Will Bachman 00:01
Welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which connects you with the world’s top independent management consultants. I’m your host, Will Bachman. I’m very excited to be here today with Mike freed, who is the chief operating officer of Marion technologies. Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks. Well, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Mike, give me an overview of Marion technologies, what your firm does?
Mike Freed 00:30
Sure, yeah. So Marian technologies is the the global leader in radiation detection and measurement. So as a company, we Our mission is to protect people and property and the environment from the harmful effects of ionizing radiation. So we support nuclear power plants, the medical community with a number of applications, Homeland Security, and military, government agencies, labs and research for some big science applications. And increasingly, we’re doing more and more of decontamination, and decommissioning work of sites that are being shut down, do e sites and the like. And last year, I should say, you know, through some mergers and acquisitions and product development, we’re expanding that mission more broadly in the medical space. So we’re getting more involved with human health and then radiation therapy to support cancer treatments, which is a strategic initiative of ours that we’re, we’re really focused on lightly, some Overall, we have about 2500 personnel across 30 sites globally. So relatively globally dispersed. And we’re proud of our private equity owned company.
Will Bachman 01:45
All right, cool. For folks that, you know, are, you know, don’t have training in radiation detection, and so forth. What are the what are the major different categories of radiation and the types of detectors that that you that you manufacture and sell?
Mike Freed 02:04
Absolutely. And the best way to describe that thing would just be through some of the applications. And so we do a lot of health physics, work. So if you worked in a nuclear power plant, and you were in a maintenance area, the primary concern is, is when when both when individuals are in that space, that they’re monitoring the levels of radiation exposure that they’re receiving, as well as making sure that surface contaminants don’t leave the space. So from the nuclear nuclear power application, one of the key product categories, we sell our contamination and clearance equipment, we call it so picture, an airport, X ray machine, that you go through it security, but instead measuring radiation, so when you leave the worksite, you can make sure that you’re not spreading contamination, or while you’re in the plant working, what’s called dosimetry. So it’d be measuring the levels of radiation you’re receiving to make sure it’s safe. And you’re not passing healthy limits when you’re doing that work. We also do broader, just radiation measurement for the plant itself. So we have a couple divisions that support broader reactor monitoring systems, detectors inside and outside of the reactor core to measure health of the reactor. And the medical community, if you’ve ever gone and gotten an X ray, you’ll see the X ray technicians if they’re actually following what they’re supposed to be following, they’ll be wearing a badge, they call it which is measuring their dose. And they take that that badge and either ship it back to us and we do the measurement and, and dose report for them and send it back as a service or we have a new product that is Bluetooth based where they can it’s called Insta dose so they can just keep their same badge and it would go through an anchor uplink to instant reads. So they can measure at intervals that they require for their medical facility and and do that digitally, which is a which is a key breakthrough for military and in Homeland Security. We do a lot of products that either help monitor and track to make sure that there’s no you know, transport of dirty mom material in through ports or other part points of entry. We we supply dosimetry and detectors to the military for you know potential use if there was ever a any type of nuclear combat that they would experience. And I said say in the labs and research markets, we have high purity germanium detectors that are incredibly accurate that can help with with research for you know, everything from the work on discovery and and analysis of dark matter all the way to you know, we’ve been involved with NASA and you You know, some of the research has been done on Mars and that type of application when we get to decontamination and decommissioning and so if you think of Department of Energy sites that are that need to characterize their waste, so do work to basically remediate the site, we have pretty advanced systems that will, will aid those sites in the characterization of, you know, the remaining remaining impact from those sites processing nuclear materials over time,
Will Bachman 05:31
what does characterize the waste to me?
Mike Freed 05:34
So, basically, with with highly accurate detectors, you can determine which isotopes you’re dealing with and can can really get into more specific specificity, not just the presence of radiation, but down to the specific isotope level. And just broadly speaking, I think the layman term way to manage that is different waste requires different types of release, and different types of processing. And when you can get highly accurate with the systems that use high purity germanium detectors, you can actually get very specific read a very specific read on what you’re you’re dealing with, and therefore develop the protocols and the actions required to clean up the site.
Will Bachman 06:22
Okay, yeah, I mean, I, my own experience with this was first a few years in the nuclear Navy, when we had, you know, I’m sure much, much less sophisticated equipment than your firm has now, which was, we were worried about alpha, which and radiation, right, neutron radiation, beta, gamma radiation. And, you know, some of those are very serious, but you can block them just with a sheet of paper, but the neutron indeed, like, you know, you know, several inches of lead shielding, right. So, there’s different different types. And I’m sure that the detectors that you have right now are way more sophisticated than our Navy days.
Mike Freed 07:04
Yeah. And it’s funny. what some of my first jobs in the Navy when I graduated college was, you know, working with this types of type of equipment. And there are many days at Marion where I wish when I’m having conversations with some of our nuclear physicists, that I wish that I remembered a lot more from nuclear power school. And I actually do still today, but um, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s fascinating to see where the technology has come in the, you know, I guess, 20 years since I was using in the Navy.
Will Bachman 07:36
So for the Homeland Security part, you know, that’s something you see in the news a bit about concerns about a dirty bomb coming in just maybe even a regular 40 foot container, what, what’s being done at the ports to make sure that, that doesn’t happen? Do do those containers go through some kind of big? You know, sort of, like, you know, like you have at the airport that, you know, to see if there’s anything inside? Or how are they determining if there’s any kind of dirty bombs coming into the country?
Mike Freed 08:11
Yeah, there’s, most ports have very large port monitors that can, that you could monitor an entire container, or obviously, hundreds of containers at the airport ticketing and kind of varies by region. You know, we have our equipment set up in a number of airports globally. And, and some, some airports, prioritize, you know, luggage, monitoring over personnel, people monitoring that some airports have started to set up, in addition to the X ray systems that you typically go through set up systems that complement that as well. And, you know, it’s one of those things where you see a high, high degree of variability across governmental kind of prep for that. And a lot of it has been funding based over time. You know, the US as as gone through various stages of that, I think it’s becoming an increasing priority. And I’d say the other thing that, that that they’re doing a lot more of in the US, it started with what they call the securing the Cities Initiative, where they wanted to make sure that they both prepared cities to monitor, you know, take large events, for example. So if you had a Super Bowl or a large event, you’d want to make sure that you had the ability to tell if there was anything, you know, any risks to the response afterwards, if there was a dirty bomb, does the city have enough dosimetry and detectors to be able to manage the response to something like that? And we’ve seen a lot more business lately in that category, with basic handheld detectors for first responders. We did a lot of work with the Indianapolis 500 which has, you know, 300,000 spectators over time, and, and these are the types of events where you want to make sure you’re monitoring for this threat in a, in a fairly non obvious way. So, you know, if a police officer is walking around with something that looked like a detector from Back to the Future, right, you know, you know, with the nuclear symbol on it’s up, I’d probably be concerning. So you have a lot more of the, you know, kind of backpack type. You know, there’s detectors and backpacks or drones or, you know, handhelds look more like cell phones and, and they’re getting more sophisticated. It’s becoming more of a funding priority. And so it’s becoming a bigger part of our business over time.
Will Bachman 10:44
Yeah, I mean, with the coronavirus pandemic, it kind of illustrates that we didn’t really, we weren’t really prepared in terms of obviously having enough personal protective equipment. And, you know, and obviously, the testing has been a big issue. It kind of makes me think, well, geez, I sort of had assumed the government would, would have that kind of material. And for some kind of, you know, dirty bomb attack, I assume that the government would just sort of whip out of some warehouse, all the detectors and, you know, full body contamination suits and so forth. But but maybe not. So, it sounds like there’s maybe some variation and how much cities are prepared for for something like that?
Mike Freed 11:30
Yeah, I think so. And while I tell you that, I think in my four years at Marian, it’s exciting to see that it’s becoming more of a priority. The government is managing some more central procurement on these types of at least detection equipment. But it does go city by city, and they’re prioritizing larger cities first. And we really focus at Miriam to make sure that we’re making products that are, are also both cost effective, but also easy to use. So are one of our more recent products that we put out, even though you and I are a little stale from our time in the Navy, you could use this will be called PRD, personal handheld device, called our accurate, which were we just launched, but you could use that it’s very, it looks more like a cell phone, it’s very easy to use. Because if you think about it, the larger cities have health physics departments, and they have, you know, trained police and firefighters that can can handle radiation protection in the smaller cities, you know, you really have to arm them with equipment that’s easy to use, because they don’t benefit from the funding, or the size or scale to have, you know, radiation trained personnel. And so there’s, there’s a little bit of a training there, there’s a little bit of a supply and readiness perspective. But ultimately, I think if we ever saw something like that, you’d see a little bit of a Fukushima type results where everyone kind of scrambles and tries to divert resources to the impacted area. I guess the one thing that makes it a little bit different than the pandemic is just what you said the there’s the government could centrally procure, like they do a lot of this equipment and then distributed rapidly to the affected impacted area, because this would be you know, geographically focused, right. So Right, right.
Will Bachman 13:16
Okay. Talk to me a little bit about Tell me a little bit more about the health, the health physics part, you know, how radiation is used in, in health? I mean, I suppose your radiation therapy and so forth for cancer, but what are the different ways that radioactive materials are used in, you know, healthcare facilities?
Mike Freed 13:38
Yeah, so this is an area that we’re growing into. Like I said, before, it used to be we’re more focused on dosimetry. for hospitals, we just acquired a company last summer that that does dose calibration for the thyroid uptake systems, or dose calibrator, for for isotope therapies for cancer treatments. So basically, before you administer the dose, if I’m trying to be really simple about it, you would just want to make sure that you’re administering the right amount. So there’s calibration systems that measure and ensure that that’s, that’s, that’s accurate. Obviously, in the broader medical space space that we’re we don’t deal with a whole lot yet. There’s radiation beam therapy, where you do a lot of quality control and patient modeling to make sure you’re delivering the right right type of dose, and the beam for the the, the the treatment. There’s also you know, areas where you can develop products for the monitoring of the medical space where these things are being administered, right. So when you when you do bracket therapy, for example, you’re administering a seed of, you know, highly radioactive seed to a specific spot in the body. And you have to use radiation measurement to ensure that that’s delivered. referred to the right spot and then also retrieved and clear of the patient in the treatment room before you know it safe for the patient and any any medical care professionals. So there’s a number of applications and that’s, that’s actually an area that’s really exciting for us. Just because, you know, the focus and mission of the business for so long has been to protect people from the harmful effects of ionizing radiation and to get involved with also advancing and restoring human health through, you know, products that support radiation therapy for cancer and using our kind of harnessing our knowledge and expertise in that space. It’s really it’s a really an exciting expansion of the business.
Will Bachman 15:45
Okay. Let’s talk a bit about how you are keeping your employees safe during the coronavirus pandemic, do you still have manufacturing facilities that are continuing to operate and still shipping? You know, devices around? How what sort of steps have you taken?
Mike Freed 16:04
Sure, yeah, it’s um, it says, I think everyone is experienced, it’s been quite the quite the crisis to manage through, but we’ve been grateful for the ability to keep people safe in our business continuity. The we haven’t had any sites that have had to close. But I think the high level answer that by saying, we very quickly set some priorities, we basically, you know, protecting employees was the first one, you know, we wanted to make sure everything from stopping unnecessary travel, to making sure that we had the PP easy reference, you know, gloves, disinfecting, masks, splitting shifts to keep people exposed to coworkers as little as possible to accomplish the mission of the plant. And then also tracking high risk employees, you know, we’re able to look and see what employees are either older or more likely to have severe effects from from the virus, and make sure that we’re tracking those individuals, we, we, I should step back and explain the structure of Marian which has really been a benefit operationally for us. So we have we operate, we call the Federalist model. So we have a very, we tried to maintain a very efficient corporate overhead structure. And we have five business units that are given quite a bit of decision authority. And what that lets us do is push, push that authority as close to the plant floor and as close to customers as possible so that we can be agile and a steady state to respond to customer needs. And in this case, we started a task force early on, but basically to support the division presidents and our regional leaders and they were able to make decisions. And so changing the split shifts, for example, isn’t like a decision that comes across my desk that we, my CEO, and I have to approve. Instead, they feel the ownership already from how we’re structured to move quickly. From another way, you know, that we’ve viewed at Marian for taking care of employees, and it’s going to sound basic, but one of our priorities early on was, was to keep people employed. And so you know, everything from our IT department making sure that everyone could have a laptop that needed to work from home to making sure that that, that we’re keeping the plants open and engaging customers that we didn’t have to do massive layoffs, because one of the biggest way to take care of your employees in this environment is to keep them employed. Right. I think that’s one thing, if I were appointed, anything that we’re most proud of is we’ve had very little cases across the company, we’ve been able to keep the plants open. And because of that we’ve been able to keep most employees employed, which is is is good not only just for their welfare, but also as a company to be ready to be strong when this starts to alleviate.
Will Bachman 19:03
So split shifts, tell me about that. That’s everybody from shift one leaves the building and then shift two comes in afterwards. So there’s no intermingling.
Mike Freed 19:13
Yeah, so we have most of our facilities run on a single shift some places they have two shifts, and then varies across our plants. But in the most basic sense, if you had one major shift, we would split that try to you know, distribute vital personnel across the two ships and create a space in between the handoff where you can, where you can clean and disinfect the site. And, you know, as employees come in, and our sites we have temperature monitors to make sure you know, we can detect a fever on the way in our leadership at the site’s had stayed, you know, as separate from the floor as possible. And so, to keep operations going, we want to take non essential personnel That includes in a lot of cases, leadership, and keep them away from the plant floor. So if you were to go to our facility in France, for example, in, in the south of France and Lamanna, they were doing your morning briefings to the plant floor from a second story inside the main space, you know, so that they didn’t go down to the plant floor. So it protects leadership, but also doesn’t unnecessarily make extra contact points with those on the on the shop floor, we have other facilities that have shifted to three shifts and function more in a six or seven day schedule to create enough time and space to do the cleaning and everything else that’s required.
Will Bachman 20:41
So in some cases, you’ve taken what a plant that was normally just running one shift. And sounds like you’ve split it into two, such that, you know, one group will come in work for eight hours, and then they’ll leave this and someone comes in disinfects, the building, and you have the other half of the folks come in for a second shift. So they’re that way, if if someone does come in and test positive, then it’s only like half half the team that that might have been exposed.
Mike Freed 21:09
Exactly. So in theory, you could, if you had someone who who tested positive on shift, one, you could hold Shift one from coming in until you fully assessed the contact points and symptoms of that group and you could function, you could disinfect the site and function with shift to until you could clear the mass, you know, group of shift one to come back. And what that prevents is getting into a scenario where if you had a little bit of an outbreak on one shift, and it touched, you know, you had to pull vital employees back, you could find yourself very quickly, in a case ready to shut the facility down. And our biggest worry there is, you know, theoretically, you could shut a facility down for a week and catch back up. But the challenge there is is you know, once people leave, it’s so much harder to get back up and running. And we have some facilities that just by the nature of what they do, we have some facilities that need to keep operations running with continuity, or you get higher levels of yield issues or quality challenges. And so and luckily that the only cases that we’ve had to monitor have actually come with more of the leadership team and not on the plant floor, which has been easier to manage.
Will Bachman 22:35
What about things like contact tracing and so forth? Are you trying to make sure that for the the shift that does come in, you figure out who is close to who so that if someone does get sick that you would know at least what other co workers they were close to?
Mike Freed 22:54
Yes, and that’s that’s an area where we’re our corporate HR hasn’t as kind of supported the Federalist model I referenced. And there’s a there’s a specific protocol to follow in the case of anyone having symptoms or anyone showing signs of pulling them on who they contacted our site leaders know where they are on the floor, and therefore where you know, the highest risk is. And a knife allows you to be a little bit more responsive. Okay.
Will Bachman 23:28
Interesting point about keeping the leadership off the floor. So that both protects the workers as well as the is the leadership just having as few few interactions as possible between people.
Mike Freed 23:40
Yeah, and, you know, we worried early on, it was in a lot of our leaders have had, you know, started to work from home office, and we’ve had this few come into the sites as possible. And we worried, you know, with that create frustration with people saying, Hey, I had to come in, while others were able to stay safe at home. And I can’t stress enough that theme, or you know, and I can speak a little bit later on it. But from a cultural perspective, having that trust going into a crisis like this is really critical. And people generally recognize that the actions we were taking was to maintain that continuity of operations for employment and for our customers. And, in general, I think people really responded really well to that mission focus and, and, you know, even in places where, you know, if you take France for example, if you went on unemployment, the government’s gonna support, you know, 70 80% of their, their salary. And so you a lot of factories shut down in France. We had employees that, you know, had that came in and continued to work and, and didn’t hesitate right, they were given the option at different points of time of saying, Hey, we can scale back if you don’t feel safe, and resoundingly, everyone wanted to continue to work and continue to do To accomplish, you know, the objectives of the company for customers, and that was, you know, elevating really, really high. For me personally, that’s been an incredible source of energy and pride through this this challenge, you really see the talent and the commitment and the resilience of your broader team in a way that you maybe don’t take time to notice on a day to day basis. And since I think we were doing the things to make them feel like we were doing everything we could to support them to make it safe, and communicating a lot. I think that was they trusted us and continued to work, and it’s been it’s gone really well.
Will Bachman 25:37
That’s great. What are some of your, maybe leadership lessons learned that you’ve had through this sounds like communicating regularly has been one of them? What else?
Mike Freed 25:48
Yeah, I think, first and foremost, culture and engagement. You know, we hear companies talk a lot about employee engagement, those aren’t the types of things that you can Institute, you know, on day one of a crisis, right? You can’t just say, Okay, I’m going to rally the troops, and I’m going to, you know, bring this company together. So everyone knows we’re there for them and knows that we care about them. That has to be something that that is built over time, because you need it in this environment. And it’s not something that can be, you know, instantly created, we started, we realized we were we had improvements we can make on that. And so we’ve had a pretty robust and employee engagement effort going for the last year and a half. And all of our sites have employee engagement committees, that are looking at everything from improving workflows to facility improvements that could be made to improve in break rooms, to wanting to know more about the company strategy, you know, wanting to see or hear more from myself or the CEO or leadership. And we’ve really been taking that seriously. And that that lesson, I’m very grateful we did that. Because I think that’s really important. You know, the simple thing I think a lot of people are learning is video conferencing, really, really amplifies your presence, as a team. And as leaders. We use stitch, I try to travel around to all of our sites, and it could take me 12 to 18 months in between site visits. And when we realize video conference was effective, we decided to start doing virtual site town halls and leadership meetings. So the CEO and I have been on calls with almost all of our sites where sometimes you have anywhere from 10 to 35 people on it. And basically just telling them, the company is is doing great, our customers are appreciative of the work we’re doing. We’re taking, you know, we want to keep employees safe, we want to keep employees employed. And then also having a chance, frankly, to say how proud we are of them, and how much we care about them. And it’s a huge lesson. And it’s something I think will extend beyond this. But you know, outreach and engagement doesn’t have to be through an aeroplane and, you know, a site visit. And, you know, I think the other thing I would say, and we’re trying to do this as we go is that we’re trying to collect our lessons learned as we go, you know, if you go back to our Navy days, you’d have a problem or some sort of incident and you’d all pull up and you’d have like the post mortem, you know, lessons learned root cause analysis. What we’ve done is, you know, who knows, we might be a quarter way through this, we might be halfway through this, but we’ve already kicked off our lesson learned activity. So I’m leading an initiative with the task force to collect lessons while we’re in the crisis, while we’re in the the facing all the challenges we’re facing to basically say, what are we learning? How are we actually better right now than we were before this happened? What do we want to keep doing when we’re done? How could we have responded better to this crisis while we’re in it, right, while it’s fresh in people’s heads, and that’s, I think, that feels really powerful. And it feels like something that I think we could probably do a better job of going forward, as, you know, kind of pulling lessons learned while we’re in the middle of something versus waiting until, till we’re well beyond it.
Will Bachman 29:24
Wow, that seems like such a smart idea. And not something I’ve heard a lot of companies talking about is is already starting to collect lessons learned. Are Are there any of those that you that you feel comfortable sharing with us about, you know, things that you’ve learned that are working well? Or maybe that you do differently in the future?
Mike Freed 29:44
Yeah, I think that I mentioned the video conferencing which is has been you know, very, is great, just from a way of working. I think we we have bolstered our belief in our federalist model. You know, everyone is kind of As universally said that they that I think we’re responding better because our authority is distributed. And there’s no bureaucracy standing in the way of doing things. I think the way that we engage customers, so we, we usually, for the law, the equipment that we sell, customers have to come into the sites to do factory acceptance testing, we’ve actually been able to do a lot of that through virtual means through video conferences. So, you know, if you’re selling a product out of Connecticut, to Korea, and instead of waiting for that travel and logistics to work, you can actually do a virtual factory acceptance testing in your facility. That’s something that, you know, could make us more responsive in the future, to deliveries. And it’s, I think our sales team is mentioned, you know, they’re engaging with customers, and maybe more impactful way as the customers get more customer comfortable with video conferencing. So you know, being able to be in more places at once than they previously had been. I think so. So I love I love that. I
Will Bachman 31:08
mean, that that suggests that also, it’s good for the customer in the future. Maybe they say, well, geez, we don’t actually have to fly a technician all the way from Korea to Connecticut, just to like, accept the new distributor machine, just, I mean, because that saves everybody money.
Mike Freed 31:23
Yeah, and sometimes, you know, there have been a number of times where, you know, you come up on the end of a quarter and, and you end up you know, Miss missing due to a delay in customer acceptance testing, you know, to be able to be more responsive, and it helps with forecasting and timing and other things. I think in the future, too. It’s, it’s, it’s one of those things that’s been really energizing to watch, I mentioned, just the pride of, of our team and our employees. But that, you know, we really aspire to be a lean culture. And you know, the basic lean concept of having employees be a part of solutions and improvement of work on a day to day basis in this type of crisis, you really see creativity. And it’s not just operationally we’ll be, when we were doing these town hall calls. You know, you’re I’m hearing about our services team in order to keep together as a unit they’re doing, they did a one of our service teams did a virtual talent show there with their with their group, you know, and they didn’t let us join or video it for record. But it’s just that people are being more creative, more inventive, on how to both get the work done, how to engage customers, but also how to engage each other. And it’s hard to quantify that. But that’s the part I’m most excited about. Because on the back end of this, it’ll make us tighter as a business for 2500 employees spread across the globe. And that this is this is exciting. I think that brings up another thought on lessons learned. You know, COVID is a very serious crisis business on a day to day basis is a very serious, you know, task. And we tend to sometimes take it all too seriously. And one of the things I’ve seen on video calls related a little bit to that talent show thing is, I think we’re succeeding in a lot of ways because we’re finding ways to have fun, you know, when we join executive committee call and someone’s wearing a funny hat, or, you know, we keep it light with, with jokes when we can, you know, you can’t survive something that’s this stressful, a lot of people at home working with their kids trying to manage school with, you know, both parents working, and you can’t do that, and then jump on a call and and be completely serious and locked in all day long for months through this crisis. And that’s, that’s also been a lesson I think we’re better for being able to laugh and, and engage in a fun way as a team too.
Will Bachman 34:02
So it sounds like are there some of these new ways of working that you expect to just continue post post Coronavirus?
Mike Freed 34:13
Yeah, I think some of the things we’re doing right now, we might keep in place, just from a safety perspective. So I think we’ll try, you know, obviously tried to get back to higher levels of utilization in our facilities when there’s a normalization period here. But I think we will keep in mind and try to keep some employees working remotely where it’s prudent. Evaluate the shift structure just so that you know if there is we want to maintain a defensive posture in case you know, you have a spike or something you know, degrades from a from the COVID perspective. I absolutely think from a way of doing business point of view, we are going to leverage this video conferencing Much more effectively. And you know, if you think about this stuff’s been around for decades, but until this, no one broke through that awkwardness of seeing someone’s guest bedroom or their kitchen, or their kids coming in and out of the screen or, or what have you, and breaking that, that discomfort down and being comfortable with the medium has, I think really opened up, I don’t think we know all the ways that it’s going to make us better and more efficient going forward.
Will Bachman 35:28
That’s so cool. Like, where can people go to find out more about your company? Or yourself? If you want to give a website or your Twitter handle? Any other links, we can also include in the show notes, but where can people go to find out more?
Mike Freed 35:44
Yeah, I think the best place is Maryanne calm. We’ve done a lot of work on the website over time. And so you can get a really good view of our products. And our company on the website. I won’t give out my Twitter handle because I don’t think people need to hear me rant about the Detroit Lions, or sports sports complaints. But yeah, our website is has been then really overhauled and is a great source of information for our products. And the company.
Will Bachman 36:13
All right, fantastic. Well, Mike, this is I feel encouraged after this discussion. I’m really enthusiastic about some of the lessons learned that you’ve had and just encouraged sounds like great culture that that you’re that you’re building there. And thank you so much for joining the call today.
Mike Freed 36:34
Well, thanks well, and I might leave that the audience with just, you know, that pot, the ability to try to be positive on all of this. I know everyone’s facing a lot of challenges. And this is uniquely challenging time. And to the extent that we all can find ways to find silver linings and better ways of doing business or even just the simple things of taking care of ourselves through this so we can be there for our teams. I just hope everyone’s able to be safe and do a little bit of that. So it’s not just doom and gloom all the time because I do think we’ll learn a lot out of this.
Will Bachman 37:07
I agree. Thank you for that. Mike. great having you on the show. Thanks. I really appreciate it. Well, thanks for having me.