On this episode, we are joined by Adrian Goodman, Founder and Director of PPX Consulting Ltd and author of "Achieving Profitable Growth".
This is part two of our 'Mastering Your Control Cycle' series where Adrian talks us through the six-step journey of the control cycle. In part two, Adrian shares his advice on step 2, pre-evaluation (budget) and step 3, post-evaluation (variance analysis).
If you are interested in part one of this series, head over to our YouTube Channel: The ONE Group Ltd (Mastering Your Control Cycle: The Control Cycle and Performance Evaluation)
If you would like to be our next guest speaker, host or ask us a question, please email us at hello@theonegroup.co.uk
Hosted by Leanne Davidson-Town and Producer Bex.
On this episode, we are joined by Adrian Goodman, Founder and Director of PPX Consulting Ltd and author of "Achieving Profitable Growth".
This is part two of our 'Mastering Your Control Cycle' series where Adrian talks us through the six-step journey of the control cycle. In part two, Adrian shares his advice on step 2, pre-evaluation (budget) and step 3, post-evaluation (variance analysis).
If you are interested in part one of this series, head over to our YouTube Channel: The ONE Group Ltd (Mastering Your Control Cycle: The Control Cycle and Performance Evaluation)
If you would like to be our next guest speaker, host or ask us a question, please email us at hello@theonegroup.co.uk
Hosted by Leanne Davidson-Town and Producer Bex.
You are now tuned into this week's episode on podcast. It is our mission to bring you guest speakers sharing their latest and greatest tips, skills, stories and no house within their market. Let's get going. Hi everyone and welcome to today's podcast. Today we're joined by Adrian Goodman. How are you? I am. No, but thanks. Very good. Thank you. So for those of you who don't know who Adrian is, he's a seasoned financial expert in the financial management and business growth strategy arena. And we were actually joined by Adrian LinkedIn live not too long ago where he was talking about his achieving profitable growth six stage journey and he went for the first stage of the control cycle. And we're here today in this first part of the two stage podcast series to talk about stage two and stage three of that journey and is the director of Pex Consulting Ltd and he's the portfolio CFO of the CFO Center and he's an author of the book Achieving Profitable Growth. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. If I'm done with that correctly. Over to you. Yeah, that's bang on. Thanks, Liane. Great intro. Thank you. So, yeah, just just to do a quick recap, the control cycle, which is which, as you say, was the late in life. We did. And I think was it December or something that that's the first part of my book is called actually profitable growth. And that's what we tried to bring into our clients businesses. It's profitable because a lot of businesses go out every day, do their thing, and then at the end of the month, they're not really sure whether to make profit or not until they get their annual accounts from their accounts. And so then we try to promote sort of inner internal rapport in that helps them to measure that profit throughout the year, make better decisions, and then hopefully end up the bare profit at the end of the year. So the control cycle is the mechanism in the framework that we work to, which is what we covered in the links in life. And that's based on three, three elements of control, which promotes financial control, which is performance evaluation, economic viability and compliance. So, so really part two and three are focused on that first element of control, which is performance evaluation. And also just to know if they want to recap on the first part, head over to our YouTube channel and it's called Master in the Control Cycle and you can catch up with that that. Brilliant. Actually, looks like a client asked me about the control cycle and I just said they get only ten. So this explains everything. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So. So, yes, it parts two and three, as you said, part two is budgeting, which is what we call pre evaluation. And part three is variance analysis, which is the post correlation. So the evaluation we're talking about is the performance evaluation of the business, which is the first part of the control cycle. So, so budgeting is the, the reason we call it pre evaluation is it's got to be done before you evaluate performance of the business because the the whole point of performance evaluation is to see how the business she's doing and it differs from your year end accounts because that's how you date and this with what we're talking about, how are you doing during the year? So what it consists of is the performance valuation consists of monthly management accounts essentially, but they do need to be done in a certain way and they do not need to have certain things in them in order to be considered actual performance evaluation rather than just, you know, a piano or a sales report or, you know, and actually, we meet a lot. Clients say they've got money counts. And once we actually look at what they use and as much as accounts, they're not really fit for purpose. And it's one of the first things we do actually when we start working with any client is to help them get that sorted. But one of the things that needs to be in that set of management accounts for for it to be, you know, accurately evaluating performance is a budget. So that's why that's part two of of this of this journey is, you know, you got to have that budget in place or you've got no roadmap, you've got no way of gauging how your performance is as being you know, if you if you did £250 of sales, that's great. But if your budget was to do 280,000 and it's not so great. So that's why a budget is so important. Yeah. So why do you think a business needs a budget then and like, you know, how important is having that budget for the business from a financial point of view? Well, in my opinion, it's vital. It's not it's not a nice to have or a luxury. It's something you've got to have from day one, you know, even. And the problem is when when we start up clients, for example, and they don't really see why they need a need a budget. And it's a difficult sell because arguably in the first year the budget is going to be a load of rubbish anyway because you've got no historical data you've got compared to. So what you're really doing in that first year is budgeting so that you can learn the lessons for next year's budget. But it's still important step to complete because unless you know what you expected to do, then you've got no way of gauging how badly or how well you did based on your own expectations. Yeah, I think that's very similar to a marketing budget as well. They ask you at the beginning of the year how much budget you want for the year and obviously you don't know what you want to do that year. In January, things changed. So yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's a great it's great analogy because, you know, obviously the marketing budget is part of your overall overarching budget. You know, the budget should mirror your management accounts categories and most businesses are going to need marketing in there. So, you know, and as you say, you know, when you're sitting down, working out, what am I going to do for the for the rest of the year or even especially if it's your first year, it's really little better than seeing you in the air. You know, it's just a lot of time. It's a complete yes. Unless you've already got stuff baked in, like you've got a contract with the customer or or you're, you know, you're obliged to pay certain things. Like if you take on rent contracts for three years, then you know what your head is going to be for next three years. But anything apart from that sort of thing is going to be quite hard to gauge or underestimate, you know, so so how would a but how would a company go around creating a budget then? Well, this is obviously quite an important topic because we work with a lot clients that once we've convinced them the always need to convince them, sometimes they totally get it. But once we've convinced them they need a budget, sometimes they'll come back to me with just, you know. So if I say to them, What do you think you do first year in sales, I'll go for Grant, you know, and it's just a real guess. It's like know science found it so but the problem is and this is when we get into the post of valuation stuff in the wild but unless you do that properly and build it properly, you can't evaluate it like you're wrong. You can't do the variance analysis. So, so the best way to build a budget is based on the volume that you're going to sell multiplied by the price you're going to sell out. So rather than just saying we're going to do 50 grand in sales, it's better to go to to calculate or work out our estimate. This is how many of these products we're going to sell, and this is the price we're going to sell it. Because if you do your budget based on that, then if you don't do that, you'll be able to see why you didn't do it, because he didn't do as many as you thought you would or you didn't sell it for the same price you thought it would. And the same applies to your cost of sales. You know, if you know, if you estimate that you're going to sell X amount and you should be able to predict your cost of sales, but unless you have that sort of fundamental knowledge of how many you're going to do and what price you can do, then your budget is not really going to be as detailed or as it's not going to be the right sort of budget. You can then analyze like Iran and see where things went wrong. So as imports get. That mechanism in place where you've got a proper driver for whichever. I mean, some businesses can't just buy something for these prices, sell it for that price because it might be a service business. But there's still a way you can work out what your price your cost price will be and what your selling price will be. And then multiply that by the volume of products or services that you expect to sell in that year. So that's the best way to construct a budget for future analysis, really. So what kind of things then should the budget cover? We talked about marketing, obviously. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. So well, really, it should cover all that, all the revenues and costs that your business is expected to generate or incur in the 12 month period. I mean, it should only really cover a 12 month period because you don't want to go any further out than that. You can have a three year or a five year plan. But obviously, the further out you go, the less the less likely is you're going to predict it accurately. I mean, even ten, 12 months is a bit of a stretch for a lot of businesses. Once you've been in business for 25 years, you've probably got frigates, historical data, so predicts a 12 month period. But if you go much beyond that, you're going to get into the realms of sort of guesswork. And that's not really what about. But in terms of the categories, it should be literally. I mean, you don't get too detailed. You shouldn't have every single cost in your business in there because you can group some of them together. But ultimately, you know, when we talk about producing management accounts, the categories in your management accounts should match the categories in your budget because ultimately that's the whole point of it is to compare one against the other. And if you don't have the same categories in the same sort of derivatives from it, then you're not gonna be able to do that, which is really the whole point of doing in the first place. So you can compare later on. Right. Yeah. Okay. And so does the budget feed into the cash flow forecast then. Yeah. I mean it kind of has to because if your you know, your budget is basically how much profit you expect to generate in the business. And then and then your cash flow forecast obviously is a result of that profit and everything. You know, profit doesn't always mean cash because it might be, you know, generated in different ways, but it's got to be linked, really, you know. Otherwise, it's you know, I've seen budgets, the cash flow forecasts in the past where, you know, the budget says they're going to do this like 50 grand in profit. But the cash flow forecast says they're going to generate about 2 million in cash. And it just, you know, the two things that correlate if you have one. But but the difference is, I suppose, is that a cash flow forecast should be updated throughout the year, whereas the the budget shouldn't be. You can still do a profit forecast, but the budget that you set up at the start of the year really shouldn't change unless there's some kind of a significant event or a loss of massive customer and stuff like that. So you shouldn't amend the budget throughout the year? No, no. I mean, again, there are exceptions to that, you know, but really, they should be something that, you know, might happen. Like, for example, if you're going into your new year and you've got contract negotiation with one of your massive customers and you know that they're not happy, then you should probably prepare three budgets, one with that customer in there, and then one without just so you can drop onto the second one if that does happen. But that aside, it's not best practice really to change your budget once the year is signed, you still use even if you go way off budget, then you manage it with forecasts. You know, you would say like six months in right where we're tracking it on the 85% of budget, 110% of budget. But the budget still has to be your sort of benchmark for the year. Right. So that's. So what? So why is that then, that you wouldn't go in, amend the budget just because. So you would have that benchmark. Yeah, because it's basically is your best estimate at the start of the year of what you thought you were going to do. And if you if you deviate, if you change it, then, you know, then you're no longer sticking to what you well, you no longer got visibility of what you expected to do. So it's hard then to gauge because then what would then what you try and do next year then is why okay, we budget to do this last year and we missed it by 25%. So this year we need to bear that in mind when we put in this year's budget and we may need to put in a more conservative budget that's 25% lower than last year. Or maybe not. If you predicted some organic growth, you might go with 17% of last year or something like that. But but, yes, just to keep keep sort of like a bit of a North Star in terms of where that the basis is go in and why you thought it would go. Because obviously, you know, humans are going to make estimates that are not always going to be correct. So you need to know how much you are out by in order to, you know, put a budget into next year. Yeah. Whereas if you change it, if you get Alpha for the year and you change it then then I suppose arguably as long as you keep the original budget somewhat so you refer back to it, then I suppose it's not the end of the world, but in my experience it's just not good practice because you've got to keep that visibility off. This is what we said you would do. This is what we've actually done. Rather than a lot change in what you thought you would do to align with what you're actually doing, which I think is, yeah, slippery slope then yeah, I can kind of see what you're saying. So from my point of view, within the world of marketing. It's like a lot. And then places have their prices have gone up this year. So everything that I kind of budgeted for has increased, which means that my events budget is now less than what it was before because I'm getting less for my money. And next year I will ask for more money within that events budget because the prices of events are going up. Yeah, yeah. That's a great it's a great way of looking at it because kind of highlights what I'm saying. If you said this is what I thought we would spend it on. And again, if you track back to what I said at the start, where the reason you had that budget is because you estimate presumably you're going to do this event, this event and this event throughout the year. And those events cost this amount of money. But then if you get halfway through the year or towards the end of the year even, and you're actually way off because not because you've done more events, but because the prices of those events have gone up, the cost of those events has gone up. Then you learn that lesson for next year because it's pretty unlikely then that the price down which in case so so you would but but if you change your budget to align with what you've actually done then the year and and you'd still be probably pitching it around right around the world level but you wouldn't know why you're looking at a high price because. Yeah. You know. Yeah. So, yes. Good. That's a good point. Mm hmm. So is there a difference between budget forecasts and a target within. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And this is actually something, again, where we have to sort of, you know, explain this because, you know, in normal terms, if you think of a household budget, it's normally restrictive. It's normally white. Right. Like a Christmas budget, for example, is that's the maximum we're going to spend on Christmas or a holiday budget. That's the maximum we can spend on that holiday. Whereas a a commercial budget is is not like that. It's more about what what should we spend in order to generate more revenue. You know, you never going to get that in household budget because the more you spend, the less you call. Whereas in the commercial budget, the theory should be anyway. The more we spend, the more money we generate, and therefore, the more profit will make. So. So budget should be it shouldn't be restrictive. It should be the best estimate of what you think you will do in that year. Not it should be optimistic and it should be pessimistic. It should just be realistic, you know, should be your best estimate. A forecast is is really just extrapolation of a trend. So if you take three months and you're, you know, at 90% of budget, then you would extrapolate that across the year and you'll end up a 90% budget. But then that might change after six months. When you've got more data in there, you can do a forecast and it's, you know, and then that might say we're going to be at 95% or might be worse. You know, but but the point of the forecast is just taking data and extrapolating over a longer period. There's not really any sensitivity in there or any sort of intelligence supply to it. It's just literally this is how it's tracking. Whereas a budget, you don't just take how it's tracking, you would say, right, but we know we've got this big thing at the end of the year that's going to cost us a lot of money. Well, that's going to generate a lot of money. A forecast would ignore that because it's not it's at the end of the year. So as you're tracking the forecast, it wouldn't pick that up, whereas a budget, you know, it's there. So you're consciously at the end and then the target is normally, you know, better or worse than budget. So a salesperson, for example, that that commission might be based on them doing 120% of budget. So that's a target then it's higher than or if you're in the accounts team, it might be that you've got to bring in cost savings and get 85% of budget on sound costs. You know, so so the target is something you aim for, whereas the, the budget is something that is just a realistic expectation, which again is something we have to kind of, you know, when we get get clients that are really ambitious, you know, they'll say, yeah, yeah, we did, you know, to to grab last year. So we're going to double that this year and kind enough to rein them in a little bit and say, well, it's unlikely that you're going to double your turnover this year unless they've got you know, they might say, well, we've just signed this massive client and it's going to at least double it, then that's fair enough. But if it's just an ambition thing, then really that's a target. It's not a budget, you know, so that's something issue. So I've got a question then. So a budget is something that set and shouldn't change for the year. The focus on then achieving is something that fluctuates depending on what about the target then? So is the target something that set at the beginning of the year at the end of the year and that shouldn't change? Well, the target is a bit more of a a so a judgment call. So in my experience and you know, the classic example on the target is going to be a sales target because that's what most it's shoot for and that will remunerate their salespeople based on that target. So so it can say, for example, if the sales team is so social or the mark that it's just demoralizing, then it's maybe worth changing the target during the year. But but again, as with the budget, normally in my experience, you wouldn't do that because you know, it's there to incentivize people who is there to, to, to shoot for. And if you fall short of it, the idea. If you shake 430% of budget, but you only get 120%, then you've still got 20% more than budget for science. So it's still worth having that's out there. Arguably, if you reduce the target, then, you know, you kind of letting people off the hook and they might sort of, you know, not hit target or not get close to it. I have also seen the other way where they smashed the target and halfway through the year they already they've already hit it. So they'll put in a revised target. But normally that will have to have some kind of incentive target tied to it because otherwise people get them. So yeah, the fans have a good enough. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, Target is a bit of a, you know, judgment call, basically spy business. You know, it can be changed if things go really well, really badly. But generally speaking, again, it's similar to budget where it's like, okay, this was the target last year and we smashed it, so let's put a bet on it for this year. Okay. So I think they lot more questions on the budgeting side of things, unless there's anything else you'd like to discuss for the pre evaluation. No, really, just to reiterate the importance of it, because unless you do that groundwork before the year starts and really should be done, you know, in a decent sized base, she got to be at least looking at it by three months before the end of the current financial year in order to get it in place in time. So, so really the message on that is just this is vital just waiting poll and there's not really any point there in management accounts if you're not doing a budget because there's no blueprint or roadmap to where you're going. And realistically, I think, you know, that's as much as where we need to cover it at this stage. So yeah. Okay. So we move on to the third stage then, which is the variance analysis. Yeah. So this is kind of where it all comes together. You know, you put that time in setting up your budget and then you execute your monthly management accounts every month. And then the variance analysis really is where this kind of the payoff, this is where you get to learn about your business and you get information that helps you to make decisions. So what it comes down to is, you know, this is what we thought we would do. This is what we actually did. And then analyzing what the difference is and how it or why it occurred. And again, this is where it kind of comes back to. You've got to set your budget up in the right way. Otherwise we literally copy the various analysis. So, I mean, as an example, you know, like I said earlier, even if you say we're going to sell X number of these units for this price, then that's that for just sales budget. But then after you've completed your first months, you should be in budget where you for short. But it's very rare that people do exactly what they budgeted today. So in most cases, we've done better or worse than you thought you would. And the only reason you'll do better or worse is, is there's only two reasons. Either you didn't sell as many as you thought or you sold them for a different price or some very combination of the two. So this is where you would analyze that out. And there is a there is a formula for that, like a mathematical formula that I'm not going to go to that level of detail today. But essentially it comes down to how many did we sell? We sold less than we thought we would. And then you calculate what element of that. So if your variance, for example, is £10,000, so you missed your budget by £10,000, that has to be made up of what they call material price sorry, a sales price variance and a sales volume variance because at the end you see things that can affect that. So basically you calculate the sales volume variance, calculate the sales price variance, and if you add the two together, it has to come to £10,000 because that's your total variance. But what happens sometimes is if you've you might have done really well on the price, but you've sold already. So they've for all variances, -£10,000, you might have made 20 grand on the, on the price variance, but then you've thrown it all away on the on volume sales. So, so it's, it's again, you know, it's really where it all comes together when you calculate what, where things went wrong because there's so many businesses that either do better or worse than they budgeted for, but they don't do this analysis. And a lot of times, although they'll make a gut feel sort of decision on that, you know, like I was an F the company during the 2012 Olympics, for example, and it was a company that thought the Olympics was going to be this massive cash cow and they were going to sell a load of stock. So they bought loads of stock in. And then as it turned out, it wasn't as it wasn't as good as the Olympics didn't turn out as well as they thought it would in terms of sales. And, you know, we had a board meeting after it and the money was basically sent out. Well, you know, it was all down to the Olympics, but actually we'd done that variance analysis and it was with the Olympics. It was the it was to say that the prices were selling out that led to the reduction. And this is I mean, people sometimes just estimate or gasly's gut feel is probably this and then they'll be wrong. But they're not learning the lessons that will help them to make choices for the future then, because they're just crying out for something that isn't. And sometimes they're right. And I've been in the business a long time and they know what they're doing. Then maybe their gut feel is right. But it's always. Worth checking out or making sure that's what the reason was, because it could be something else. And then you get you know, you get caught out in the next month when, you know, you didn't see the results the previous month. So this variance analysis then, is this something that you should do in-house within the department or is this something that should be said externally to have fresh eyes looking at everything? Well, I mean, it's there's an argument that you can get both on that because the more easily get on it, the better, really. But obviously, a lot of businesses, you know, well, business is conscious of cost and sending out for external analysis is always going to have costs attached to it. So really it should be whoever does your management accounts should be doing this. So whether it's somebody inter, if you've got an internal accounts team that this management accounts, then they should be they could be doing this in-house. If you if you got an external company or your accountant does your accounts and they should be doing it. But I guess, you know, the best answer to that question is that if one entity like Avio accounts and or your in-house team is there in the accounts, then someone else doing the various analysis would be good because they might spot something that the other team missed. But, you know, that is let's say that is that there's a cost implication, though. So it's really best best case really for small businesses to just whoever's doing the council tax variance analysis on the end of it. And sometimes it's better to do that quarterly rather than monthly as well, because, you know, certain trends can appear over three months if you if you do it over one month. I mean, I would argue that you're always going to get good information if you do it monthly. But if you are doing this externally, then it's going to be a monthly cost. Whereas if you do it quarterly, it's not really any more work to do it quarterly. So might be a better show into from a cost point of view to just do it four times a year instead of 12 times a year. Yeah, I mean, it's getting done. That's the main thing. Yeah. So with this analysis section, then you're purely just analyzing what's happened and then maybe just changing the forecast. You're not really changing anything else or using that to to change the price or the volume of what's going on within the sales team. Well, yeah, ideally. I mean, it's it kind of depends on what you find when you're doing it, but you could change. I mean, it's about changing it, anything that needs to be changed. And it's but sometimes you can't change. It could just be like, for example, if you're in a transport business and you budget a certain amount of fuel, but then if fuel prices go up, it's just not develop. So but it's but at least you're aware of it now, you know, and you can and as you said, you wouldn't change your budget, but you'd revise your forecast and say, okay, right. Because of this fuel issue, we're going to have to, you know, start tighten our belts or get more money or maybe saving costs or else or generate more sales to accommodate the the increase in fuel. I mean, like when there was an issue recently with hotels in Yemen and there was issues with shipping, you know, that was quite a few companies, some clients that ship out stuff being delivered that was going to come in not late then. And they were going to miss a load of orders. So, so but the reason they established. So then they had to pay basically for a different type of delivery like some did airfreight instead of instead of sea freight to get it over a bit quicker. But then of course, they had to factor that cost in for a certain amount of time. And but that wasn't the only way it came about the only way to catch up because of the various analysis we did on them on for accounts, because the the cost aid budget for freight was considerably more sorry, the actual cost was considerably more than what the budget and it was only when we looked into that, that, that's, that's how it came to light. So yeah. So sometimes, but yeah, yeah, sometimes there is something you can do about it. You can maybe look for a cheaper supplier if, let's say, fuel price has gone up or, or if you're not selling, if the price you thought you would maybe put your prices up, but then that might have an impact on how many yourself. So but it's all about knowing what the various analysis is telling you so that you can make those decisions and doing it, you know, doing it in a timely manner as well, you know, because if you don't do it this month, despite me saying earlier, that sometimes quarterly is is the best way to do it, that's really only from a cost point of view. If you're doing it monthly, then you've got a good aren't you got good eyes on next month's and what you might need to do to, to fix whatever the problem is. Yeah. Because I guess if you do it quarterly and you find out after Q1 you have an issue that you can face and then you wait until after Q2 to figure out if in Q2 that issue was fixed, then if it's not fixed, then it's just delaying, isn't it? Really? Yes. So if you've got an issue in January, for example, and you don't do your various unless and until the end of March, there's two months there that you can fix the problem. If it's something simple that you could have easily fixed. Yeah, you could have had two months of a bad performance if you if you when you first on that audit. So yeah, certainly that say from a cost saving point of view quarterly that for maybe a long term point of view and to have your eyes actually on what's going on. And then monthly the better. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, is there anything else that you'd like to talk about with phase three of your six stage journey? Just really that it kind of like if you split the six stages in half, this would be kind of the end of the first half because it's really about you know, when we talk about control cycle and you've got these three elements trial, which is performance evaluation, economic viability and compliance. This is where we look at the economic viability because until you've done the various analyzes, you don't know if you don't actually know if this is viable. So the first part of performance evaluation is what you do in management accounts. Once you've completed your various houses, then you know if is viable and in most cases hopefully it will be viable. But that's when you would then lead into the compliance stage, which is the next part of the of the achieving profitable growth journey, if you like. So, so no, that that's kind of it now. I mean, obviously we're not doing massively detailed dives into this stuff because we pay for 4 hours. But. But yeah, in terms of, you know, the sort of overview, that's kind of as much as we need to do to value. Yeah. Okay. But then why thank you so much. And for all your tips and advice to end every podcast episode, we do the one word, which is basically just when we all pick a word together and share them with our listeners. So that was something to think about for the rest of the day. Do you have a word? Yeah, well, I guess my word in the context of what we would talk about would be control, because I think that's the best way to get cheap to achieve profitable growth is to have that control. So you. Okay. And is back here with us. My word is going to be do your budget. Because that's I don't know which. I'll check that out. Okay. My word is going to be analysis, because just when you were talking about it, I did think that she is it sounds like a really good thing to analyze after you've spent and the budget and everything to actually see, you know, whether you're doing what you should be. And it is amazing how many people don't do that step. They do with the budget and they do the management counts and then they just drop it. And that's really where it all comes together. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Thank you so much, Adriana. It's been a pleasure having you here. And we are going to invite you back for the second part of this podcast series to talk about the stages four, five and six. Do you want to give us an insight on what they stages out? Yes, that's that's really where once you've established the business, you've got the performance evaluation and you've established the business is viable. It's about future proofing it and protecting it and making sure that profits sustainable because obviously only, you know, you can generate or create a really good business that's got really good products. But then something happens like, you know, a couple of years ago we all know what happened and we had a, a new product come out that makes yours obsolete for that. So it's really about how to guard against that, mitigate that risk and make sure that you carry that profitability and viability forwards with you. So that's what we do on the next one. You can and everyone watch out for that episode coming soon. Well, thank you so much again, again for coming on today. And for all our listeners out there or viewers, make sure that you subscribe so you never miss an episode. Thank you very much, everyone. Thanks. Bye. That's a wrap for this week's episode. If you want to be our next guest speaker on telecast, then get in touch with the one group. And don't forget to subscribe. We would hate for you to miss the next one.