9UNP0204SD_Robert_Behnke_WordPress

- This lecture is offered through the University of Wisconsin School of Human Ecology. I'm Jeanan Yasiri, the instructor for this class. As we begin today, I'd like to extend our thanks to our partners for supporting this course, the UW Office of Corporate Relations, the UW College of Engineering for their technical support, and we received financial support from the Marion Ewing Kaufman Foundation which is committed to advancing entrepreneurialism in education. Additionally, we thank our media partners, Wisconsin Public Television and their University Place crew for taping today's lecture. Today, I am very pleased to introduce our very special guest. He is Robert Behnke, co-founder and vice president of merchandising with Fair Indigo. Prior to co-founding Fair Indigo, Robert spent 11 years at Lands’ End, where he held positions in international merchandising, including two years as an ex-pat in Japan. He was responsible for Internet merchandising, and product development there as well. He also served as store manager for three Lands’ End retail stores in the Chicago area. 

And prior to joining Lands’ End, Robert worked in store merchandising at Macy's, where he served on the team that opened the first Midwestern Macy's store in Minneapolis. Robert graduated from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. I've asked him to talk with us today about his journey as an entrepreneur and specifically as it applies to Fair Indigo. So please join me in welcoming Robert Behnke. 
(applause)
 
- Thank you, Jeanan. Is this on? You can hear me okay? I really want to thank everyone for allowing me to be here today. 

You know, I speak to different groups all over the place, all different students, and fair trade groups, and professional groups. I always say that my favorite group to speak to is really students, because our business is based on the principles of fair trade. And usually in an audience that's not students, I have to spend a good chunk of the time, maybe a third of time, letting people know what does fair trade mean, what does fair trade really stand for. Whereas, in a student audience, I feel like you guys are really ahead of the game. That always makes me feel really good, because I feel like the future is looking bright for this kind of market. And I'm very excited to be here and talk to you about what I've learned over the last three years, when we started this business. Some advice I can give to any of you who are thinking about starting a company. Also I was telling Jeanan earlier that it was really great for me to be asked to do this presentation, because over the last three years in a startup, literally you're sort of devoting your whole life and all of your energy to the company, and to the success of the company, taking very little time to sort of sit back and think about where you've been, and what you've learned. And so this was a really good break for me, to kind of look back and say wow, this is what we did in three years. And here's what I'd do differently and here's how I would tell people to grow their business. 

First of all, before I start, just a show of hands. How many people, before you saw the syllabus for the class had heard of the company Fair Indigo? Okay, so that's good. So our marketing person is doing a little bit better this year than he was last year. We are a local company. We do business in all 50 states through our Web site, and our catalog mailing, but we're based here in Madison. We have one store at Hilldale. And I'm going to tell you today, just give you a kind of a history, just tell the story of how we started, of how our concept of fair trade apparel started. The process that we went through to get where we are today with our launch, and with our continuing operations, where we want to go in the future. But then most importantly, kind of impart on you guys the big things that we've learned over the past three years, and what we would do differently. 

We made a lot of mistakes. And it's really important for everyone to understand what those mistakes are, because that's how you can make the next time better. I'm going to get through all of that, and generally I think it's best if we hold onto the questions until the end. Just write them down but if I say something that looks really, really strange, or just doesn't make any sense whatsoever, just throw your hand up and I can repeat it or clarify. The way that the idea for Fair Indigo started actually was, it's something you sort of see this on TV or in the movies, but you don't ever think it really happens, but it really did happen this way for me. I'd been traveling back and forth to Japan many times a year, and had really bad sleep habits and had jet lag. I was up at 3:00 doing laundry, and sleeping at 2:00 in the afternoon, when I should be eating lunch and things like this. So I was on this kind of crazy schedule. And I'd been reading about Fair Trade Coffee back here in Madison. I saw some shops that opened up on State Street. 

And there was a few different articles about this. I literally was in Japan. I sat up at 3:00 in the morning out of bed and said wow, why is no one doing fair trade clothing. Where is this in the world, because it's something I see in the news, in coffee and in crafts? Why is no one doing clothing? I got up at 3:00 a.m. I went to Google, and I typed in "fair trade clothing." And I wasn't visionary enough to print the screen at that moment, because I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. But I did save the Post-it note that started this journey of what this company became. And these were the top search results that came back. 

This was 2005, when I typed in fair trade clothing. Rainbow, hippy, patchwork, knee socks, patchwork, Nepalese Kurta, recycled silk spring. I'm not sure if that's clothing, or exactly what that is. And a hemp dress. So this was the world of fair trade clothing in 2005. And I, being in the apparel business for ten years at that point, and reading what's happening in coffee and other sectors of fair trade, thought, wow, there might be something here. Either there's a really good reason no one's doing this, and I'm just stupid and I can't figure out why. Or maybe, just maybe I'm one of the first people to really think about how this can work. So the concept really became how do we-- the idea is to capture the growing socially conscious consumer movement. There was a lot of things going on in the early 2000s in socially responsible shopping. 

There's organic foods and fair trade coffee, hybrid automobiles. How do we capture the niche in clothing? No one's doing clothing, no one's really doing wearable clothing. There's some clothing out there, but most people can't wear recycled silk springs to work every day. So there must be something better that we can do. Then sort of the pie in the sky of that was, you know, we could really change the way things are done in the apparel industry. I'd been the industry for many, many years and saw the good side, the bad side, the ugly side, the good places, the sweatshops, all those things. I thought that we could do something really good for this business, if we could get big enough. So I sort of bounced this idea around with a bunch of friends, and some people thought it was a really great idea, some people thought it was a really, really stupid idea, and no one would ever understand what it was. Most people were somewhere in between. 

You know, I didn't have a pile of money sitting around that I could start my business with. And so I took my idea of fair trade clothing, wearable fair trade clothing to two colleagues that I worked with at Lands’ End, who had a lot more piles of money than I did, and didn't have any ideas, but lots of money. They actually looked at the idea and they said, "We really kind of like this, and this could be something." And my idea was very modest. It was a small store in Madison, and we would sort of maybe have a Web site and bring in kind of the best of fair trade from around the world, and we'd kind of pull it all together in a way that was, you know, a little more modern and a little more updated and relevant to consumers in the modern economy. Their idea, however, was something much, much bigger. And they thought, you know, this is actually something that could be huge. It could be in a big, national brand, and we need to think about this in a big way. So I said okay, that sounds even better. And I need some money. Do you have any? 

And yes, we do, but you have to prove to us first that this could really work, so you need to go out and do research on how this would work; how big is the market; how many suppliers could we have; is there is a good supply chain; and how would this all be put together. About a year and three months was sort of the research phase of figuring out if we could make this thing work. And so we went out and looked at what's happening in the world of socially conscious shopping. And this term, the LOHAS Niche, is used and was especially used a couple of years ago. I haven't seen it as much lately but it describes a market in the economy that's devoted to lifestyles of health and sustainability. It's things like hybrid cars and green building materials, fair trade coffees, yoga, alternative medicines, all these kinds of things. About $228 billion. What was happening back in 2005, while we were researching this company, fair trade coffees was a good example. It was growing really rapidly in market share, especially in the UK. The UK is the red bar up there. 

In the U.S., it was much smaller but growing rapidly. It seemed to be about three or four years behind where the UK was. The other big thing that was happening is fair trade coffee was moving from sort of alternative coffee shops in college towns to the mainstream. So, Starbucks and even McDonalds and Dunkin Doughnuts started introducing their versions of fair trade coffee. Mainstreaming. Hybrid automobiles, the same thing. You know, in 2000 there was almost none sold. And this chart is really outdated, because in the last couple of years, I'm sure this is way off the chart there. Growing extremely rapidly. And again five, six years ago, when you thought of electric car, you sort of thought of your eccentric uncle who was building something in his garage that you could plug in and drive four miles and plug it in again. 

And now, Mercedes has their hybrid automobile. So it's really moved into the mainstream market. This is happening. This is something that's happening in the last decade. We've had these alternative concepts of organic foods, and hybrid cars, and fair trade coffee, and moving into the mainstream of society as more consumers were aware of it and demanded better options for their shopping. But at that moment in 2005, there was really nothing happening in the apparel world that we could find. You had a handful of online sellers, of more indigenously produced crafts and some hemp, some hemp styles. Then there were some really super political kind of t-shirts, anti-capitalist types of t-shirts, and things like that. You had American Apparel, which was just getting started out there and they were selling sweatshop-free t-shirts to college students. But they weren't really using the word fair trade. 

And they weren't focusing so much on the social aspect of their business, as much as they were on the design and the marketing. So we came to the conclusion that there is something here. There's something missing here. It's happening in cars. It's happening in coffee. It's happening in organic foods. Why can't it happen in clothing? And you know what? Let's make it happen in clothing. So we decided we're going to innovate, and it sounded really kind of grand for three of us, four of us, to get together and say we can do this. 

But we want to innovate the apparel industry into a more socially conscious supply chain, an economic model. So we are going to define an undefined model. No one's really defined what fair trade clothing looks like. What it is. We know how to make clothing. We know how to design it, and produce it, and market it. And we know what we want to do in accomplishing what we want to accomplish on the social side. We can do this, and that's what we set out to do. We ran into quite a few road blocks along the way. I would say during the 14, 16 months when we were in the phase of starting up the company we almost gave up maybe three or four times, where we literally sat down and said you know what, this is not going to work. 

We need to all go home. One of the big road blocks was sourcing. The big circle that you see here represents all the apparel production in the world. So these are the big factories, and small factories, and co-ops, and worker groups that make clothing and accessories. We wanted to focus on the ones that we felt had really high quality standards. Because you can really easily make a thousand t-shirts not concerning yourself with quality. A thousand people will buy them one time, but they'll never come back. If the quality doesn't hold up, they'll never come back. So we really focused in on the quality end of the production on apparel. Then within there, of course, we want to do fair trade. 

We want to produce things in a way where the workers are paid well, treated fairly and work in good conditions. That's an even smaller circle. Smaller than I ever imagined, frankly. So what we're looking at really is just that little sliver in between quality production and fair trade production. We're looking for both. And it's a very small universe. We ended up working with about six or seven suppliers to start with, that we felt achieved both of those things as we launched our business. But it was very hard to find them and took many, many months and trips and re-trips, and audits and re-audits. And we finally settled on a few that we were happy with. The other big road block was certification. 

You know, there's no such thing as a fair trade certified t-shirt in the world today. Fair trade is a word that has been very clearly defined in coffee, in tea, in bananas and commodities, but so far there's not a single garment in the world that is certified fair trade. Maybe the cotton that was grown to make that shirt was certified fair trade, but that's as far as it's gotten so far. The only agency in the U.S. that will certify fair trade is called Transfair USA. And they are the ones that developed that top stamp there, the fair trade certified. They do that for coffee, tea, and commodities. We approached them in 2005 and said we really want to do this with clothing, can you help us? Are you going to be doing this anytime soon? And they basically said, you know, we're not. Maybe ten years from now, we'll get around to that. 

We think it's a great idea but because of this, this, this, this and this, it's going to take a long time to get there, so we're not ready to go there yet. We got the same answer from a lot of other fair trade groups that we approached in the U.S. and Europe, and no one was quite ready to make that leap. I can explain some of those reasons. It's really the supply chain of clothing. It's very complicated. The cotton on a shirt comes from some place. It goes to another facility and gets spun into yarn. Then it gets shipped to another facility, where they weave it into fabric. Then it gets shipped back to another facility that cuts and sews it into a garment. The buttons came from here, the zippers came from here, the labels came from here, the dyes came from here, the threads came from there. 

So there's all these components to garment production that are very complicated and drives these people crazy, frankly. They want to say, here's the thing and this is fair and this is not fair, and we're going to stamp this one. And with clothing it's really, really hard to do that. This is another point where we said maybe we're really crazy and we shouldn't do this thing. We decided we are going to plow ahead. We know how to do this. We know there are really good facilities and really bad facilities and we can make a company using only really good facilities. And we feel like certification will follow. At some point, certification will follow the industry. And there will need to be certification, just like there needed to be with organics. 

And so we decided, instead of waiting for ten years until someone comes around and says this t-shirt is fair trade, we're going to go ahead and do it. Here's how we're going to define fair trade. We're going to get all the things in place that can help us show consumers this, and give them confidence that what we're doing is good. We're not going to wait for the official certification. And then the big third road block was inventory. You know, inventory is one of the three biggest expenses any new business will have in a startup if you're a product seller. If you're a service business, than this is not an issue. But if you're going to sell product, this is a huge expense, especially when you want to design your own products. I could go tomorrow to American Apparel wholesale and buy a hundred t-shirts from them no problem, and we could sell a hundred t-shirts next month, no problem. But if I want to sew Fair Indigo labels into our garments, I need to buy may be 600 to 900 t-shirts per color, and that's just because of production minimums. 

Factories have to have economy of scales to make units. I can't sell 600 to 900 t-shirts next month. It's going to take me-- I really only need 200 t-shirts, but I need to buy 800. That's an expensive business model not sustainable at all. So we have to grow to the point where we can afford to buy that kind of inventory levels and sell that in a short term. Funding, as I said, there's three big expenses in funding a new business. One is the inventory, if you are a product business instead of service. The second is finding the customers. We have a great idea, fair trade clothing. We know there's consumers out there that want it but how do we find them, how do we make them aware of who we are? 

You can do it in a lot of ways. You can open a lot of stores that people are walking by. You can mail catalogs. Open a Web site. You can have ad campaigns, word of mouth. There's a lot of ways to do that but almost all of them are very expensive. And the third is your staff, your employees. We started with, originally four of us started. And then as we launched our business we were up to like 12 people. We all took big salary cuts from where we were in our previous lives, but it was still very, very expensive to give us basic monthly income to pay our bills. 

So the two individuals I mentioned who I worked for at Lands’ End, they funded the company, along with we took a bank loan out. We got a couple external investors and things like this. But we got off the ground with that. This, I'm not going to spend much time on here, because everyone will start to fall asleep, but this shows kind of how much cash you use, a company like ours, in the first couple years of business. These aren't real numbers, these are just percents. So what it really means, just look at 2006. The bottom line, 316%. That means that for every dollar that we made, for every dollar we took in the door that first year we spent $3.16. So for example, the top line, inventory purchases. We bought $103 worth of inventory and it only got us $100 in sales, 48 cents of every dollar was spent on catalog advertising, 77 on salaries, and so on. 

And you can see, for the first four years we're spending more money than we're making by a long shot in most years, and not until the fifth year hopefully, do we even break even where our cash outflow equals our cash inflow. This was developed in 2006 and it's probably way wrong by now. You know, your numbers are never going to be what you thought they would be. We'll get to that in just a bit. So we launched our business and we went out the door with a set of principles, a set of values that we were going to stick to in order to communicate to consumers here's who we are, here's what we believe. And I'm not going to go through each one. We can do that in the Q and A, but basically we're going to be the first fair trade apparel company. We believe in higher wages and great working conditions only. And we're going to do everything we can to bring those products to consumers through our different channels. Really, what it comes down to is how we innovated. 

I know this course focuses a lot on innovation. How we were innovating, is we wanted to take the fair trade model that existed and really kind of turn it on its head, because we felt there was a better way to do it. So the traditional fair trade model on the top there is like this. I'm an artisan in, pick a country, Guatemala, and I make baskets, and I make beautiful baskets. And I am a fair trade retailer in the United States, and I want to go to Guatemala and take these baskets and take them back here and tell people to buy these baskets, because you should buy these baskets because you're going to help these families in Guatemala. It's a great thing. It's a beautiful model. It's what you'll find at fair trade shops on State Street. It's what you'll find in church basements, and all over the place. It's what's worked for 50 years. 

This business really started back in the 1940s in the religious areas. What we're saying is we want to help the most people possible. That model can help, but the church basement might be able to sell 30 baskets in a month. That's going to help some people in Guatemala sell their baskets, that's a good thing. We want the Guatemalans to sell 3,000 baskets, because it's going to help more of them, and help them have more income. We're saying they can make this, but the consumers want this. So the new model is really we're going to go there, and we're going to say you need to learn how to make this, because if you do then you can sell a lot more, you'll need to hire a lot more people, and you'll get a lot more income. So it's really focusing on design. Designing products that consumers naturally want in this country, and then taking them to the fair trade producer countries and helping them learn, help giving them the skills and the tools they need to make those things. Does that make sense? 

So that's kind of in essence what we're doing, is trying to change that model. It doesn't mean the old model is wrong at all. And I don't want anyone to confuse that we have any scorn for what other people are doing in that world, because it's all great stuff. And we do still do some of the traditional fair trade crafts in our business. But we think the goal is to help more and more people. And you're not going to change millions of consumers to desire traditional Guatemala baskets. There's only a certain small number of people who really care enough to really want to do that. We want to bring it to even more people. Like I said, there's no certification right now for a stamp, but we're using lots of tools to make sure that the places we are in are doing the right things. There's a fair trade calculator that the World of Good Development Organization developed. 

They have a Web site. We use that to set what the living wage is. And we use that as our bench mark to only work with facilities that pay that living wage or higher. There's a lot of definitions that go into that, and I won't go into the details now, but I'm happy to answer questions about that as you have them. Verite is a nonprofit social auditor that we work with. They're in Massachusetts. There's the ones that actually go to each of our facilities and check out to make sure the wages that are being reported are actually being paid, you know, that the bank statements of the employees match the payroll records, that the working conditions are safe, not just on the visits when we're there, but all the time. They make surprise visits. They interview employees outside of their workplace so there's a safe, you know, safe interaction. And the other pictures at the bottom right, we the employees of Fair Indigo, we travel to each of our facilities at least twice a year, get to know the workers, get to know their stories and really have a sixth sense about, you know, this is a really good place or this needs to be looked at a little harder. 

So our suppliers, there's really three types of suppliers that we work with now. One is a more the traditional fair trade groups. These are artisans, typically in rural areas. Lots of them in India, throughout Asia, some in Peru. They make things like crafts, jewelry, and accessories, and things like that that are a little more handicraft work. Typically, with these groups, there's some kind of educational component to what they're doing, so maybe this organization provides them with free education, possibly free healthcare, day care, things like that. So it's not necessarily a traditional factory making t-shirts. It's actually crafts, with some benefits on the side. Type two, we work with a lot of worker owned cooperatives. This is actually our first choice when we're looking for sources. 

This is kind of to us the gold standard of what fair trade is, because what you really have is the owners are the sewers. The people making the clothes are the ones who get all the profits from the business. And it's sort of what we are. Everyone, all 12 of us that started Fair Indigo. We're not technically formed as a cooperative. We're a Limited Liability Corporation, but all of us have ownership in the company, so we know what that model looks like. And we really love working with those groups. This is really common in Latin America, South America, Central America, a lot of these places used to be mainstream apparel factories, making clothes for brands like the Gap and J. Crew. And what happened is a lot of these facilities closed down back in the late 1990s, early 2000s, as production moved from South America to China or south Asia. 

What happened is a lot of the factory owners then donated the equipment to the workers, donated the buildings and the equipment to the workers, who formed their own little business. And so now they're looking for people to work with directly, and we're one of the people that's working with them. This is a workers cooperative in rural Uruguay in South America that makes our scarves, mittens, and hats, and things. And then the last type that we work with, this is what I call skimming the top of the mainstream supplier. So the circles up there represent, let's say Gap, and I'm not picking on them for any reason, just to give an example. The Gap is making woven shirts for men, and they are going to work in a dozen factories to do this. And almost all those factories fall above the minimum wage, right? So that's the law, that's what all mainstream companies really set as their bench mark. We're going to be only in places that pay at least a minimum wage. You're going to see one dripping below there. 

What happens is, and this happened actually very recently in India with the Gap. They'll think their putting their production in the big circle above the line, but then that factory, for whatever reason, gets too much business, or they can't handle it all, so they send a chunk of production down the road to the factory below the line, which isn't paying minimum wages, which has horrible conditions, and which is, frankly, a sweatshop. And so the Gap may or may not know that that's happening. They probably don't. But that's what happening. And that is very, very common in developing countries for these things to happen. There's these little businesses down side roads that nobody really quite knows what they're doing. They don't have an address. They don't pay Social Security taxes. There's a lot of that going on. 

On the other hand, Gap is also in some really great factories above the living wage line up there, just a few of them. Gap isn't there necessarily because, oh, they're great, they're paying a living wage, they're like fair trade. They're there because that factory on top, they know how to make this special kind of weaved shirt that Gap wants for the next holiday season. That's why they go there. They just happen to be in the top tier. Fair Indigo is really only playing above that dotted line. So we're using, in a few cases, we're in some of the same facilities where mainstream apparel brands are, but it's really separated by those lines. Does that make sense for you guys? So we launched our business. We found the suppliers. 

We mailed out about million catalogs our first season. And we launched our Web site. And against the wishes of some in the company, we opened a store at the same time at Hilldale. I was one of the no votes for the store, but I was overrun. So we sell through three channels right now. About 95% of our sales comes from the catalog and Web site and 5% from the Hilldale store. We mail all over the country. And our biggest states are the same states that have the most people, California, New York, Florida, Illinois. The big states is where the biggest chunk of our business is happening. Very, very concentrated though around college cities. 

So Evanston, Illinois. Boston. Boulder, Colorado. College towns like Madison are extremely successful for our catalog and Web sales. It's where people know what fair trade is. That's where the people who really understand fair trade live. If you're in a niche business and you're doing something differently from what other people are doing in the world, you have a much higher opportunity to get in the news. This is one of the areas we've been really fortunate with. We were written up in Time and the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, a few others, because of what we were doing, because what we were doing was different than what everyone else was doing. So we had some news worthiness about our business. 

It was able to get us in some of these doors. A great lesson learned is that if you have a good niche, you're doing something that other people aren't doing, and you can provide really good service, that's like a magic potent combination that will really grow your word of mouth marketing. We really focused on this when we launched our business. We want to be a great service organization. We want to go the extra mile for the customers. And I'm going to talk about that in lessons learned. But it has really, really worked well for us. When we have one customer, and she tells her three friends that is like negative advertising expense. That is extremely effective. So service is not just a sort of buzz word, or a department, that I think businesses can look at, it's got to be part of your DNA and part of your culture. 

In terms of the future. So that's where we are as of today. In the future, we're expanding in a couple different ways. These three channels that we talked about are the three major channels. But in order to cover all our expenses and to grow through this economy, the economy right now is not so great for people trying out new companies. When the economy is suffering, people tend to shop in the places that they are very familiar with. They are not as willing to take a risk on a new company. So we're in that situation right now, where we're mailing catalogs, you know, and we're getting people to buy from us, but not at the rate where we need them to in order to get over this hump of cash flow. So what we started doing just this last month, is also wholesaling our product. We're selling our product to different stores and boutiques around the country. 

A lot of interest in our baby clothes and baby products. And we're not making a lot of money on that, because when you sell wholesale you don't make a lot of money, because the stores want to sell-- If we're selling the shirt for $39, the store wants to sell the shirt for $39. We've got to sell that to them for $14.50, or $18.50. We paid $14 for it. We're not making much money on our wholesale business. So it's not a way for us to make a lot of money, but it's a way for us to get our name into more hands throughout the country, and throughout the world, where they go to their favorite store, they buy a shirt that has our name on it, it has a hang tag on it that explains what our business is all about. The hope is they go to our Web site and then they learn more about us, and then they become a direct customer to us in a bigger way. The other thing we just started, maybe you saw it in the newspaper, is we developed a fair trade organic UW Wisconsin or UW hoodie sweatshirt that is being sold at the UW book store right now, both here and at the Hilldale location. And it is our first school, because it's our home town, but we're hoping next spring to go to the big trade show to present that concept to all the schools that go to the trade show, it's like 500 or 600 schools and expand our offering to the university community. Again for us, it's not a lot of margin in that. 

It's hard to make money. These things cost a lot more. To make things organic, to make them fair trade, it actually really does cost more, but the book stores, you know, they don't want to raise their prices too much, so we have to get squeezed a little bit there, but again the hope is we go into Madison, we provide the book store with the sweatshirts, and then lo and behold, Channel 27 is there, and the State Journal shows up. And these things did happen. And then we have people in our demographic more broadly hearing about us, and hopefully checking us out and becoming customers. How are we doing on time? That is the future. That is where we're going. What I really wanted to talk to you about as potential entrepreneurs and people that might be interested in starting businesses yourself someday, is the big lessons that I learned, and that we learned as we've gone through these last three years, and what we would do differently. And if I was to sit down, would I do it again? 

Absolutely. Would I do it a lot differently? I think so, in many ways. So I'm going to share with you those things right now. First lesson. Some of these sound so commonsense, it's like why did you even put these up here, because everyone knows that. But finding the right team. There's a little bit of guts here, because finding the right team is what everyone says they want to do. I mean, every HR department in the world says, you know, it all starts with the team. And we'll find the best people and the people are our greatest assets. 

Of course it's all true. But in a startup situation, especially, there's two things you have to really look out for in putting your team together. Number one, in bigger companies people can wear a hat that they're really good at. So I'm the accountant. I'm the inventory purchaser. I'm the product developer. I'm the writer. In a startup company, you really can't, unless you have full pockets of money to support you, you can't have that luxury of having people specialize in their jobs. For example, our clothing designer also does all of our writing for the catalog. And that's something that would never happen in a bigger company. 

You know, I was doing product development and inventory management. That would typically never happen in a bigger company. You know, our CFO was packing boxes in the warehouse. So these are the kinds of people you need to really think about as you put a company together. People willing to kind of get out of their comfort zone, out of their specialized zone. Not that you want to put the IT person in charge of the art. There's definitely extremes you may not want to cross. But there's related jobs, and if you can find people that can do one thing really well, and can stretch a little bit either way to do something else, that's a great person to look at. And the second point about finding the right team is there's a lot of people that succeed extremely well in big corporations, and they may or may not be the ones that will succeed in a small business in a startup. Big corporations, you kind of get in there and you figure out the system, because there's a system. 

And there's a way things work, and there's a way things get done, and there's people you know who can get things done for you. If you can make the right waves and float with the right people and choose the right paths, you can do exceedingly well in a corporation. In a startup business, those skills, while they may be useful, they're not going to get you the success that you maybe got in a corporation. You need to be someone who really is very comfortable in shades of gray, and knowing that there is no handbook, there's no system, there's no policy book that's going to tell you what you should do. It's going to be a little bit of a kick from, you know, from the seat of your pants. You know, go with the flow and react as things change, as they will. So really spend a lot of time thinking about those people. Don't just pull the people together that you're really comfortable with, that you get along personally with, that you think are really smart. Really think through, what do you need the company to do. Also, it should go without saying, but you will fail. 

I don't want to be a downer, but you're going to fail at a lot of things in your company. And hopefully the whole company won't fail and just crash and burn, but there's going to be pieces of what you thought would go this way that totally go the other way. And that is bound to happen with any new company. It happened with us in many, many occasions. We call them the mini train wrecks. Thank god we never had the big train wreck. But we've had lots of mini train wrecks along the way. And this is to be expected. You just have to really be the type of person that sees it for what it is, and then moves on and fixes the train. It goes along with just being really flexible, because you're going to get a lot of data as you open your business, as you start selling and getting orders, you're going to learn a lot of things that you didn't know, and you have to be really flexible to change. 

In the early stages of the business, you really have a luxurious time, because you can change 180-degrees, if you want to. You can say we were doing X today, but tomorrow we're not going to do any X, we're going to do Y. You can do that when you're early on, because you don't have a big chunk of a million customers that likes you the way you are, and the way you're doing things today. Most of the people that you're talking to, 99.8% of them, are people that have never heard of you yet, so you're only going to upset only a small fraction of people that you interact with by changing dramatically as you go along. And we've done that in our business. What is your niche? In terms of the one question to ask before you think about starting business, this is really it. You need to make sure that your business idea, your plan, is doing something, you're doing something that's different than what anyone else is doing, or is better than what anyone else is doing. I don't know any example of a successful startup that said, we're going to do that, too. They're doing that, we're going to do it, too. 

You have to do it different, something different or something better. Spend a lot of time on this question, and really, really work through the details of why are consumers, because you have to take consumers away from other companies. There's not new consumers born out of thin air every day. Well, there are, but there's a universe of people are buying things, and the only way you're going to get them to buy your thing is if you're doing something better or something different than what's already being done out there. Be really careful on this one, that you've thought this through and make sure you know devil's advocate type of people in your life, and have them become like your best friends, because you need them to throw those arrows at you and say this won't work, this won't work and here's why. Really challenge yourself on that. Something's going to cost a lot more than you thought it would, no matter how good of a budgeter you had. You know, we had the CFO from Lands’ End on our team. Something's going to come out of left field and go wow that was expensive. And so be ready for that and try to budget for that. 

Try to plan your budget so that if there's something unexpected in there, that you don't know what it is yet, but it's going to come and bite you. If you thought this was all going to be inspirational and here's how you're going to succeed, hopefully it's some of that. I'm trying to tell you things that we learned the hard way, that hopefully you guys can take notes and think about if you ever do this. I would also strongly encourage anyone, if you have an idea for a business and it's a service versus a product, you can eliminate a big, big chunk of the expense of a startup. Like I said earlier, the inventory cost is really a huge, huge chunk of what we spent our money on. And unfortunately it's money you have to spend up front, and you're not going to get paid back for a while. So we have to buy those 800 t-shirts in January, we're not going to sell them starting until February, and we're not going to get out of them until like a year and a half from then. So we've spent all that money that's going to slowly pay off for us. If you have a service idea, you can eliminate that aspect of the business. Going back to the customer service. 

Again this is another cliché. Every company in the world says our customer is number one. Our customer's most important. We take care of our customer. Our customer is never wrong. But don't think of customer service as some department in your business. Don't think of it as something that this one person over here is in charge of, and has to do. Really, really make it a part of your DNA of the company. And let me give you an example. This book is actually sort of our customer service Bible. 

It's Fred Reichheld's book the "Ultimate Question." I'll give you the Cliff Notes version, is he's done the study that shows-- He's looked at companies that have the most extreme loyalty in the business today, those companies being like Apple, like Google. Companies that people just, they have almost an irrational love for these companies, because the consumers become evangelists for the brands. What makes them different from sort of the average, or even above average companies that makes people crazy about those companies. And he found you can measure it with one question. And the one question is, on a scale of one to ten, tell us-- You're giving this to consumers that have interacted with your company. On a scale of one to ten, tell us how likely you would be to recommend our company, our products to a friend or family member. That's the only question we're going to ask. And what he did is devised a scale where nines and tens counted as a positive. One through six counted as fail. 

And then like seven and eight are sort of neutral. So basically the formula takes like the eights and nines, and subtracts out the one through sixes to get the score. What he found is that the companies that had the fastest growth rates, growth through word of mouth, and through this sort of evangelical love of the brand, were the ones that had the nines and the tens, the highest scores. So he kind of backed the data into reality and came up with this. So we, Fair Indigo, has implemented this in our company, not just for the customer service staff that answers the phones, but for all of us. So our financial bonuses at the end of the year are tied directly to this score, this one number. And it's a scary thing when you think about setting it up, but it is actually-- I've seen it work. It really drives all of us, whether we're developing a product and the fit, or we're answering the phone, or we're shipping, or we're doing anything, this is always in our mind. What are we going to do that's going to make the customer say, wow, that was a nine, or wow, that was a ten. It's built into, not only into our business, but into our raises and in our financial payouts. 

Search marketing is a big buzz word, of course, right now. And the beauty about Google is anyone can do it. I mean, I can go on tomorrow and set up an add word for my company, and get through it without talking to a person. But truly find somebody who really, really, really understands it, because there's layers and layers of search marketing that I don't understand. And that you won't understand unless you've spent a lot of time on it. So I would highly suggest going to someone who's very experienced with it. It doesn't have to be someone who you hire on your payroll. It can be a consultant, someone who's done it for other companies, but who really gets it, because there's a lot of things that can be done not only in setting up search words, but in designing your Web site, so that the key words are embedded at the right places for it to find. Google has been extremely successful for Fair Indigo. When you’re a niche business, search marketing is really the name of the game, because by definition, it's how motivated buyers are going to find you the fastest. 

If you're one of the few people that's providing the service, and there's people who want exactly that thing, they're going to find you on the search engines, and it's very cheap. Find somebody that knows somebody. If anyone in the room knows Oprah, or can get me to Oprah, please I brought my wallet, and will be happy to share a big chunk of it. This is kind of the extreme example. You know, Oprah's kind of our gold standard of how we would like to be exposed. But in seriousness, if you talk around enough, you're going to find people who know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone. In our culture, in our sort of celebrity driven culture, it's amazing what one celebrity can do to help your brand get noticed by others. A funny story about Oprah, actually. When I was with Lands’ End back in '98 or '99, Lands’ End had this crazy Polartec pajama thing that was one piece. It was almost like kids pajamas for adults, you know, with feet and everything in them. 

Craziest thing. Everyone thought it would fail, but then Oprah got a hold of one and she loved the thing. And not only did she love it and bought it, but she bought like 300 of them. She did the thing where she threw it out on her show. That day, in November of '99, I think, was Lands’ End biggest day in history. And our Web site crashed, and our phone center crashed. Oprah just pushed the whole company over the cliff. And those pajamas were sold out in like three days. So that's the extreme. But, you know, that would be a good problem for us to have if our Web site crashed and went over the cliff. 

My offer stands on Oprah, if anyone knows her. And finally, just warn your family and your friends, that hey I'm in a startup now so I'll see you in a few years. It's a lot of work, you know, it is like you need the energy of two people to get through starting up a business. And it depends what kind of business. You know, the business I envisioned was something very much smaller and more containable than was the vision that the people that I talked to had for it. It became bigger and bigger. So again, I don't want to end on a downer. But just to let you know, it's always more work than you think it will be. Because things just don't play out the way you ever planned. We all sat around a table three years ago and said, here's how it's going to go; here's how we're going to grow; and here's what's going to happen. 

Almost none of those things happened. We had to change so many times, and that takes a lot of work and energy. Just be ready for that. But, you know, like I say to people that ask me, oh, you look really tired, would you go back and do it again? I always say in a heartbeat, I would never, never not do this because I've learned so much and experienced so much that I never thought I would in my life. And it feels really good to go through it. I hope that it will pay off at some point. And we'll be having to hire a hundred more people. And come join us. That's what I wanted to cover. 

I'm probably running a little over on time. 
- I think we're fine on time. Robert, what you had to share is just terrific. I just want to remind the students that because we're taping this, as you have questions I want to make sure that you have the opportunity to use this handheld mic to ask your question, just so we can capture it. So just let me know if you've got a question, and I will actually hand it off to you. But as we get the students ready to ask questions, why don't I go ahead and throw one out to you Robert. You were talking about how you have internal and external investors. And that's probably not such an uncommon circumstance for a startup venture. Can you talk a little bit about what was most important, or what may still be most important for those investors? Was it truly just profits? 

Was it the mission of what Fair Indigo was about? Some of your internal investors, including yourself and other colleagues, was it about doing something different with your work world? Kind of a lot of questions there, but what mattered most to your investors? 
- Well, the smallest investor in the company is me. So my investment is the idea and the passion for making this business work. I didn't have-- You know, I was doing perfectly fine in my life at Lands’ End, and had a decent income, and things like that. But I did not have a lot of financial abilities to invest in something like this. So for me, it was more investing my blood, sweat and tears into the business, because I believed in it. I believe where the market is going. I really believe in the idea. 

The two internal investors, the two guys that I knew from my days at Lands’ End, they're business investors. They are smart people who invest in ideas that they think have a realistic opportunity for return. They believed in the idea. They believed in the mission. And they put their personal, you know, they put their houses up for mortgage, and they did a lot of things to provide collateral to get their investments through. So they believed in the mission, though. One of them was with Lands’ End when it started sort of getting big, and saw how that all worked, and saw how, regardless of what you think of the Lands’ End clothing, the values of the company were such that it created this sort of magical place where entrepreneurialism really lived strongly. It grew up from this little nothing in the cornfield to this $2 billion company in a matter of 15 years. They had been through that and they had seen the value of what sticking to really strong business principles can build. Building things the right way, and not the fast way. 

So their motivation was really re-creating that kind of magical place where people will love to work, and that can help people all over the world have better lives. But with a reasonable payout. I mean, they're not just charity workers, either. They wanted the business to be profitable. We're not a non-profit. We are a non-profit, but we don't mean to be. 
(laughter)
 And so, you know, for them it was a combination of let's make a profit and let's make the world better. The outside investors, you know, it's really about trust. They know that we're not going to make a profit for quite a few years. 

And they have to develop a trust in our team, me and my partners and my co-workers, that we are smart enough and, you know, brave enough to make this happen and they just want to see progress. So they want, every six months, us to kind of report back, and here's where we thought we'd be and here's where we are. And when we're not where we thought we'd be, here's why. And if those things seem reasonable, then they'll come back and say, okay, you know, here's another million dollars. If those things don't seem reasonable, then times are scary and we kind of have to back off here. So it's really quite a mix. It's quite a mix of investors and reasons, probably, for investing. The outside investors are probably less driven by the social aspect of the company as they are by, these are smart people, I think they're going to turn a profit. 
- Okay. And probably important to identify what their expectations are up front, as you're going into that investment phase. 

I'm available to give the mic to anybody who's got a question. As I'm looking for those hands, I'm going to also ask, you talked about having the idea at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, and then of course doing your own search, informal as it were, and then eventually wondering is this so crazy, I'm going to bounce it off some people. And I hear from some students, well, I feel like I don't have enough of this worked out to be able to share it with others. Or even more so, if I share it with somebody, if it's a good idea they'll steal it from me. How important as an entrepreneur is it to share your ideas, and how formally or informally do you need to do that? 
- Very good question. I think to start with, you need to-- I think informally to start with is really, really important. And going to people that you trust, not necessarily people that think like you, though. I mean, that's kind of the mistake a lot of people make is they have a great idea, and then they go ask all their best friends, what do you think of this. Most of the best friends have, you know, similar interests and backgrounds, and they say it's a great idea. 

And that happened to me. But go to as many people as you trust, that aren't going take it anywhere, but you that they maybe think differently, and think outside of your normal way of thinking. So start there. As you go more formal, again it's who you know. You should get to those more formal situations by referrals. Don't go to the yellow pages, which says we'll help you start your business, or look on the Internet and say, we'll take your business plan. You don't know those people. They might be totally valid and they might be perfectly fine. But it's best to talk to people who have been there. One thing I've found was really helpful is go talk to business owners. 

Go talk to people in the community who have started their businesses, hopefully not doing exactly what you're going to be doing, because they might not want to share that with you. But we went and talked to the owners of a fair trade craft shop. I can't think of the name, on State Street. We also talked to the soap store on State Street. We talked to some of those people that had started their businesses, just to kind of get their thoughts on how to start. From there you need to really just find people who have the investment capability to supply your business with capital, but do that through people you know and trust. And if you don't know someone, someone you know knows someone who knows. So it's the whole chain gang. Find someone who knows someone, who knows someone, who knows someone. That's the best way. 

- Great. We have a question at the back here from one of our students. 
- I'm just wondering, so how did you just all the sudden like start it? Did you just all the sudden quit one day and be like, I'm going to start this business? Or was it kind of like something you did outside of work, and then you got to a certain point where you're like okay, I'm going to quit my job and start this business? Just tell me more about that. 
- Yes, but I didn't use the company computers to do it. 
(laughter)
No, it was like that. So the 3:00 a.m. thing. I was still on Lands’ End payroll working for them, but I really, on my own time, on my own free time, I started researching. I dug even deeper into that and I was digging around for fair trade suppliers, and fair trade factories, and things like that. I did a lot of it sort of moonlighting the research phase. And then I went to these two investors who I worked with previously. The reason they had a lot of funds, by the way, was Sears came and bought Lands’ End. I don't know if you guys knew about that, but Sears bought Lands’ End. At that moment, a lot of the top executives at Lands’ End were asked to leave, so Sears could take over. And they were two of the top executives. They said here's some money, go away. 

So they had this extra money they didn't know what they were going to do with their lives. So I went to them as I was still working for Lands’ End. They had already retired from there. And I presented this idea, and they said this sounds great. Tell us more tell us more. Go back and research. So I did the research sort of moonlighting from my job. I came back to them with here's what I found, it's going to be really hard to find enough factories, but I think there's a few. You know, it could be touchy. Then at some point we pulled the plug and said okay, let's do this. 

You know, it was kind of the critical mass of okay, I found a place that can make sweaters, I found a place that can make shirts. I found one for t-shirts. I can't find someone to make pants. Do we need pants in our catalog? We were kind of on that line of we have enough to some things, but not everything. But at some point, we just said let's do it. We'll find pants people later. Our models just won't wear pants in the first season. 
(laughter)
So at that point I cut out and I quit my job. 

And it was so scary, you know, like amazingly scary and exciting. But they gave me a salary, you know, and I was on COBRA health insurance. We just kind of made it work, but it was really scary. 
- We have another question over here. 
- Hi, I'm Alexa. I was wondering what steps can the average consumer take to research if a current company that they buy from practices fair trade policies?
- There's a couple different tools that are online. There's kind of two big ones. One is called the Fair Trade Federation. I think it's fairtradefederation.org or FTF.org It might even be shortened. 

That's an umbrella organization that fair trade companies join to sort of band together as one place where you can find all these resources. And a lot of stores use that site to purchase merchandise for their own store. In that group, you're going to find more of the traditional fair trade, more crafts, more jewelry and accessories, and bags and things like that, soaps. And there's another group called the Green Business Network. And the Green Business Network is part of Co-op America. And I don't know the exact URL, but you'll find it on Google. And the Green Business Network is sort of similar. It's a little bit more broadly defined the as socially conscious stuff. Not just traditional fair trade, but socially conscious. So there might be more organics and green socially responsibly mutual funds, all different kind of shopping options like that. 

Those are two that I know of. 
- You mentioned that you're doing work internationally. And certainly there are about to be a number of things that would have been of interest in that way. I'm coming up to you. What was your biggest surprise or what has been the biggest surprise that either you or your colleagues have seen either at a site or in a country that you might be doing work with? 
- Yeah. Probably 70% or 75% of our business is done right now it Latin America mainly in Peru. We do some in Costa Rica, Columbia, Uruguay, and then we do a bit in India. We do some in West Africa and then China. China is actually, you know, we really went back and forth on do we even want to tip toe around the subject of China? 

Can China be fair trade? And my original thoughts were, I think there are some great places in China that we could work with, but I'm afraid to do that because I think consumers will be very skeptical, and rightfully so, because of all the publicity that comes out of China in terms of sweatshops and working conditions. At the end of the day though, we thought it was really unfair of us to say, hey, China, we're not even going to look at you because you're China. And we felt that was really discriminatory, and sure, there's a lot of really bad things happening in China, there really is. There's a lot of bad things happening everywhere. But there's good things, too. There really is. So I was surprised when I really started digging in, and I'd worked in China with my previous job at Lands’ End. And I knew there was a range of sort of really not great places at all, and some that were pretty good. So we decided we are going to go head on into China, and we're going to show people that you can do things fairly in China, and you can work can the people in China. 

There's some people in China who are making a difference, who are doing things better. We feel it's morally responsible of us to support those people. We can't change China overnight, but if we can reward the ones that are doing the right thing, we felt that was a really good thing to do. And what I was surprised at is the fantastic facility that we found there. We only have one facility in China that we work with. They're in Nantong, which is a couple hours north of Shanghai. You know, of all the places that I've been in all over the world, I would have to say from a physical comfort, and air conditioning, and music on the floor, and employee fitness center, I mean, that's probably one of the top factories that I've ever been in in the whole world. In China. So that I would say was one of the most pleasant surprises in our trips. 
- That's a great story. 

- Yeah, hi my name's Jeremy. I just was wondering if you could talk more about, like being the person with the idea and not the money. Like, how do you go after the venture capitalists, and how do you approach them, and what sort of liability do you have to them for their investment in you? 
- Yeah, I just happened to be very lucky in my situation, because, you know, the two people I knew that I knew had money are two people I worked with, so I had a personal connection with them. So that part made it easy. How I originally-- I was kind of scared to ask them for money, frankly, because I knew them well, but not that well. So my first thought was I go to them with this business idea, sort of telling them hey, I'm going to go to a bank, you know, what do you think of my idea? In the back of my mind, I'm going, God, I hope they love the idea and they give me the money. But I think that the best way for you, if you don't have a rich uncle, or you don't know someone that has a lot of money that will want to invest is, again, to find the network of investors that are out there locally. And if it's a local business you're talking about, there's a great group called Accelerate Madison. 

Has anyone heard of that? Accelerate Madison. It's just a really good way to network with people. But what you want to do is find other people that have been funded in businesses. Find small businesses, startup businesses, and go talk to the owners and find out how they made connections, and how they were able to get funding because, again, it's not something you want to do with the yellow pages or Google to get funding. You want to really have someone that you have spent some time with, and trust, to give you some good advice on where to go do that. 
- That's great suggestion. And certainly I'll be happy to share information on Accelerate Madison, and some other local groups that could be of help to you. I'm curious, as you were describing the whole concept, and I think everyone of us in this room would see what you're doing is a great thing. Nevertheless, there's always going to be an adversary in some corner. 

And I'm just curious if you've run into them. Could be competitive clothiers. Could be, and this just came to mind as you were describing how you were reaching out to the indigenous people of any given area, and how then you kind of have to help them think about producing something differently, if perhaps there are groups with cultural issues or matters that are at the fore that are saying, well, you're changing the way they live. Have you run into anything like that that you would say is adversarial about the ideas that you have? 
- Oh, absolutely. Definitely we have. We are definitely going against the grain in the traditional fair trade world. That is causing a lot of people to sit up and say hey, wait, that's not fair trade. That's not what fair trade is. We define fair trade this way. 

Fair trade means we help artisans make things with their hands, and we pay them by the piece, and they make an income. And we're not saying that's wrong at all. We're not saying that's the wrong way. It's just one way. Another way is to do it the way we're doing it. Who's right or wrong, I don't think either. I think both are right. But we've definitely had people from those groups come at us, and say, we don't like what you're doing, we think your kind of bastardizing fair trade. This is not what fair trade is about. Well, the fact of the matter is there's millions of people all over the world that work in factories, too. 

Not everyone is an artisan making crafts. There's people that sit there for eight hours a day and make t-shirts. And why can't we do something for them? Why is it only about the artisans? And that wins them over usually, but not always. We also have consumers and customers who say, you're not fair trade because it's not certified. You don't have a certification stamp, how do I trust you? We have to then explain, you know, here's why there's no certification, just as I explained to you guys. Here's the things we are doing to make sure that we're doing what we're saying we're doing, but that's a lot of words to say, versus here's the stamp, you know, you can have it. So from customers and from fair trade organizations, we've had a lot of questions and adversarial questions. 

- Hi, my name's Jared. You said you went to a bank to get some funding. I know you talked about your investors. How exactly do you go about getting a loan from a bank? What do you need to bring into them? Why did they give you the money? And also, if you toyed with any other options besides the bank and investors that you later decided not to do because of certain reasons. 
- Right, so typically you have, you might have a mix of funds some being investments or equity funds. These are people that want to invest money in your company, and then there's loans from banks that you get some money right now that you promise to pay back in a few years, as your company become profitable. The reason we use-- Some people would say ideally you want all investments, and no loans. 

I'm not a finance person, so I'm going to tell you only really, really like kind of high level things. Some people will say it's good to have a mix of debt and equity because if you have too much equity, then everyone's ownership gets spread too thin, and then the owners of the company only own like a little tiny sliver. Why we need bank loans is because our cash goes like this, throughout the year. It's kind of like a swimming pool. So we have times of the year, like July and August, we're buying a lot of inventory for the fall season. We're spending money at that moment. We're not going to get cash in the cash registers until September, October, November, December. So during the summer, we're actually going below zero in our checking account. And what the loan does from the bank, is it gives you that temporary loan, so if this is zero, and the bank loan says we'll give you a line, they call it, a line of credit for two million dollars, that's the bottom of the pool. So we can kind of go below zero, all the way down to $2 million before it's like Christmas and we start, you know, making more money. 

So that's why most retailers need a bank loan, to support those ebbs and flows in the cash of the business. Not necessarily even related to profit and loss, it's just the pure cash outflows are events that happen at certain times throughout the year. What do you need to go get that loan? We're finding it very, very difficult right now in this environment, in this banking environment. And you know, even this morning things happened in the banking world that sound crazy. You basically need to go there with your plan. Here's our financial plan. Here's our business plan. Here's our cash flow needs. What we expect by month. 

And show them, and basically convince them, that this business is viable. That this business, here's the reasons why. Layout all your reasons why you think this will succeed. Bring data, and bring historical performance, and bring everything you can get your hands on to convince the bankers that this thing will work. We just need some money now to do it. It's not easy. I don't think I could ever do it. You know, this is not something I did. I didn't have to go to the banks. I let my partners do that, because they talked the language of banking. 

I don't talk the language of banking. So you need someone to help you, unless you really understand that world. 
- I think I'll have the last question for you Robert. As I was listening to your presentation, I was wondering, are you a business entrepreneur or a social entrepreneur? Or does it matter? 
- I like to think both. I would have a hard time being a purely social entrepreneur, because I sort of have business in my blood a little bit. I have that competition part of me. I have that sort of drive to succeed, and to be successful. So I think that the best thing for me, but I also have a lot of social concerns. 

I love the idea of what people are doing in social entrepreneurial and charities. So for me it's perfect to be able to combine those two things together into one. And it's not probably right for everyone, you know, I think some will be one or the other. I tend to just be right down the middle. 
- Excellent. Well, your story is inspiring. We thank you so much for being with us today. 
- Oh, thank you. 
(applause)