Top 10 Areas You Should Be Addressing Midyear

It's hard to believe the year is half over. For many business owners, they are probably wondering what is going to happen for the next six months. Rich and I have compiled our Top 10 areas we believe are the most important to review and adjust.

Join us as we lite the match to your 6 month business review fireworks!

[00:00:01.06] - Alice

Books in the Biz, a podcast that looks at both the financial and operational sides of success. Please welcome our hosts, Dan Paulson and Richard Veltre.

[00:00:13.29] - Alice

Dan is the CEO of Envision Development International, and he works with leaders to increase sales and profits through great cultures with solid operations. Rich is CEO of the Veltre Group and a financial strategist working with companies to manage their money more effectively. Now on to the podcast.

[00:00:32.24] - Dan Paulson

Thank you, Alice. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Books and the Biz. I am here with my good friend Rich. Rich, how are you doing?

[00:00:39.27] - Alice

I am doing well, Dan. How are you?

[00:00:41.26] - Dan Paulson

I am doing wonderfully. It's hard to believe that We are now talking at the time of this recording. It is July fourth week. How exciting is that? Six months have gone by.

[00:00:53.25] - Rich Veltre

Blown by.

[00:00:54.22] - Dan Paulson

Blown by. Missed it. Maybe some of our guests are feeling that way, too. I know some business owners out there that might be looking at their stuff and wondering, what the heck? Maybe it's what the heck good or what the heck bad? But either way, it might be what the heck. It's just amazing how fast this year has gone by already, and the fact that it's fun and sun, and we're here going to be talking about some business issues. We figured that would be a fun way to wrap up July fourth week, and being said as the end of the second quarter, it's a good chance to review what you need to do. So with that said, we put together a nice top 10 list.

[00:01:34.29] - Rich Veltre

Sure did. I feel like they're letterman.

[00:01:36.16] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I think this is like our second top 10 list we did, and the last one we did right around the holidays. So this is a good opportunity for us to go over What we see as being very important for our clients to be looking at, and also maybe for you to be looking at, too. So top 10 areas to address halfway through your fiscal year. What could be more exciting than that? It's like apple pie, and hot dogs, and Chevrolet. What can I say?

[00:02:03.16] - Rich Veltre

And top 10.

[00:02:04.08] - Dan Paulson

And top 10.

[00:02:06.10] - Rich Veltre

And top 10.

[00:02:07.23] - Dan Paulson

All right. Shall we jump right into it? Works for me. All right, let's go. Now, let's see if I can get everything else to work the way it's supposed to. And here we are. Good. So the first top 10, our number 10 item, which I think is probably one of the first things you should do. So it's not necessarily what's most important, but they're All important, actually. And I believe, and I think you might agree with me too, Rich, because a lot of what you're going to be talking about is reviewing, is review your strategic goals. So if you're one of those companies or people that sets their end of year goals or New Year's goals, this is a good chance to review and track to see how you're doing with it. Are you actually following the plan that you put in place? For many of you, I'm guessing there isn't a plan in place. So this might be a good chance for you to sit down and review what you want your strategic goals to be, or what you have put in your head at the beginning of the year, and set those goals, or measure those goals, and see where you're going.

[00:03:09.24] - Dan Paulson

If you're not tracking where you should be, then maybe you need to look at the other nine points that we're going to be bringing up here. Rich, what's your thoughts?

[00:03:17.05] - Rich Veltre

No, I think that's exactly right. And if you haven't actually set strategic goals, and you look at the other things that we're going to talk about now, if there's any one of them that particularly upsets you, come back to this slide and say, let's start a strategic So there you go.

[00:03:32.07] - Dan Paulson

I think- Maybe if slide number 10 gave you that uneasy feeling, there's your answer. All right, let's go to number nine. This was you, Rich. Take it away.

[00:03:45.14] - Rich Veltre

Absolutely. So many companies that you walk into, it's June, 30, July, first. Take a look at whether or not you actually got your reports from the people that are doing them for you. If you're the one doing them, finish push them up, because why? You want to know what your results were. The biggest thing that I have to do when I come in to somebody's company is I look at what's happened in the past and then predict what's going to happen in the future. If you don't have the past, you can't look at the future. It's just going to be a big mess. So if you're behind in your financials, catch up because you really want to know, where do I stand at the end of mid-June, the middle of the year? Have an idea where you stood, how did you do? What went wrong? What went right? And that way you can really see, okay, let me look at the rest of these slides and say where I want to go.

[00:04:34.23] - Dan Paulson

Definitely. And if you have not gotten your financials, this is where you need to get on your accountant's case, because I'll tell you, Rich, I've heard from a number of clients this year that financials are coming in two, three, four months or more behind.

[00:04:50.06] - Rich Veltre

That's not good.

[00:04:51.18] - Dan Paulson

That's not good. No. How can you run a business if you can't get reasonable information fairly quick?

[00:04:58.14] - Rich Veltre

If you were getting financials a month late, years ago, when that was normal, people would say that wasn't good. Now the world is moving so much faster and digital move so much faster. If you're getting financials two months after the month's over, it's too long. You're making decisions that you don't have the right information to do.

[00:05:24.01] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, and you should be able to sit down with your accountant and say, I tell my clients, you should have financial information, accurate financial records, assuming you've turned in all your financial information no later than the 10th of the month. It really shouldn't take that much longer if everything's being updated. It's even worse if you have your accountant also doing your bookkeeping where they're entering all your financial information, they should make sure that's up to date as well. And if they're not doing that, that to me is first red flag when you're getting to the end of the month or into the following month. So now you're almost two months out and you still haven't seen accurate numbers.

[00:06:02.00] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, totally agree.

[00:06:04.29] - Dan Paulson

Very good. Let's go to number eight. Number eight, similar to this, is evaluate your operational efficiency. So we've talked about financials, getting your financial information. Let's look at your operational information. Are you hitting the metrics that you need to be efficient and productive? And if not, what's going on? This is a chance to look at waste, manufacturing or anything where waste would be a concern, food service, especially. You should be looking at that. You should be looking at the efficiency of your employees. Are you producing the widgets you should be producing in the time you should be producing them in? Are you staying up to date on that? Are you finding bottlenecks that you are not or we're not aware of that are slowing down production or creating quality issues. This is a good chance to do that quick gut check and review and make sure everything's functioning as it should. We don't know what the future is going to bring. We're in an election year. Things get crazy when that stuff happens. So you never know what to expect. You don't know if the economy is going to affect your sales. You don't know if it's going to boost your sales or hold you back.

[00:07:13.21] - Dan Paulson

So it's really important that you keep your efficiencies in check. Rich, you got anything to throw in there?

[00:07:22.08] - Rich Veltre

I think you hit it all.

[00:07:24.27] - Dan Paulson

I got it covered. All right.

[00:07:26.09] - Rich Veltre

Reviewing performance based on units as opposed to dollars. I mean, look, just to simplify it really, really, really down, it's just as important. So everything you just said, totally cool. Excellent.

[00:07:39.17] - Dan Paulson

Good deal. All right, let's move on to number seven. Review sales trends.

[00:07:44.01] - Rich Veltre

Sales trends. Yeah. It's our sales going as you expect it. It's not always just a gut check. You want to know, are you collecting your money as well? I mean, that's the other piece that you have to look at. Those financials are really key because every metrics you're going to run comes off of the financials that you didn't get for two months. So you don't know where you're standing. So if in the last two months, all your collections have gone slower, you wouldn't know it because you haven't seen a report to show you that it's gone slower. So review what your sales have been, review how you ended up the last six months, review on a monthly basis how your DSO stands, which is days sales outstanding. That tells you from the day that you bill it to the day you collect it, It tells you what your average number of days is to collect it. So if that number is going up, address it.

[00:08:36.26] - Dan Paulson

If you're experiencing, let's say your normal is net 30, so you usually collect within 30 days. What's the difference? What's the impact if you go from 30 days to where it's 45 days or maybe even 60 days where you're collecting that cash? How does that impact?

[00:08:56.23] - Rich Veltre

Think of it this way, okay? So I'll just go with You're a service business, right? You did the work in April. You build it April 30th. It goes another 30 days before you collect it. That's May 30th, right? So you did the work and you paid the people or you paid the expenses on that in April. They agreed to pay you in May. You're already saying you agree to carry one month of expenses. Now, if they go over 30 days, you're going into June. So now you've May's expenses as well. But you have not collected a dollar from that customer. So that's the way to look at it first. Then you can apply the fact that you can go a little bit more advanced and say, well, I had to borrow money to go pay that, and I had to go. So you might be adding expenses to May to cover the fact that they didn't pay you for April. So your expense numbers go up based on the fact that they didn't pay you on time.

[00:09:55.29] - Dan Paulson

And even if you have the cash, now that cash is tied up in paying May's bills because you haven't collected for April yet. So that prevents you from maybe doing future growth or expansion, somehow reinvesting that money into future growth. So it really does double down when you take longer to collect.

[00:10:17.02] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, correct.

[00:10:19.04] - Dan Paulson

Definitely. Let's go on to number six, update employee performance and development. And this is a big stickler for me because I find a lot of companies don't do any reviews Or they do reviews only once a year. And guess when they do those reviews? They do those reviews in the fall or very close to year's end, because usually that's related to a performance or a merit increase. Well, what happens with your employees if they don't know what they're doing, or if they don't know if they're doing the right things throughout the course of the year, and you wait 12 months? You're really not doing them a service, nor are you doing your company a service. So in a situation like this, you're about halfway through the year. At the very The very, very least, they should be getting some feedback at least twice a year. Hopefully, you're giving them feedback at least weekly or monthly, and also giving them feedback when you see good performance and when you see bad performance on the fly. If that's not happening, then this is a good chance to reset that barometer and really look at what you're doing as far as employee performance, checking in with them, especially if business is starting to slow down, what can you do to help that employee improve their If business is going successful, how do you get that employee gaged maybe on a different career track, or maybe talk with them about where their career track is going?

[00:11:41.05] - Dan Paulson

So there's a lot of elements here to me, and you might find that too, Rich, from the financial side, where reviewing employee performance can be pretty critical this time of year.

[00:11:51.10] - Rich Veltre

Absolutely. I mean, one of the things I was just even thinking about just now is just communication is so key. So when you're dealing And with, whether it's clients and vendors, that's one thing. But the employees is really key because that is in your house. They're home for you. So communication has to be wide open. And the more information you can give them, the better. And that's going to just improve their performance, and it's going to improve your profitability.

[00:12:22.20] - Dan Paulson

Profitability. Tongue-tied on July fourth week. What can we say? Tongue-tied.

[00:12:25.14] - Rich Veltre

There we go.

[00:12:27.09] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, it really is. And Also, if you're experiencing higher turnover, I can tell you right now, a lot of the reasons you're experiencing higher turnover is because your employees aren't getting the communication that you just spoke about, Rich. They're really struggling to get information or see where they stand in the business. And then that causes people to have wandering eyes. So they'll find somewhere else with somebody who's going to give them the feedback that they're looking for. At least that's what I've experienced.

[00:12:54.29] - Rich Veltre

Totally agree.

[00:12:56.22] - Dan Paulson

So let's look at number five. We're now halfway through our list here, evaluate inventory levels. What's that all about, Rich?

[00:13:05.08] - Rich Veltre

Well, inventory is something that, number one, if you're carrying inventory, then you have carrying costs. So you don't necessarily want to carry more inventory than you need. So one of the ways that you can check with the financials, as long as you get them, is check your inventory level and check on the number of days of inventory that you're actually carrying. Again, more than likely, what you want to see is the trend. So if you're not getting financials on time, you're not seeing your trends on time. And the trend in your inventory is big. We had one time, just to give a quick example, that financials looked fine. Everything looked great. But our DIO, which is the days of inventory that we had, was going up, and we didn't see it until we started looking at the monthly reports. So once we started to see it, guess what? It was the predictor to the Great Recession. Okay. So our inventory levels were going up because the bigger companies that we sold to were not buying what they said they were originally going to buy. So check your inventory. Make sure you are following along with what your plan was.

[00:14:13.03] - Rich Veltre

Make sure it's not rising on you. And if it is, figure out why. So it's important mid-year, I think, to be able to make sure that you keep going on the track that you want to follow.

[00:14:23.14] - Dan Paulson

And now that's finished goods. But also, I would say, look at raw materials inventory as well. Now, here's a couple of different To your point, Rich, if things are slowing down and now raw materials are starting to sit around longer and longer, that's not good. At the same point, and this is probably less of an issue now than it was, we'll say, during previous years, especially previous, recent years, where maybe supplies were difficult to get a hold of. You do also have to watch for that because maybe you have somebody who supplies you inventory that has their own problems, and they're not able to get you the raw materials you need to build your products and services. So you got to consider that as well. I think you got to look deeper and really understand what might be going on that's affecting you all the way around. And if you're not getting your raw materials in, you better be starting to look for a new supplier or at least a backup supplier, just in case something's going wrong there.

[00:15:18.21] - Rich Veltre

Very much.

[00:15:19.12] - Dan Paulson

All right, let's go to number four. Number four, address customer satisfaction. So a couple of slides ago, we were talking about the employees. We got to worry about their satisfaction, but we should also worry about what our customers are thinking, because if our customers' pocket serve are tightening up a little bit, then that's going to affect who they decide to do business with. If they're not happy with your services or if they're questioning your services, they might start looking elsewhere as well and taking their business with them. I can't count the number of times where companies didn't look at what was going on and address something that's right in front of them, which is their customer service.

[00:16:03.09] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I think, especially if you are, affected quickly by reviews, you want to know what they are. It's just one of those things that you know your business better than anybody else. And to have somebody not give you a good satisfaction rate or have a mark, you want to know about it before it becomes bigger or before it becomes a trend. So, yeah, I think it's enormous, enormously important, especially... My business has one Google review out there from 10 years ago. It's not something I think I need to check because It's the same one that I had a long time ago. But clearly, if you are selling product and people are leaving reviews, don't leave it blind. Definitely don't leave it blind. And if you haven't looked at it, if you're not looking at it every month, definitely take the mid-year and say it's time to look.

[00:17:04.14] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I would say it's even more of a concern for people like us, Rich, because I typically, like you, I'm not sending people out to do Google reviews on me. But a couple of years ago, I found one that was false. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get it off the record. And there's a number of reasons. Google makes it difficult to remove bad reviews sometimes when they're there because they just won't do But you really do need to look at maybe those surprise ones, where maybe somebody is spamming you, or trying to give you a negative review. And then I've heard of cases where they'll come back, and they want money to remove that review for you. So you really got to look at those things. Our online world has changed quite a bit, and we don't think about the fact that now people can instantly give feedback on our products and services online, and we might not be aware of it. So you definitely need to do a review of what's happening out there and address it. Let's look at number three. Number three. So now we're talking about payables and receivables. Tell me more.

[00:18:15.07] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I think it goes along with what I was saying before about the DSO. There's also a DPO, right? Days Sales Outstanding and Days Payables Outstanding. And you want to look at the two. If your sales are following a certain trend, your payables are a certain trend, you have balance. If you are the opposite, where every bill that comes in gets paid on the day that it comes in because that's just the way you are, good for you. But then DSO becomes a lot more prevalent because you've paid your bills already. So you're not playing the collections versus the payments. But if you don't know these numbers, you definitely want to jump in and take a look at your financials, maybe in a different way than you normally would. Financials are only going to give you so much, but you can analyze it using these other KPI tools, which is key performance indicators, because I'm horrible with acronyms.

[00:19:08.23] - Dan Paulson

Start an accountant in their acronyms.

[00:19:10.14] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I know, right? It's too many of them. All right. But if you're looking at a key performance indicator, a lot of times it gives you different insight than you can get just by looking at the financials that the accountant gives you. So definitely take a look at two of my favorites, which are DSO and DPO, which is day sales and days payable. Outstanding. So I tell people definitely at the mid-year, see where you're at, and then try to go back if you can and look at the last months and look for the trend, and make sure that the trend is even. If it's going up or going down, what's going on?

[00:19:43.18] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, definitely. You got to stay in front of those numbers because they switch, and we take it for granted, especially if there is money in the account. Rich, you talked about your fish in a barrel thing. If there's still fish left in the barrel, I must be doing good. And unfortunately, If we're not paying attention, sometimes the fish get out of the barrel, and all of a sudden we're left with an empty barrel. And at that point, it's very difficult to make financial decisions when there's no finances to do so. So be sure you're staying ahead of that. Let's go on to the next one here, and I think we can both speak to this, perform a competitive analysis. So maybe your products and services, when was the last time you really reviewed them and decided what you might need to change to improve? Technology is constantly changing. Customer needs are constantly changing. You've got to be on top of your game to make sure you're doing the right thing. And to me, taking a moment to actually perform an analysis and say, how are we doing compared to others in like businesses to us can be very helpful.

[00:20:49.06] - Dan Paulson

Again, the Internet is wonderful because it can provide you a bunch of resources to your competitors to really understand what's going on there and making sure you're making changes. Are there opportunities, in this case, not to keep up, but to leapfrog what your competitors are doing? And that can be very valuable because maybe you start realizing a trend that you can capitalize on before your competitors do. And that puts you in a tremendous benefit when it comes to actually looking at what customers are doing and what their needs are and being able to address those needs up front. Be proactive instead of reactive. Don't wait for the sales to change because somebody else figured the formula. And now you're sitting on your heels and not able to do much of anything. Now you're playing catch up. So to me, this is really becoming pretty important, Rich. You've really got to start looking at what's going on in the world around you and start making those changes when you need to.

[00:21:46.28] - Rich Veltre

Yeah. I'm a big proponent of proactive versus reactive. And I'm also a big proponent of just saying, well, not necessarily what are my competitor's weaknesses, but what are my strengths that can put me ahead of my competitors? But if you don't know who the competitors are, what they're doing, then you're guessing. And guessing is not really a good strategy.

[00:22:08.17] - Dan Paulson

It's like hope. Hope is my wife. She's not a strategy.

[00:22:12.14] - Rich Veltre

That's right. So, yeah, I think if you haven't done this yet, definitely do it. I mean, there's a lot of resources out there to be able to see who you're up against and who you're competing with. And just look at industry trends, too. I mean, if you're like me, I've been looking at accounting trends for a long time, and they're readily available. You can see who's doing what, and who's making moves in the market, and who's growing in a certain way. And For me, I just think use technology and be out ahead of people. So the only way you can do that is to look at how other people are handling it.

[00:22:53.25] - Dan Paulson

Exactly. And that leads us to our number one. So So create a financial and operational dashboard. And Rich, I took what we were talking about earlier, what you were talking about financially, and what I was also thinking operationally, and really put it together into one place where you can find the information you need, because that's the biggest challenge is all these different parts we're talking about. Even in the financials, there's many reports that you can get. I know operationally, there's often less tracking that's done. But what can you do to get all that information on, we'll say, a a single sheet of paper, or in a computer screen on a spreadsheet, or there's other tools out there as well. But how can you track that information? And are there things that you do from a financial side that you look to put information together so people can see all the key performance indicators as you brought up, make it easier for them to find what they need?

[00:23:56.03] - Rich Veltre

Yeah. I mean, everybody's different what they're looking for. But The more that you take a look, depending on the software that they're on. So if your software you're running is Quickbooks, it has now dashboards. You log in and you've got screens. Check them out. Do they actually help or do they not help? Why? Because Quickbooks has now become movable. You can actually change that around to give you the key pieces of information at the top. There's other softwares that do the same thing. Sage Intac does the same thing. If all your information winds up coming in, the thing I like about Sage Intac over QuickBooks is it'll actually hold some of your operational data, too. So if you want to do units or days, or if you're in a senior living facility, you can do beds, you can do locations, all these things that you can do that allows you to look at data by a certain dimension, by a certain way that you want to look at it. So on top of that, it might just be where you take some of the data and you track it in Excel. I'm not a big fan of Excel because it requires a lot of fingers.

[00:25:04.26] - Rich Veltre

A lot of people are touching things. But it can be done. And you should do it because those individual pieces are the pieces that will give you insights into your business that you didn't have before. Segment it out the way you want to look at it. Segment it out a way that's important to you. Because, again, you're the only one who knows your business. So you're the only one who's going to know, hey, that doesn't sound right. Even your accountant could sound really, really intelligent until you say that sentence, hey, that doesn't sound right. All of a sudden, he'll start sweating because he'll say, what did I miss? What did I miss? So even if it's Excel, Put something in there that allows you to see the business the way you need to see it.

[00:25:50.17] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, it's very important and same thing operationally. I think it's just as critical when you're looking at the performance indicators on the operation side, overall efficiency, productivity, days inventory on hand is an overlapping thing, in my opinion, if you have that situation where you've got to track what's coming in, what's going out, turnover, measuring to your strategic goals. And there's different ways to do this. And Rich, as you pointed out, it's different for different companies. This is what makes it a little bit tricky because everyone wants to create that one widget that encompasses all things. I don't think I've seen it done too often. So it's good sometimes to have somebody help you figure out what are those metrics you really want to measure, you need to measure. And even if it's putting it, as you pointed out, in an Excel spreadsheet, so at least it's all in one spot that you can go and look at it. Or if it's in a word document that, again, you can do a monthly review on, because it really shouldn't just be a semi-annual or annual review. You should be looking at this information every 30 days and deciding, are you trending the right direction?

[00:27:04.06] - Dan Paulson

Are you doing what you want to do? And if not, what do you need to change? Because that dashboard or that worksheet or whatever it's going to be becomes your tool to measure against Yeah, totally agree with that, because as we keep saying on the podcast, the world is moving so much faster than when we started.

[00:27:28.06] - Rich Veltre

So even now, Now, thinking about how fast things are moving, six months is an eternity for business data. So if you're not looking at it and it's six months have gone by, you might be surprised by what you find. So I think month to month is a lot more important now than it ever was.

[00:27:47.25] - Dan Paulson

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And that leads to our point as we're wrapping up here. So we've given you our 10 areas that you should be looking at. But you might be asking yourself or you might be thinking to yourself, well, great, Dan and Rich. A, I don't have time to do this. B, I don't know where to look. And C, I'm not really sure what I should be checking or measuring within the data that you gave me. It's real easy to just push this off and not worry about. But like we said, times are changing, and sometimes, again, it's to your benefit, and other times it's stuff that's going to slow you down. So here's a good opportunity, I think, for us to jump in and say, we can help you with that. So seamless self-promotion here. We don't do that a lot on this podcast, but I think we have an opportunity where maybe during this time, we can help some companies out there figure out what their next course of action is. Rich, we've worked together on several situations, and one recently, we were helping a company with a succession planning situation, and they didn't know where they stood on it.

[00:28:54.08] - Dan Paulson

And when we were talking with Dela, one of the co-owners of the company, she was surprised by some the issues that she found out because they thought everything was going pretty good, but they weren't sure how to take the next steps into figuring out who's going to buy from who and when. But there was some other stuff going on.

[00:29:15.14] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I think it was a little surprising, I think, to them that they wound up looking at things a lot differently than they had been looking at it before. I think a lot of it had been gut check. Financials were definitely getting there a little bit late for them to really realize the effect it was having. And I think that caused a little bit of a shock, a little bit of stress. The update, I think, would be that, yes, we were able to get in and help change the things around so that they can see things more clearly, more timely.

[00:29:58.17] - Dan Paulson

Yes.

[00:29:59.12] - Rich Veltre

Clearly timely were the two things. And then I think you can definitely ride a ship. Not that the ship was definitely headed in the wrong direction, but long term plan wasn't going to go where they wanted it to go. So it was clearly more of a reason of, Hey, steer a little bit left because that way we can get to where we want to get to. But I think they're very appreciative of the fact that they had us on board to show that because otherwise they would have never, I don't think they would have ever seen it.

[00:30:27.28] - Dan Paulson

Exactly. And then the other thing they took for granted, which I think most companies do and most business owners do, is how much the owners were actually doing or involved in what was happening in the business. So in a succession situation, the last thing you want is very active owner involvement, because when that owner steps away, that adds to cost. We've talked about this in previous episodes. But at the very least, you really need to be looking at how much volume of operational issues in production are you addressing directly versus what your employees are doing. And we were able to show them pretty quickly that if you left on vacation and you were not able to come back for a while, things probably wouldn't be running the same by the time you got back. You wouldn't be getting the same results that you expected. And that's something that I know is a lump in somebody's throat or an uneasy feeling in their stomach when you start talking about that. And what we can do for an evaluation can really help address those issues as well.

[00:31:31.05] - Rich Veltre

Yeah. The financial is big, but operational is probably... I still think operational here is bigger.

[00:31:43.25] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, so There's a lot to address, and it's true in most companies. So if you need help with that, give us a call or an email. Rich, how do they get a hold of you?

[00:31:55.06] - Rich Veltre

Best way to reach me is by email. Send me an email at rveltre@veltregroup.com.

[00:32:00.23] - Dan Paulson

Definitely. And you can get a hold of me at danpaulsonletsgo.com. There's a form on there you can fill out, and we would love to help you with this. We would love to help you address whatever your next six months is going to look like, and maybe provide some clarity with that. But in the meantime, there's some fireworks to be dealing with. There's hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet, as I brought up earlier. So we got to really make sure that we are having a good holiday weekend. Try not to stress out too much, and get out and have some fun with the family. And then when that is all done, give us a call. See if we can help you address some of the other issues that are going on in your business. Rich, I hope you're going to have a good holiday weekend. Do some fun stuff. Thank you.

[00:32:42.12] - Rich Veltre

Get out and enjoy the weather.

[00:32:45.17] - Dan Paulson

So we will talk to you next week.

[00:32:49.16] - Rich Veltre

Sounds good.

[00:32:52.08] - Dan Paulson

Take care.