Well, in the initial phases, when you first mentioned, wouldn't it be nice to be an accredited provider of education, essentially making us a school, I started researching. Who's available? Who does that? Who does the accreditation process go through for businesses like ours? I was familiar with what's called WASC accreditation. It's the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. And that is an accreditation program that public schools here in California standardly have to receive in order to be legally compliant providers of education to children. But we target adults. We are helping people to go through their employee development plans, setting their goals, making their future plans for how they'd like to promote. And considering we do this not just in the U.S. and Canada, but also overseas internationally, in Belgium and Sweden and France, I wanted to see what was available internationally. And that was how... through word of mouth and a lot of reading, I found IACET, the International Association for Continuing Education and Training. I initially signed us up to do the application process before I really understood every single complete detail that would have to go into this. At times, I feel like I might have opened a vein a little bit and done the blood, sweat, and tears version of it. But the ISET structure asks you to walk the commissioners through every single element of who you are and what you provide to your students. So this begins with the standard business introduction. What's your mission statement, your vision statement, your statement of purpose information, your articles of incorporation, things of that nature. And it goes all the way through the individual learning outcomes for every single class. And as I went through this process and received feedback from them, you and I had many conversations about ways to improve the classes we already had, ways to change them into more bite-sized pieces for students, ways to make them more accessible for students. So that the process of becoming accredited providers of education also is a process of deep improvement of our products, of who we are as educators and professionals. So by the time I finished, I have about a 200-page document that I keep in a very fancy binder that reflects... Every element of what we do, including feedback from our students through the surveys we have at the end of our courses and the evaluations that I included at ISA recommendation on our sample courses so that we would have some additional feedback on not just what you learned, but the self-evaluation that you had before you began the class, the evaluation after the class. Following that, I had about a two-hour interview with one of the commissioners. I had two commissioners assisting me, giving me pointers, tips, recommendations for where to refine or rephrase what I had written for our application responses, and then the final interview. After the final interview, the interviewer, Wendy, gave her feedback to the commissioners in general and to the other reviewer, whose name also is Caroline. That kept it nice and confusing for us. And Caroline made her recommendations based on the hard copies, the paperwork from the classes. This really opens us up to a lot of different opportunities for our students. Prior to this, in our industry, When people were accredited, it was a self-accreditation process. It wasn't something typically through an outside organization that had a series of very, very detailed standards that had to be upheld and maintained. So this has really put us as the first and only to receive accreditation. And I had to follow the ANSI standards, which are for people in the know. Incredibly detailed. AMSI
