Eugene Terk, VP, Business Development & General Counsel, Align

Scaling Up Serivices - Eugene Terk

Eugene Terk, VP, Business Development & General Counsel, Align

Eugene Terk is the Vice President of Business Development & General Counsel at Align — a growth management software for companies and their teams to manage and communicate shared priorities for everyday focus on the right things.

Founded in 2012, Align was developed as the software solution for the Rockefeller Habits, popularized by Verne Harnish. The habits reinforce practices like creating a strategic one page plan, efficient daily meetings, defining quarterly priorities and using key performance indicators to gauge how you're doing. Align was designed to make it easier to manage these practices and adopt good business habits quicker.

http://alignwithscalingup.com/
https://aligntoday.com/


AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.

[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive

[00:00:58] Welcome everyone. This is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Eugene Terk. He is V.P. of business development and general counsel at Align.We're gonna learn more about Align and how Align fits into the world of scaling up and the world of growing your business. And how do you keep track of the data? How do you keep track of priorities? How do you communicate effectively in your organization with that? Eugene, welcome to the program.

[00:01:21] Thank you, Bruce. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:23] Yeah, it's a pleasure. So what do we talk a little bit about? Well, when we learned about you and then we can talk about Align a little bit and we can talk about what the benefits of using software, of using systems to manage communication, to manage priorities inside of a business with leadership teams, with management teams and really throughout the organization. But how did you get involved? What was your connection to align? What were you doing before that? Tell us the story.

[00:01:45] So I have an interesting background. So before coming to align, I was actually a litigator for 20 years. I was a disgruntled and unhappy attorney for many years, had been looking for a way out. And I'd reached a point in my career where I thought it was time for a new career. And it just so happened that the timing was perfect. There's always this sort of serendipitous connections are made. I knew the CEO had just been hired to lead Align. We were sort of social acquaintances and the timing was perfect that I had invited him out to lunch, sort of just to reconnect, to learn more about what he was up to these days. And he sort of filled me in that he had just been hired for this new company and that he had a particular position that was open and available that he thought I would fit in quite well and whether or not I would be interested in leaving the practice of law at that time. Align was going through a series, a capital raise, which he was spearheading. And they hadn't quite finalized or closed that deal yet. And so we continued the conversation over several months. The deal ultimately did get done. And so he called me up and he said, are you still interested in leaving the practice of law like we discussed? And I said, yes, let's talk about it. And we sort of had one of those heart to heart conversations. And here I am. That was about 15 or 16 months ago.

[00:03:02] So I think people sort of transitioning, pivoting and industries is fascinating. I actually originally came out of architecture and to software and then became an entrepreneur and then sold my business, became a coach. So I know now I know their process and I know the kind of questions you ask yourself is the biggest mistake I'm going to make or is is the best thing, you know, without some risk.

[00:03:22] There is no reward, right? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:03:25] And so tell us what you got to build on the Align to how I guess, how did you begin to understand align as as a tool in this practice of growing and scaling businesses? Like what was your education process? And how did you how did you go about kind of wrapping your head around what the software product was, what the industry looks like, what the benefit was from a product point of view?

[00:03:45] Sure. So I don't think it'll come as much surprise to your listeners. The legal world and the legal profession is not one that's very good at strategic planning, generally speaking. So I wasn't very familiar. I wasn't familiar at all with Verne Harnish or rock habits or scaling up or really any type of business methodology for strategic planning and execution purposes. And so it was sort of a you know, it was a large learning curve for me to sort of learn what Align was, what it did and why it was of great value and benefit to companies that were looking to grow in scale. So, you know, the first thing that I learned was sort of the backstory of Align itself. I mean, Align was created probably six or seven years ago by a serial entrepreneur here in New Orleans where we're based, who was trying to implement the Rockefeller habits, using spreadsheets and shared docs and whatever else. And that particular entrepreneur had had a business that was in the association space that had in-house developers. And he basically said, I think I can build something better to help me implement these habits in my organization. And that's when Align was built. He was working with a scaling up coach who liked what was built and said, can I go take this to my other coaching clients? And he said, Absolutely.

[00:04:58] And that's kind of how Align got started. And for a long time align, you know, it was a it was a side project of someone who is simply running another business, a completely unrelated space. But we was using it to help him implement the scaling up methodology and those good business habits to help that primary business grow. So it wasn't till about two years ago when Ailgn got spun off as a completely separate. Corporate entity that CEO that I mentioned came on the capital raise happen. And I was brought on to sort of learn about the entire world of scaling up and scaling up coaches and scaling up companies and realizing that what companies really need to do to grow in scale are implement certain good business habits. You know, this is not reinventing the wheel. As I learned. These are things that companies have been doing. Successful companies have been doing quite well all along. But that information hasn't necessarily been shared with other business owners and CEOs. So it was a it was just an issue of sort of learning it for myself and becoming aware of all of this information and all these good business habits and then sort of understanding how a software tool like Align actually speeds up the process and efficiency of implementation of those habits.

[00:06:11] In the segment, when should a company or what type of company or what kind of situation does, you know, a product like Align, you know, more of a software solution for managing the information, the priorities, the communication around the stuff. When does it start to apply or when this is start to have a really positive aura? Why, in terms of helping a company manage this process, what do you have any good thoughts or heuristics or data around this?

[00:06:37] Well, what we what are sort of sweetspot is customers who say that they really need this tool is when a company is sort of growing, let's say from five employees to 10 employees or from 10 employees to 15 and 20 employees. You know, there's a certain stage at which a CEO can keep can keep control or keep knowledge of what everyone is doing and make sure that everyone is rowing together towards a common goal. But at some point and it's different, obviously, for every different organization and different CEO and executive team, at some point it becomes a little bit unmanageable and all of a sudden people started going off in different directions. So it's realizing that within your organization, whether that happens at five employees, whether that happens if eight employees, ten employees. I think a CEO, you will realize when it is that all of a sudden you've sort of got to contain a little bit of the chaos that it starts to creep into your organization as you're growing and scaling. So it's different for every company, but really it's somewhere between five and 10 employees. I think we're starting to implement these habits early on before you get to 20 employees or 30 employees. And if you don't have these sort of systems in place to really manage, you are proud to set priorities that can be tracked and measured and setting the good habit of having a daily huddle. If that already doesn't exist in your organization, I think then it becomes more difficult. It's easier to start when you're a little bit smaller and grow with the habits as your business grows.

[00:08:04] And talk to us. I mean, I know there's a couple of different companies will use different software solutions or technology solutions of different types. You mentioned no Google Sheets and Excel and there's a sonna, there's Trello and there's a there's 1001 different kind of project management program management kind of tools out there these days. How? I mean, I guess how is Align specific to the sort of scaling up leadership priorities, setting strategy development? You know how talk to me about how Elina's is specific to this particular business case or business situation relative to some of these other more general sort of tools that are out there.

[00:08:43] So that's really a great question. And let me answer it in two ways. One is Align is not project management and Align is not task management. Asthana and Trello and all those other softwares. You know, if you talk about Salesforce, your CRM, those are the software tools that you use all day, every day to run your business. Those are the tools that you're using in your business all day, every day. Align sort of sits at a higher level where you're doing strategic planning, strategic thinking and really strategic execution towards the growth of your business. We like to say that the best practices for using Align for any company is if you can spend five minutes every morning updating your hotel information and if you can spend five minutes every day updating your KPI eyes on your both company and individual priorities, if you can get into the habit of doing those two things and only taking 10 minutes a day in Align. But if you can get into the habit of doing it over 30, 60 and 90 days, you will start to see results in how much you achieve and how much better the culture within your organization is based on that information that is being exchanged through a daily huddle.

[00:09:54] You know, it's really it sits at a higher level than the Assunta and the cellos. And yet the other way that I was going to answer that question is that the difference about Align versus those other tools is aligned, literally was built on the scaling up methodology. So I mentioned that serial entrepreneur. I mean, it was built to help companies implement the scaling up habits. So those people who are familiar with it, they'll know all of the growth tools, whether that be. Face to face. You know, the vision summary, the one page strategic plan, that entire suite of growth tools is found in the Align software. So, you know, Assunta and Trello, they might be good for project management and task management, but they're not necessarily softwares that you use to plan your strategic growth and ultimately execute it through quarterly priorities that you measure and track with KPI.

[00:10:46] So give us kind of a rundown like what what parts of the system and the processes align, kind of support, manage, capture and then what does it not do? And you mentioned that it's not it's not it doesn't run your business. It's not your project management, I guess. Give us more details about where we're kind of focused or where you've gridded kind of limits or boundaries to what you're trying to talk with Align and what you're trying to do and what you're trying to do.

[00:11:10] Sure. So Align, really, I think if we boil it down as three primary things. One is it serves as the repository for your one page strategic plan. So obviously in scaling up, Vern's big thing is having a one page strategic plan that sets out your core values, your purpose, your B Hag., and then you start to break that down into your three and five year targets. Your one year targets and your quarterly priorities. So in the align system, that is a living and breathing thing that is visible to every person who's on the align platform. So if you've got your entire executive team or if you've got your entire organization on Align, everybody sees this, that one page strategic plan, it is not something that lives on somebodies hard drive or on a bookshelf collecting dust. It's something that everyone can see. This is what this organization is, where they want to go and how they want to get there. So that's one. Then you take that planning and you turn it into implementation and execution through quarterly priorities. Say, if that's our B Hag., if that's our North Star, what are the two or three things that we want to achieve in the next 90 days to keep us going in that direction? And how are we going to measure and track our performance and success and execution against those priorities? And that's both on a company level as well as on individual levels.

[00:12:27] And what we've seen from our customers time and time again is that employees like to have a challenge. They want the freedom to go and tackle that challenge. And they want to crave some accountability. They want measurables and they want Domino's to knock down on their way to a larger goal. And that's what Align lets you do. So you can see what your target is. A, you know, how to get there. And as you're going through the quarter, you're sort of achieving those goals. The last thing is, is the communication aspect of it through the daily and weekly huddles. You want visibility, transparency, accountability and great communication in your organization. So everyone knows what everyone is working on. And you can work together, collaborate to help achieve those priorities and goals both individually and as an organization. And that's really what we're trying to do. You know, there's lots of other softwares that are trying to be everything for everyone. And we are not that we are trying to do those things, those fundamental good business habits that will help a company grow in scale. That's what we're trying to do.

[00:13:28] And who who uses the software in the company is primarily working or accessing the align system and how do they access it? Kind of rundown of the users.

[00:13:38] So if we see it in two different ways, a lot of times it starts out from the top. So it starts out with the executive team who's really doing the strategic planning. But that being said, the way to really harness the power and Vergne obviously is a big proponent of this. The way to harness the power of these great business habits is to spread them down throughout the organization more broadly. There isn't any reason why middle management and frontline employees shouldn't be in a huddle every day. Yes, they may not be involved in the strategic planning part of the quarterly priorities, but there's no reason that they shouldn't be huddling, and there's no reason that individual employees shouldn't have an individual priority that they are held accountable to and that they can use to measure their own performance and execution. So ideally, it will ultimately get funneled down throughout the entire organization as an example. Our largest user on the Align platform currently is a billion dollar insurance company that has more than 400 employees in their account that are using Align on a daily basis. At the same end of the spectrum or the opposite end of the spectrum, our other you know, we have companies where it's just five people, there are five person organization, but they're setting goals for themselves and they're, you know, using it to really track their own performance and think about things not just, you know, servicing their clients or doing the business that needs to get done, but also thinking what's going to take us to the next step? What's going to take us to the next level of growth? What's going to get us to some target that we see down the road?

[00:15:07] And tell me, what does it not do? Like what? To just give some boundaries to people, what you need other systems for, assuming it doesn't like this isn't your CRM, right?

[00:15:19] You know, this is not. This is not your. This is not going to track your leads and your opportunities. This is not sales force. This is obviously not your communication system in terms of video calling. Everybody's gonna be using Zoom, but you can incorporate that into Align. You can include zoom links in the huddle. We are not project manager. We don't think ideally that anyone should be using Align for the granular things that you do all day, every day in your business. It's you know, if if you want to talk about tasks that are related to a priority, for instance, like opening a new location. That is a strategic goal that you might set for yourself. And there may be some tasks that you have to achieve in order for that priority to happen. You need to find a space, negotiate the lease, you know, find furniture. Those are things that are specifically related to that priority. But it's not what I need to make 200 sales calls today. Yeah, because that's just part of my job. That's what I do every day. So that's that's the way we. We strike a balance between working in your business with the various software applications and working on your business with a tool like this.

[00:16:21] Yeah. Nomics sounds. I think of it as they're often referred to us as implementation of strategy. That still helps the management of implementation of your strategy. It's not it's not going to manage your customers. It's not going to manage your customer projects, your your client projects. It's about it's almost the management of the business transformation that you want to make. So what are the goals and changes and things that you want to do strategically? This is where those things go. Good. And in terms of where you've gotten traction and what kind of companies, you know, most of folks on this podcast are gonna be service based companies. But who have you seen on the platform? How have they been using it? What kind of benefits? Where have you seen traction in terms of actually getting this into the market and having customers on it?

[00:17:01] Sure. So really, the software is industry agnostic. You know, we have companies everywhere, like I said, from insurance companies to health care providers to construction service providers to sports equipment repair shops and businesses. You know, it really runs the entire game. If you have a business, it doesn't matter whether you're a product provider or a service provider, a non-profit association. If you're still thinking about string, your business strategically or your organization strategically align can help you. So. So, for instance, we were talking about the insurance company that has you know, it's a billion dollar company with 400 users. They want it. They really wanted to grow and scale quickly. So they implemented Align to help them manage the scaling up broke habits methodology and they grew. This is their own number. They attributed their growth as being 60 percent faster over the 15 months that they were culminating a number of different initiatives. It part of their implementation based on the use of a product like Align. So basically their return on investment was a 60 percent faster implementation and achievement of priorities over a given time period because there was that transparency, accountability within their organization. We in the construction space, we had one particular client that they set a priority for themselves to try to reduce canceled contracts. They were always being distracted by sort of what are the things that could increase sales.

[00:18:23] And they decided to take a real sort of focused look at what can we do to reduce cancel contracts. And so they set some critical numbers and some priorities for themselves for that particular metric in Align. And again, habitually and routinely checking into Align, that was the number that kept coming up. That's the first thing that you see when you log into the platform. And so it helped them visualize and maintain focus on that particular number one goal. And there oh, I r-. Why was they reduced churn by 20 percent in one quarter? Wow. And ultimately they grew their revenue to $30 million in five years. You know, the benefit is, as Vergne always says, there's the number one thing. What's your number one thing? And if you just keep focused and don't get distracted by new shiny objects that are always sort of, you know, coming down the road. You set your target, your goal, and you work every day towards that achieving that goal. You start to see results. I guess if I could give you one more example, the sports company, this was an interesting one, at least from my perspective, one of the least used scaling up components that I think is this sort of concept of a theme. I think a lot of companies. So it's an advanced scaling up sort of component of each plan.

[00:19:37] And they were really good about implementing themes. They also had in sports equipment repair. They would have all these contracts that would get canceled. That driver showed up to the wrong place or the school was closed on that particular day. So they decided to reduce their canceled contracts or churn, as they called it, or returns actually by 20 from 20 percent. They wanted to get it down to five. And they set a theme that I think was like superhero based. And so that every employee, based upon their own contribution towards getting that number down reach. It was almost like gamification of their quarterly priorities. You would reach different levels of I think it was either Marvel Superheroes or DC Comics and their marketing department printed up this beautiful. Poster that they posted on on, you know, in their office and it was a really fun way to engage all of your employees to get on the same page towards what the number one priority was. And as a result, they did reduce their returns from 20 percent to 5 percent. But the long standing benefit is that it didn't go back up. The next quarter. Everyone got into the habit of knowing that we should not have 20 percent of our returns. We should have something of 5 percent or less.

[00:20:48] And it has maintained at that level ever since I've seen a lot of great benefit teams using a system like this in terms of sort of tracking, making decisions, tracking those decisions in the future, know, keeping people on the same page, kind of beating the drum. Have you seen any cases? I'm curious how much you've seen people use the data that it gets generate. Because the other really interesting and valuable thing of a system like this is that over time you actually have data you can analyze and you can look at, well, what are the trends? What are the patterns in that we may not fully appreciate unless we look historically at and actually have some good information? Are there things that you've noticed or you've you've seen that clients are able to do in terms of, you know, once you start using a system like this, you start generating that history that allows them to gain better insights or see patterns that help them perform better in the future.

[00:21:38] Absolutely. So, you know, one of the first things I started talking about was a one page plan and that it's a living and breathing document. So in the align platform, when you create your quarterly targets at the beginning of the quarter, you sort of set your projections for what do you want, you know, whatever revenue number of widgets sold or a number of clients or an existing client retention rate and you set your projections and then at the end of the quarter, you come back and enter your actual. And then you go to the next quarter and there's your strategic plan and you're setting new targets for those numbers or perhaps generating new metrics that you want to measure. But that all that data exists in Align and will always exist online. So you can go back quarter over quarter and say, you know, what were we really tracking in Q1 of 2018? And not only that, you can do it. Hey, you know, we're about to go into Q4 of twenty nineteen. What were we focused on in Q4 of 2018? How well did we do. Was revenue down. And if so, what was it that we attributed to us not making it versus now that we're getting into our planning session for Q4 that we need to take into consideration in order to try to achieve something that we didn't reach last time.

[00:22:45] I think that's kind of this next level of awareness that I found and the companies that I work with and I coach, it's that having the data on having the ability to go back in retrospect and reflect on previous performance and get to the kind of deeper level or deeper understanding or awareness of what's really driving performance. And what do we need to do differently? Like one of the classic ones I do is, you know, we start doing weekly planning and we start looking at, well, do we get things done or not done? And, you know, red, yellow, green. And if I see a couple of, you know, a couple of weeks of red or yellow on commitments, you know, I'm kind of you know, it really doesn't matter what our goal was. If we're not if you're not able to meet your commitments, it's like we can do all the planning in the world. But, you know, we're gonna fail every time. So we need to kind of dig into that and understand more of like, okay, well, are we not committing to the right things or they are we overestimating how much time we have in the week or are we to be distracted by other work? And it leads to kind of that met a conversation that I think a lot of times it needs to have. But you wouldn't see it, I think, unless you have a system like this or some kind of system in place that's going to give you that feedback.

[00:23:43] Right. And I think what you just mentioned is incredibly powerful. It's also the fact that Vergne and the scaling up methodology and certainly align is color coded, red, yellow and green. So you're setting visual indicators for yourself. You know, a lot of times you might get a report in Excel and it's just a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers that doesn't necessarily give you a quick visual display of are we on target or are we lagging behind. So one of the things that we have in Align is we have priority insights like a heat map. So basically what it does is it shows you all 14 weeks of the quarter and it will show you what color was that priority in each of the weeks of the quarter. Exactly. Meaning did you start out and trend up the entire way or was it sort of like a roller coaster where you started out strong and then you hit a valley and then you sort of came back up? But, you know, from a CEO or a leadership position, it's a very quick visual indicator. What are the company priorities doing? How are we doing as we're going through that time period? And what do I need to focus on? Where's my attention need to be? Which. Which of these priorities is yellow and sort of, you know, a warning sign that this might be headed in the wrong direction versus one that's even red. Somebody has got to figure out why are we in the red? How do we turn this thing around versus one that's in the green? That obviously seems to be moving along quite nicely. Maybe I don't need to pay as much attention to that. Whoever is accountable for that priority is doing a great job and it's on its way.

[00:25:10] And I'll even dig it one step further as a CEO and as a coach. I've learned that when I can see that across my leadership team and if I see. Many of them doing yellow at the same time and actually gives me like I start asking different questions, I guess. Has something gone on in a company where all of a sudden everyone's you know, there was a fire drill going on? Like it when I start to see that across leaders, you know, my C-suite or even departments, if I've got this rolled out a department level, it really gives me some interesting meta information. And then I can actually see it quarter over quarter. And I see that the third, fourth and fifth week of every quarter, everything goes yellow pretty consistently. Then I can start figuring out, OK, well, want what's going on there? Do people lose focus? Or we do. Something happened with the other parts of the business, you know? Are we missing or weekly huddles? You know, so once you have this data, you can do some really interesting. You develop really interesting insights and start asking some questions that may get to more sort of systemic changes to the business that you need to make.

[00:26:11] And it also plays into the accountability factor, because ultimately no one wants to be in the red when you're having sort of one on ones or when the CEO is meeting with his senior vice presidents. No one wants to be in the red. So it does, you know, as much as it has an effect on people and they they tend to work harder and get their stuff done in order to show that accountability in the platform.

[00:26:35] So having run several different software businesses over the years, I'm curious what you would have been some of your challenges as a company in terms of building a software platform to do these things where I guess what have you learned about just building, building the tool itself in terms of making decisions, finding, you know, focusing on a core customer or product backlogs, technical issues like would've been the big challenges if you Ronan scaled Align as a business?

[00:27:00] Sure. So like I said originally, we are located in New Orleans, Louisiana, which is not exactly a hotbed of technical talent. So what one critical thing for us and this might be obviously different if you're in Silicon Valley or in New York is just finding the tech talent development talent. And it's a hiring thing. And obviously, you know, you establish your core values and you sort of live and die by those core values and you hire by those core values. So, you know, it's just finding the right people to do the right job and putting all the right pieces in place to grow and scale your business. You know, other problems, not other problems, but just other issues is where a business and our issues are no different than any others. It's how do you build your top of funnel? How do you get people to your Web site? How do you get people to actually click to sign up for a demo of the software? Then once you get them sort of in the sales process, how do you nurture them and understand what their pain points are and do a good job of showing them how your particular solution is going to help them alleviate some of those pain points? You know, I think we have sort of very typical common where we have experience, very typical common issues for any SAS business, whether whether you're, you know, providing a software like this or whether you're providing a task management system or a calendaring system or whatever it might be, it's just getting people to your software, understanding their pain points, helping them understand how you can solve that pain point for them and just providing the best service that you possibly can and with the best product.

[00:28:38] So I guess tell us a little bit about how Align fits into the whole sort of scaling up community at this point.

[00:28:45] And I know that when you guys venture back or your route, you raised some money and are operating as as an entity, but you're also kind of within the kind of scaling up community. Give us a little insight on how that's working and how those relationships fit together.

[00:29:00] Sure. So like I said, aligned was largely built upon the scaling up methodology because our founder was trying to implement scaling up. It has always been a big player in the scaling up community of Vergne. Actually, there is an ad for scale, for Align in the back of the scaling up Book of Vergne has always been very good about promoting Align as a software implementation tool for his methodology. In fact, we just partnered with Vergne for the first time to create what is called the scaling up scoreboard, which is the official software tool of the scaling up methodology. So it is now Vern's software that will be promoted in the scaling up community, whether that be as part of the scaling up coaching world self implementers who might learn about Vergne through the scaling up book or some who might attend the scaling up summits. So we're really excited about that and looking forward to that relationship. It's you know, it's great.

[00:29:59] Yeah. And I will say as a scaling up coach makes a huge difference when a client company is on a system like this. And not only does it help me coach, but it helps them just get clear on what the priorities are. Communicate internally. It really, really does accelerate the process for people to find out more about Align and about the software solutions and the products and get demos and stuff like that. What's the best way to get.

[00:30:20] That information since I was just mentioning the scaling up scoreboard and the best way to actually sign up for a demo and to learn more about the scaling up scoreboard is to go to alignewithscalingup.com. That's Align with scaling up dot com. For those of you who may not. Or for those of your listeners who are not scaling up fishing and autos, you can also go to alignetodaycom. That is our official Web site where you can also schedule a demo and learn more about our our software.

[00:30:49] Is perfect. Thank you so much, Eugene, for taking the time today. Good information, good insight. You know what? I encourage folks listen to the podcast, too. Go, go check it out. If you've been at all curious about some of the tools that are out there, definitely put up those. Put this on your list. Understand how it works, how it specifically around the scaling up toolset and methodology. Very helpful.

[00:31:08] So, Bruce, if I could just add one more point why I didn't get a chance to add this in there. You know, we were talking about sort of anecdotally, you know, Vergne for a very long time has been talking anecdotally about how using online learning with growth institute and coaching and a software implementation tool helps companies grow in scale and sort of those qualitative stories. What we now have is we did a recent analysis of about nineteen hundred companies on the Align platform. Who did, who completed or who entered four hundred and thirty five thousand priorities into the alliance system over four years. Now what we did is we published a white paper recently that sort of provides now a quantitative analysis of what are those good habit for the businesses that are growing and scaling.

[00:31:56] What are the good businesses and what do we see based on a review of the entire pool of data that we have that indicates, you know, our our companies that huddle more than those that don't? Are they more likely to succeed? Are companies? What's the percentage completion of priorities for a company that's in month 1 versus month 15 while on the align platform and sort of gives a quantitative analysis to a lot of the benefit of using a software tool to implement the scaling up methodology so you can access that from our Web site at Aligntoday.com as well.

[00:32:28] Great. I'll make sure that all those links are in the Shonen so people can click through and get the information, get access to the demos and find out more about the tools. Eugene, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for taking the time today. I really appreciate you being on.

[00:32:40] Bruce, thank you so much. It's been my pleasure.

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