Alex Schuessler and Ron about the gross profit changes in equipment, the changed world for OEM dealers relative to the Rental Business and Contractors.

So SmartEquip has been around for a little over two decades, and it started in a very strange way. Back in early... Actually, back in 1994, I got my dream job, the one I always wanted, which is I was going to be what I was. I became a junior professor at New York University. I had previously done graduate school, and I'd helped Harvard and MIT set up a data center. And my fascination early on, not knowing this is where the world was ultimately going to go, But my fascination early on was with how do people, there were all these machines being built everywhere and machines in those days meant computers to us. And they were just looking for data everywhere. And we were working on methods on what they could do, statistical methods, what they could do with this data. And so I helped set up this research facility that was shared by Harvard and MIT. And that was a huge Harvard-based institute. It's grown into massive proportions.

But it was part of the early guard there. And then I was asked to join the faculty at NYU to build a similar data center. And as I was realizing that there's more and more data being pushed out into the world, although none of us had any inkling how big this was going to be one day, I was always fascinated that we lived in a bit of a crippled environment. And what I mean by that is only people who were actually data scientists, even though that term didn't exist in those days, now we call them data scientists. In those days where they were statisticians and quantitative metricians and all that stuff, they were the ones that could interpret it. And I thought, well, if the world's going in this direction, we're going to all be stuck in trying to figure out what all of this means. And most of us won't have the degrees for it.

Right about the same time, this was sort of coincidence number one, I went to visit my parents who lived in Singapore in those days. And I ran into a good friend that they had made. who was previously been an employee at Caterpillar. And he had 10 years earlier predicted that the future of equipment ownership wasn't going to be that people go out and buy their machines. They're actually going to go and rent them. So this is sort of a precursor of what we now think of as a shared economy, the way he was describing it then. And he said, it just doesn't make any sense for us to own the equipment. All we want is nobody goes. The old saying was nobody goes into a store to buy or rent a drill. What they really want to do is they want to buy the hole. And so the better way to buy the hole is by renting the drill rather than purchasing that equipment. So he had spent some time at Caterpillar and they didn't really see that same future.

Then he went off and became very active in the equipment rental industry. And then the Caterpillar asked him back. In those days, it was Catamericas, which is the South American part of it. And they said, hey. we really believe in what you saw. It's clearly happening. And in South America, with hyperinflation and everything else looming, we really need to build a rental network. And he said the last time he tried to do something like this on his own, he stumbled because of the technology side, computers, software, infrastructure, and all that. And I had just set up these two data centers. So he said, hey, will you come with me and at least take a look at this? And I said, sure. So we went on a long trip around the country with more and more people joining us. It was a bit of a magical journey, actually. And I came on board this new entity that was being formed. It was called Caterpillar Rental Services Network initially.

And we owned it, but Caterpillar gave us permission to use the cat name. And we started really working on this rental industry in South America. And as I was doing this, I came across all these parts guys and service guys and everything else. And they were trying to consume data coming from hundreds. of different manufacturers. And so people ask why they're working for Caterpillar. Well, no, once they got into the rental business, they had to be able to really interpret and consume information relating to machines, Caterpillar machines. But they also had to be able to handle, you know, scissor lifts from JLG, scissor lifts from Genie, from Skyjack, from everybody else, and literally at least dozens, if not hundreds of other manufacturers and suppliers at a very intricate level. serial number based parts kits and retrofits and all that stuff. And I said, well, wait a minute, this looks familiar.

Didn't I just do this in my last career, which I still had a foot in, but then I ultimately left to really get involved in this. I was really pulled into that. And I thought, wow, why is nobody paying attention to this? Although a little bit later, I found out, Rhonda, that you were in the world and you've been paying attention to this for a very, very long time. But the people who are building technology hadn't. And then I started asking around, well, wait a minute, there's this big dot-com revolution going on. Why are we not building technology to help with this? We're doing purchasing platforms and procurement platforms and B2B and B2C and all that kind of stuff. And why are we not really focused on this? And then the answer was a very primitive one. I think it's still, I still believe it's the correct one.

But nobody was paying attention to this because if you look at what a typical fleet owner, whether it's a rental company, a contractor, whoever, I happen to know the numbers for rental fleets a little bit better. But every time I look elsewhere, they seem to be roughly similar. If you look at all the money they spend in any given year, only about one and a half percent of every dollar, one and a half cents on the dollar is actually being spent on parts. So when the big technology revolution came knocking on the door, they said, well, we're not going to start with the little stuff. We're going to buy machines. We're going to buy, you know, stationary for 600 locations and all that stuff. Parts are just such a small amount of spend. But then when we dug into it or when I dug into it, I said, well, wait a minute. It's one and a half percent of your spend or roughly about three percent of your original equipment cost typically.

But it's by far the most frequent type of spend you have. In those days, it was about 70 percent of the time that you did a purchase order. It was for a spare part, as they say in Europe or part, as we say here. And by now, again, fast forward to 20 years, nobody wants stock or inventory. Now it's closer to 90%. And the pain associated with finding the right part, the expertise you need and everything else, that's where the cost comes from. It's not the cost of the part that matters. It's the cost, the operational cost of finding a part for a piece of equipment. That's what's there. So that's really what we have to focus on. And nowadays, as I said, we're north of 90% of the number of times that you cut a purchase orders for a part. And it's incredibly error prone. You need to know a serial number. You need to know how different manufacturers handle serial numbers. Everybody has a different key to that.

And you have to be an unbelievable generalist while getting parts fixed. You're part of a labor pool that keeps getting smaller. It's hard and harder to find service to parts guys. And it's the only purchasing job you do in the entire company. that when you make a mistake and you do it very often, your equipment is down and you lose revenue or, as they say in Europe, turnover. So it was really fascinating. It was much harder to solve than we originally set. All these purchasing systems that we originally wanted to just license and start using in the industry, none of them could handle the data complexity of parts. So at the end of the day, we said, hey, let's just start a technology company. Everybody else is. It's the year 2000. Our timing was pretty lousy. It was about two and a half months before the big dot-com crash. And we had a few other major hits to it. But we started this company.

And now today, if you're looking on the rental side, and you're looking at just the activity of the top 100 rental companies in the U.S. and weigh them by size of company, more than 60% of the transactions for parts today run through this. I've been very focused in the last 10 years, especially on the international growth. We're making big strides in Europe and feel like increasingly where the industry is standing there as well. And as I think I've mentioned to you before, I'm now doing the same thing in Japan, really Asia Pacific in general, but starting in the northern part with Japan, where we just were getting ready to announce our first major Japanese rental company having just gone live and with another one to follow. So it's been a long journey and a very weird one with a lot of weird coincidences and overlaps. But that's really sort of a history of how we came about doing smart equipment.

Yeah, you're touching on one of my favorite topics. And this is not theoretical. This is something that we discovered along the way. And a lot of the dealers and manufacturers themselves were very surprised to find this, as were a lot of the fleet owners, and as were we. The reception we got back in 2000. especially from manufacturers using dealer networks, was from the manufacturing side, very, very nervous at best. And from the dealer side, extremely aggressive for the most part. And that was because the dot-com was all about disintermediation. And they saw, hey, here's another platform, another marketplace, which we never were. We were never a marketplace. And I can explain that more in a moment. they thought here's another one they're trying to disintermediate us and because of the additional five percent or so you can you can save off a price of a part on average maybe 10.

if you're a large fleet it's actually less because you already have a volume leverage over the dealers and the manufacturers but for that extra five percent uh smart group is going to make it all frictionless and and we're all going to get burned And that is a fear that still exists today, much, much less so. But it's still there, especially for participants thinking about entering. And when I say all this, by the way, I'm not so much describing the Smarticorp side of it. I mean, there are many Smarticorp stories, but I'm much more interested in the industry side of it. And I want to anchor it just like you did in that one and a half percent. So, but let me start with a brief, very short story. So there's a large, and I'll keep names out of it so I can say more. There's a large fleet owner in Europe. They've been using SmartoCook very successfully.

And as they, and they turned around as these fleet owners do, once they're convinced that they will move forward and they tell all of their manufacturers and all their dealers and whoever their suppliers are, hey, starting in a couple months from now. You need to be connected. You're our first tier. They start with the top tier ones and they go to the second tier and so forth. You're our suppliers. We need you to get on SmartEquip. If you want to continue being a preferred supplier, that's what you need to do. Those that have already been using SmartEquip elsewhere are delighted because they immediately understand that there are a lot of savings to be had for them. That everybody understands. But they also have experienced that the volume of transaction activity actually goes up, not down. And everybody is surprised by that. Nobody trusts that as a prediction. But it happens.

So that particular fleet owner was visited by two of their suppliers in the space of literally two days back to back. One was a manufacturer saying, hey, listen, we're not crazy about you doing this because we think we're going to lose all of our volume from our dealers and from the official channels to will fitters, third parties, whatever you want to call them. And they said, OK, well, look, we're going to do what's right for our company. We can't predict where it's going to go. But that is a temptation for us because we can now control what our employees are doing across several hundred locations. When they buy parts, we can just set the supply channel pointed to B as opposed to A, and that might happen. And then the next day, they got a visit from one of the larger wheel fitters that had been supplying them with exactly the same fear. They said, hey, we think that once you're on, you'll go all OEM.

And they said, well, we don't think so because we're asking you to come on, but we'll see what happens. And everybody was worried about that one and a half percent or let's call it, let's do everything in terms of OEC. It's 3% of original equipment cost. Right. And they said you can save 10 to 15% of that on average if you're a large fleet and you have good negotiators. So they were all really, if you multiply that 10 to 15% times the 3%, you get a potential improvement of 0.3 to 0.45% of OEC. Right. That's just simple math. Right. Or half that in terms of overall spend. as you know more than anybody, in fact, I've learned a lot of this stuff from you, when you then go ahead and say, well, wait a minute, a part on its own is useless, you need service. And it turns out, it makes it easier to remember, but sometimes confusing. There's a symmetry there.

If you look at what Sunbelt has officially shared, for example, with the world, Sunbelt rentals in the US and the UK. If they spend about 3% of OEC on parts, there's another 3% in service cost, internal service cost. Well, some of it is external too, but overall service cost. Now, that's there. And then every time you do a parts transaction, you have an accounts payable group and everything else. And you've got data management to make sure that your item master on your purchasing system are up to speed and everything else. Something that we fully automate, but before there's automation. That's another, as it turns out, on average. three-quarter of a percent. So now you have 3% parts,3% service that goes attached to the part, another 0.75%. So your real cost of parts just from that perspective is in fact 6.75%, not 3%, but 6.75%, almost 7% of OEC. So that's a big change.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, every time you get that part wrong, your equipment is down. The cost of downtime, which we know so much more about. these days than we did 20 years ago. But the cost of downtime is huge. And we have a lot of customers that say, yep, the 6%,7%, that's about right. The cost of downtime is higher than that 6%,7% combined. So now you're suddenly, let's say it's the same. So now you're starting to look at 10%,15%, maybe more percent of OEC relating to getting the parts transaction right. So who cares about that little 0.3% to 0.45 %? You want to make sure the information flows through the organization. It goes to every service guy. It goes everywhere. And what the fleet owner, the one I'm referring to in Europe, and every other fleet owner that's gone through this kind of automation suddenly realizes, hey, we can maybe save 0.3%.

We can save so much more by doubling the efficiency of our service guys because they don't have to chase information. They don't have to fill out work orders and purchase orders. All of that is automated. And they literally have a near doubling of capacity there. So what happened in the end, the very dealers and the very OEMs that were most afraid of being cross-referenced away from, that's usually the term we hear, they're suddenly seeing volumes that are going up. Again, not by design, not on purpose, it just is, because everybody, once they're in an automated world, realized what we can get in terms of operational efficiency improvement is so much greater than anything we might be able to save by further reducing or commoditizing the role of the part. And by the way, as you know, exposing yourself to all kinds of other risk if it's not original.

So the pendulum has swung away from the transactional savings and has swung so far into the operational savings that now the dealers that have been up with us the longest love it because they say, hey, we don't just sell parts anymore. Just like we used to sell equipment and then we switched into becoming more of a parts and service kind of place. We're now delivering operational efficiency. Because of us, your accounts payable department is more efficient. Who would have thought that 10 years ago when you were selling equipment and parts? Now you're actually making your customers operation, sorry, accounts payable departments more accurate and efficient. And you get the benefit because you get correct orders. So nobody believed us when we said that's what we think would happen and nor should they have. But that's really what's happening. And that's a circuitous road.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

That is correct. That is absolutely correct.

By the way, just in fairness, you Canadians didn't have the hyperinflation that we have to deal with further south. And that, by the way, and the reason I mentioned that is a lot of these, and actually Catapult is a wonderful example. The cat dealers traditionally, and this is now going back three generations, two, three generations, they said, look. We sell wonderful equipment, amazing machines. We've got the best dealer network because if you're a cat dealer, you better not be selling anything else out of that building. And we sell them and it's usually family owned and already planning two generations down usually. And they sell the equipment and then along the way, and they get a nice big margin on it in the old days. And then along the way, they say, okay, we've got to give you the best service, the best parts availability and everything else. so we can make money again on the next sale.

And then the world changed because margins started coming down. They started having to sell smaller equipment as well. And it was usually required a generational change. It was usually the sun, typically, that took over and was starting to look at it more as services. They stopped calling. And then they were being pushed into rental along the way because the contractors that used to buy their equipment couldn't anymore in a hyperinflation scenario. So the cat dealers sold the machines to themselves as a rental company and then had those same contractors use the equipment. So that was their way of hedging and dealing with it. But they were really dragged kicking and screaming into this dirty world of rental in those days. And at the same time, they were dragged into kicking and screaming, seeing that really parts and service were. not just an extremely attractive opportunity, sell the machines to sell the parts.

So go to a sort of essentially a razor model, right? That's when you start selling the parts along the way and make sure it's so good that they'll buy the next machine so you have another recurring revenue stream. In South America, that was forced so hard because of the hyperinflation settings and the economic turmoil, but it ultimately helped that part of the world really leap forward with a much more modern business model than they were previously on.

Yeah, I think on the one hand, when I speak to people in other verticals and other industries, they all complain about how slow the industry is to react. So nobody says, hey, look at our industry. They're ahead of the curve. But I do think ours is a particularly slow one. And I also think looking back, and I've been at this now for two decades. And if I look back at the original expectation, And if there's one aspect, and I'm grateful for it in retrospect, it was tremendously naive to think, hey, in four or five years, we've got them all on this platform when it really took 15. And we were lucky that it was a series of accidents that helped us get there, including some economic downturn where all of a sudden the company said, we've got to do something because doing it the old way won't move forward. But it was never driven by innovation. Hey, let's do this. This looks really interesting. There was a lot of kicking and streaming along the way.

Right.

And you probably knew all of them by heart.

You know, it's interesting. When I mentioned to you earlier, the generational change and the focus on the equipment life cycle and moving from a world where you first sell the equipment, make the money there, and then have to do the necessary steps along the way, assuming they're not profitable until you can sell the next piece of equipment. My hero was Don Fites. And I remember very well. He was there, I believe, until about 99 at Cat. We started this company in 95. Not, sorry, Smarticoot, but the prior company that took Cat into the rental business. And he was, as small, as tiny as we were, he was the person that had to sign off and also had to allow us to bear the company name, even though it was not company-owned, which was unheard of. You had to sign a second order. We could use the Cat yellow.

right you know on our business cards but he was a huge believer and so ahead of his time in that um and i think that that um that really uh gave a lot of opportunity and also uh enabled that that way of thinking is it was also behind um allowing a lot of the north american based um more traditional dealers to start becoming part of that kent the cat rental store network

and the other thing

Well, and he felt that they had sort of given rental was suddenly exploding because of U.S. rents, which later became part of United Rentals and so forth with those massive roll-ups happening. They realized that the dealer model was disadvantaged in all of this, but we suddenly had to deal with South America. And because Caterpillar was organized by... geographic area, that was a perfect opportunity for us to start this work. But, you know, there's one other thing that you mentioned, and I think there's a very natural pull or contradiction or friction, and that is the service labor efficiency side of it. And there I do. I think that's one of the reasons I've always been very much drawn into the rental side. It's very obvious and very evident, even back in the 80s and 90s. to see that if your equipment isn't up and running, it's not going to make money.

Contractors, I knew a lot of contractors who were doing extremely well, and they said, well, we'll just buy a few more machines, which is true, but that's not exactly an efficiency model. It's just saying, okay, to get this revenue impact, which I think I can do in a saturated market that I'm part of, how many machines do I need? And I'll just buy the machines required. As long as I'm cash positive and profitable, that's fine. In two ways, the rental industry, I think, helped a great deal. One is they suddenly had a very literal financial metric. The machine was either being used or not. There was a financial utilization metric. There was a physical utilization metric that pertained to it and so forth. And so it really forced a sort of discipline into machine usage. I think that that was very strong. The other thing is it made...

perfect sense that if an organization is built around the financial return on asset, it would start thinking very much like that too when it comes to the financial return on labor. So I remember there was a large dealership that was also a rental company. They were out in Arizona. Again, I won't mention their name either, but the headquarters were in a big U-shaped building. And inside the U was the service area. That's where all the service and parts guys hung out. And the CEO of the company, we went there after hours. We had just flown in together because we were doing this road trip. And he took me through. And one leg of the U was a dealer business. And the other leg of the U was a rental business. And so we walked from one to the other. We walked from the rental side to the dealer side to begin with. And he pointed at service area. And he said, hey, that's on your right here.

You see that's our profit center, meaning service parts, et cetera. Then we walked and then we looked around the dealership side and then we walked through that same area. And now he pointed to our left since we're heading the opposite direction. He said, over here on your left, you see our cost center. It's the same technician, same everything. But they were there to improve, sorry, to keep the rental fleet running. Same guys. And so it was so interesting. And then he turned around and then we went out and had dinner and over beer. He said, well, you saw both sides of the business. And we need the same technology to improve it both ways. It looks different when our financial guys are talking about it. But operational efficiency means the same thing. And that was the first time that I saw it. Obviously, he meant the whole thing humorously.

But it's the first time I saw that same sensitivity to labor efficiency that had come out of the machine efficiency or uptime ratios that they had worked out being applied to the labor side seamlessly, which was really cool.

Well, and not being able to find that product is a very important part of that. And the same is you're not able to find the labor either. I mean, that's what, and that's worldwide. I was in Singapore a few years ago, which is an area of the world I knew very well because I actually grew up there. And I would walk into these places and the... And the government had shifted policy-wise, it shifted its reliance away from foreign labor. So a lot of the work permits that were being issued were no longer available. But the sort of native Singaporeans, the interest in working in 110 degree weather inside on a hot machine wasn't very high compared to semiconductor factories and all that stuff. And all of a sudden. they were not looking to make more money. They were looking to stuff a hole that had suddenly appeared and they just could not get labor.

So the idea of actually doubling or near doubling, I keep saying doubling, it's really 85%,90% throughput improvements that they could do just through automation of service and the whole sourcing side of it. That to them was not a question of convenience or higher profitability. It was really a question of survival. Yeah.

is. And again, I think. We liked the idea so much early on. I mentioned earlier that we were naive, thinking that, boy, it's an even better idea than we can take credit for. We were pretty lucky in some things. Just as an example, we never knew that. So Sunbelt Rentals at a conference showed their technology portfolio, and they focused on Smarter Group. And they said, you know, ever since we put the system in place over the last five years, We've more than doubled the size of our company and we've reduced our accounts payable group by 30%,35%. And we all nodded as if we knew this or even knew why. And as soon as the conference was over, we ran over there and said, well, wait a minute, what happened? And they explained to us, well, you no longer have the mismatches, the AP mismatches, which nickel and dime you to death for every $10 and $15 and $50 part.

So stuff like that, because we're now matching the buyer and the seller in an automated fashion. So the headache goes away for both of them. So stuff like that. We stumbled over a fair bit of luck along the way. But when we look at all of this, there are a few, you know, when these changes happen, there's always so much opportunity. And much as we were naive to not realize this would take a long time to take, I'm now thinking there's so much opportunity to be had, especially by dealers. And I keep waiting for that to happen. So I'll use one example that you referred to earlier. You referred to labor, dealer labor, and protecting your customer, protecting yourself with the customer to make sure that they use your labor. And I think there are some types of repair where that's absolutely critical. With all the tier four, tier five, et cetera, engine stuff, I think that'll be in the hands of the dealer. So very, very long time's to come.

Whether it's a small rental company, a large one, or a large contract, or a small one. They're not going to start doing that kind of repair anytime soon. It's going to become less likely. So that's there. But there are other types of repairs. And at some point, you start thinking, well, wait a minute. Am I better off? These rental companies or these fleet owners in general, they have their own service personnel. What's the profitability that in addition to offering mine, I actually remote support theirs? There's a revenue opportunity there. Without me having to double the size of my labor force, I could potentially double. the size of service activity that I, as a dealer, am involved in. It may not involve my own group directly, but it's my group and myself and my expertise supporting those.

And again, with SmartEquip, we do that by injecting the right service information at the right time and delivering it directly to the serial number of the equipment you're working at. It shows up on your mobile device and you have a technician there and people pay for it. They either pay for it directly or they pay for it by... buying higher margin parts from you than they could be getting elsewhere because that's real measurable value. And when it comes to parts, and I know we're not there yet, but we're a lot closer to there than we were to where smart equipers today when we started the company. So it's not that far out of reach. You know, when you look at places, and again, excuse the science fiction element, but when you look at places like oil drilling platforms and space stations and so forth, a lot of the parts are being printed now remotely.

It is inconceivable to me that we're going to live in a world 20 years from now where the only way to get a part is by sticking it on a 747. Well, we won't have any 747s, but sticking it on an airplane and delivering it. More and more, we'll have regional printing centers for all of those. And again, the first fear is, well, then anybody could print it. No, you can protect the IP and you can do all of that stuff. But the idea of actually shipping a part halfway around the world to a machine. I think at some point that's going to become less and less so as well. And the third element in all of that, which is, again, linked to information technology, is something that you alluded to earlier as well, is machines. We have all the elements in place, and there's some really, really smart companies working on this. A company called Uptake in Chicago is one of the better known or best known examples.

There's this notion that machines should not be breaking down anymore. With all the information flowing off of the machine, which often we don't know what to do with yet, right? And learning from more and more machines that are structurally or fundamentally similar and learning what happens to them at different types in their life cycle and with different types of environmental exposure, different types of work they do. We should be becoming, we are becoming better and better predicting what it needs when. So in my world, what I would love one day, what I dream about, literally dream about, which maybe that's worrisome, but what I literally dream about is a world where a machine knows it's breaking down. And knows means that, you know, the sensors tell it and it's actually the machine doesn't know anything, but it's all transmitted to a data center or as a set of facilities and with all the... the very real statistical.

I don't want to use AI because it's, even though that's what it is in machine learning, but really it's at the end of the day, there are these statistical methods that are working on all of this data coming back, comparing what's happening to different machines around the world at different times. So they're saying, hey, there's a pretty good chance that over the next 30,40,50 hours, you're going to have this failure. So then they go ahead and that triggers, without any human knowing about it, that triggers a physical transfer of the right part. And since they have 30,40,50 hours, not, oh, my God, this thing broke down. We need it now. They will go ahead and find the local place. Maybe they'll print the part one day. Right now, let's say they pull it off a shelf somewhere. And physically, at the customer, this part shows up. They never ordered it. It's just showing up. And they don't own it, by the way. It just showed up.

And it gets received just like any part does when it gets shipped in their system. The system will reflect because it's integrated via SmartEquip. It'll say, hey, that part belongs to your manufacturer or to your dealer. And then when that machine comes back, as a system filled out a work order, it adds that repair automatically because it's not working right now. It's a service order. It just comes in. And the minute you add that part to the work order, you get charged for it. And so it's a form of vendor managed inventory, but dynamically into the workflow. You install the part and it's back up and running. And it's not even a hiccup. It's not an emergency. It's nothing else.

So these kinds of things, when you look at the workflow, and I've done this many times, you map them out in Visio and you look at these beautiful diagrams and you say, wow, that is so far into the future until you look at every single link on the chains that you're drawing and you realize. Virtually all of them exist today. The integrations you require, virtually all of them exist today. Many of them are in smart equip for other purposes, so we're already there. The technology or the statistical technology or quantitative technology, whatever you want to call it, now focused specifically on machine lifecycle stuff is being developed by really, really super smart people and data scientists. And uptake is a great example for this. So it really is now a matter of really linking all of this together. And we're much, much closer to that world today, looking back, than when we were to the world that we had to climb when we started.

We were competing against people that were upset that we were taking the microfiche reader out of the service department. And nor were they going home and ordering things through Amazon either. We had to really make them think that screens are a cool thing. Nowadays, I see a lot of service technicians that are frustrated. Why can't I do in this repair what I will do this evening when I order a new pair of sneakers on Amazon? So I think we're just lagging behind, but the elements are all there.

Well, I'm glad. Oh, I do it. I hope I didn't meander all over.

I will. Take any excuse to get to talk to you, Ron. So, yes.