth at every single time.