How Stephen Ladek Tripled Revenue Of His Consulting Business To Almost $1MM In One Year by Defining Guiding Policies that Drive Results!

Owen: Hi. My name is Owen McGab Enaohwo and welcome to Process Breakdown Podcast where I bring on successful entrepreneurs to come on here to reveal how they’ve been able to create systems and processes for their businesses which literally enabled them to run their businesses on autopilot without their constant involvement. My guest today is Stephen Ladek. He’s the founder of the International Solutions Group. Stephen, welcome to the show.

Stephen: Thank you very much, Owen.

Owen: So Stephen let’s get started. What exactly does your company do and what big pain do you solve for your customers?

Stephen: International Solutions Group is a technical service provider to governments, UN agencies, NGO’s and large contractors that mostly do work in the humanitarian and international development field. The work that we do is to help them to perform better and that’s sort of a broad umbrella. That really means that we evaluate the work that they do. When a donor gives money to an NGO for example or a UN agency, that donor usually wants to know how that money was used so we come and evaluate those projects. But we also do a lot of strategy work with organizations and with agencies and governments to help them understand how can the funds that they have can be used to be most effective in solving some of the most difficult social problems of the world.

Owen: Okay. And so I think too is we always try to give like context as to how the big the business is and also in terms of revenue stuff and so how many full-time employees you currently have?

Stephen: We actually have five full-time employees. They’re sitting in Washington, DC right now. I don’t consider myself a part of that group. I’m the owner of the company. I’m sitting in Costa Rica but we have several interns and we also operate with multiple part-time staff in different markets. So we have something like in America here, we have a few people in the Middle East, we have some people on Africa and then our business now really revolves around the fact that we can put together teams of consultants for each of the individual projects that we work on so right now we probably have 35 consultants working on different projects right now.

Owen: And you also mentioned beside the full-time employees you have part-time employees working on. I’m just curious, what was the last year’s annual revenue and probably what you expect to do this year?

Stephen: Last year the company did right around $300,000 worth of business but since I’ve put the processes that we were going to talk about today in place, we’ve more than doubled that revenue. We’ve already booked more than $700,000 worth of business this year and actually I was pleased that I’m on this now because when we had talked before we were 700 but we’ve actually just cracked over the $900,000 mark as of this call and we’re looking in the million dollars variation by the end of the year.

Owen: Awesome and just so the listeners know, some of your clients you said they are well-known brands. What are their names?

Stephen: So well-known brands that people now probably think, things like the American Red Cross, UNICEF and United Nations Development Program. We work for the Government of Switzerland, the Government of Vanuatu, the Government of Fiji, we’ve worked for the United States Government. So these are all big brands that pretty much everyone knows.

Owen: So let’s dive in because your goal is literally to come in and look at owners of business, as how successful entrepreneurs are able to systematize their business so that it can run without them and your situation is you actually comes off hand and basically, you have clients with different needs and I’m curious how do you create the company that has a system on how you handle, provide solutions for clients with different needs? And so that’s the main goal of this interview how you can do that and what would you say is the lowest point of your business and describe how bad it got?

Stephen: The lowest point for me and business was from International Solutions Group was when I was working 7 days a week. Flying around the world for various clients and intentionally being on call all the time because when you work around the globe you know I can receive calls at 2:00 in the morning or I have to be in meetings at 11:00 at night and I did that for a very long time. It was before I decided to sort of systematize the company I was really just toughing it out by being a consultant myself and working with the consultants that we hire to basically deliver for the clients that we have.

So the lowest point for me was just looking up and saying “We’re making good money.” The company at one point, you we’ve gone through several business cycles so at one point the company was about triple the size as it is right now and I woke up and I said “It’s not worth it. I need to find a different way to do this” and that was when I made the decision to figure out how to systematize the business.

Owen: What you also mentioned during the pre-interview is that you said one of the most difficult aspects of running your business being a consultancy is that every client is different, every deliverable is different and every proposal needs to be tailored to the client’s needs. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Stephen: Sure. So in the work that we do because when either an NGO or a government or a UN agency decides to pursue a strategy, usually that strategy is designed to take care of one specific problem, malnutrition or working on disaster relief or resilience of the community, something like this. So we don’t have a luxury like I’m sure of many of your other clients or maybe other people that you’ve worked with where they’re delivering an e-Book or they’re delivering a system process or they’re delivering an online tool. We actually have to say “Hey. Here’s the problem that you have, here’s how we think that we can solve it for you.” And the way that we’ve thought about doing that or the way that we work to that is when we systematize the business we really look at how can we create frameworks that will make our employee successful so that we have a 90% solution so really we only have to customize 10% of that solution for each of the clients that we propose work to.

Owen: And so that it’s clear to the listener, what you are basically saying is that some businesses like for instance now you’re talking about a restaurant. Literally, the middle step-by-step, “For the menus, this is what you got to do because we only have this type of dish and then step-by-step you could write up the menu or whatever the procedures to get that dish done. But in your case you could have been like that. So the way you walk around it, it’s created a framework that basically the employees can now use that framework and now customize solution always based on that framework and we’re going to jump into more details on that.

Stephen: Sure. As I was saying, can I sort of dive into some of those details for you?

Owen: Yeah. I was about to get you in that. So how do you solve the problem?
Stephen: So really every business has three aspects or there are three general aspects. We have to have money making machine, we have to have business development all the time, we have to be either bringing new customers in your business or winning new work from clients. You have to be able to manage the work that you have so as you just said, even if you’re on a restaurant. Somebody comes and sits down. At the moment they choose to sit down at your restaurant, they are your customer and you have to service them. In our case is when we win a contract. Then, we have to manage that contract to make sure the work is delivered. And then there’s this sort of underlying layer or background layer, however you want to think about it of administration. How do I make sure the people get paid? How do I make sure that I get paid? How do I make sure that we’re legally compliance and those types of things? So really when I looked at how to systematize my business I look at those three specific aspects and that’s where our processes all come in place.

Owen: So let’s start with the first one. You said that basically you came up with a structured process for wining your business. Let’s dive into that.

Stephen: Sure. In our industry that we work in there are known way that I won’t go in the incredible detail because it might irrelevant for most people but like any other industry, you know where to look for business. In our case there’s e-mail list that we subscribe to, there are news listings, there are RSS feeds, etc. So we’ve created a system where we have a constant source of opportunity coming to us and then what we do is we created a process where our business development associates and the woman who directs that process receives as on a daily basis and there’s a very quick process of putting it through filter, a criteria filter where we determine, “Are we a good fit for the potential project? Do we have the resources to apply for the project and actually deliver a high quality solution?” And then if those two, if we’re a good fit and we have the resources then we decide is this a low priority solution? A high priority? Or sort of this is a super sweet spot? And that third criteria right there is really where I think we make the difference because if it’s a low priority solution, we’ve built a template, a system where we can literally pump out a proposal in less than 24 hours. That describes our company well and describes a solution we do. But if because we think we’re an okay fit but it’s really sort of what we call “Hail Mary pass.”
Owen: Okay. So one of the things that I try to do during interviews is when I guess describe like a concept like how you just describe. Now, we want to make it more concrete so memorable in the minds of the listeners. So can you use an example, a client of yours, how that would work when it comes to what you just shared?

Stephen: Sure. For example, some of the work that we’re experts in is helping organizations to understand disaster relief or how to be prepared for disasters? And this can be a community that’s a coastal town or this could be a UN agency that responds to disasters or this could be government that is supporting a bunch of communities to be prepared or respond to disasters. So coming through our pipeline, we’ll see a number of different opportunities. One of the sort of the low-tier opportunity would be they want or somebody is looking for an individual consultant to come in and do a little bit of work. It’s a couple of hundred dollars or a couple of thousand dollars worth of work. For us, that would a very low priority solution where we know that we’re a decent fit but there’s probably thousands and thousands of people that are applying for and it’s going to be super competitive. So we’ll probably throw a “Hail Mary” pass just because we do win some of those every now and then but it’s not worth all out of our time.

A second level or second-tier type of example would be again the same topic where we think we’re an expert and we have several of these sort of vertical expertise about understanding disaster response or disaster preparedness would be where we think that there are only a few other firms competing. And again it’s a mini-size solution. With a company of our size that’s a $50,000, a couple of hundred thousand dollars that we think the bid is worth. And so we’ll actually put some development associates on in, will dedicate some very serious time to thinking about solution that we’re going to provide, will really go out and customize the consultants that we want to bring in, etcetera.
And then the third tier would be again the same topic but in a place where we’ve worked in the country before or we worked with this client before. We may do and we know some people and the clients. It’s something that we really feel like this is a real sweet spot for us. We really think that we have not only excellent opportunity but it’s a high dollar value in sort of I would say from $150,000 to $500,000 range and we really take the time to put a couple of business developments associates on it and customize the bid that we’re getting back to the client so that it speaks to the work that they’re looking for as well as highlight our expertise and our ability to perform that work and deliver high quality.

Owen: Okay. So I was trying to basically look at the process you have for literally say “This is an opportunity for us now.” I’m trying to see if you can break it down to how maybe the consultant listening into this knock and probably swipe that same process that you have from breaking it down and say “This is for us.” Just go ahead and move to the next step now that we have we have invites for us.

Stephen: Okay. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the question. So you’re asking how we receive opportunities?

Owen: Yeah.

Stephen: So as receiving opportunities is a sort of the benefit of being in the business for a long time so we have lots of referral business where people send these opportunities. Also we subscribe to new services where they will send us opportunities, literally list of hundreds of opportunities or procurement opportunities that will come through every day. Now, let’s just say you want to be a government contractor. There’s something like FedBizOpps where FedBizOpps with the United States Government is online resource that the US Government uses and there’s literally thousands of opportunities that are pumped to that every day and we only focus on one agency within that FedBizOpps. Again for us really, there’s a huge amount of procurement to come out of relief web. The Development Executive Group. We receive a lot of procurement alerts from the Development Executive Group and then there are services like that that we subscribe to, to make sure that we’re aware of the opportunities that are available. Is that what you’re talking about?

Owen: Okay. So first thing is first, you identify source of opportunities and then I’ll get that. So it comes over to whatever listening to this now as identified as source of opportunities might think is how did you now created a process or say, “Okay, now this is the social opportunities, they’re coming in,” how do you now qualify them to make sure that this is the right for you? We’re still on the first date of your process.

Stephen: Sure, right. Exactly. So we’re qualifying whether or not that our qualification process is it may sound relatively simple but I think simple is good. The way that we can qualify process is the size of the project. So within our procurement bid, it’s a very rare circumstance where the client, the potential client will tell you how much their budget is. You’re going to actually be submitting the budget to them, right? So again it’s a part of my business development associates in this company. They have a very good sense of “Is this a small-size project? Is it a couple of thousand dollars, $10,000 dollars? Is it a larger opportunity or is this really a big opportunity?” based on the number of the mandates that we’d have to put into it, based upon the amount of travel that would be required for it and based upon the specific type of work.

For example, if we’re going to be doing a performance evaluation for a program in Africa, we would look at “How many people we’re going to have to send to Africa? Let’s get more specific, Kenya. Yeah, “How many people we’re going to send to Kenya? How many people will have to be on the ground? How long will they be there? Will we have to hire local people?” So it really is first is the project even within our sweet spot. Is this something that we can even do? And there are lots and lots of opportunities that we’re not qualified for or do not have expertise.

If you were to send me a project that has something to do with water and sanitation, probably not a sweet spot, probably we need [16:20]. The second piece of that process is “Is it the right size for our company?” There are lots and lots of opportunities that are in the $10 million, $20 million range, not the right size for us. So we look at the size of opportunity and then if it’s the right sort of general size, then we break it down into three categories in size. We say “Is it a really small one-off opportunity? Is it more of a medium-size opportunity where we should really commit some time and energy into building a proposal?” or third, “Is this really sort of our classic project that we’ve done hundreds of that we’re going to really commit time and resources to polishing a proposal that we have really highlight league of winning?”

Owen: So I get that now you’ve identified the source of the opportunities. So it can be referrals, it can traffic coming to you, whatever and then now you have a criteria in which you say once the opportunity come in as the lead, you have a criteria that you must go through to make sure that this is actually someone or you can actually provide solution for and then you have the ability to do that plus it’s also the right price and I guess that’s one of the things that you use as the criteria. Then, the next thing you mentioned was assigning responsibility to that opportunity. Can you explain that as well?

Stephen: Absolutely. So as I said we have five full time employees. Most of those people in Washington DC are really focused on winning your business because our business is built around putting together teams that are specific to an opportunity. So once we’ve decided to go for a project and submit a proposal, our director whose sitting in DC as well will assign that to a particular business development associate and that person will be responsible for making sure that we have put the budget together, that we have the proposal written on the right way, that we identify the consultants that are going to be necessary for filling up project for communicating with the potential client or the procurement officer to make sure that we’re understanding the requirements correctly, and then ultimately taking that bidding process from beginning to closure to make sure that hopefully we win it basically. And so we assign it to one person and that person has been trained to know, how to talk about the company? What type of experience that we have? What type of language we’d use within that particular proposal? How to locate consultants within these consultant networks that we have? And how to put together budget that make sense?
Owen: Okay. So now with [18:53] on order and now you have accepted the job and it’s go time. You said that you also now have a framework when it comes to the actual management of the execution of the project. Let’s talk about that.

Stephen: Sure. After we bid on project and we put it in our pipeline to monitor it over time because these things have a fairly long sales type usually. Once we’ve won a project, we have a hand over process where the business development associate will package all of the bidding materials and the proposal that we’ve submitted and any communication we’ve had with the client and the completed contract and hand that over to our project manager. And our project manager will then be responsible for basically going through and the initial piece of it is making sure that they understand the project, making sure that they understand who’s working on it, what the time frames are and what are the deliverable should be.

And within that process they’ve created an understand not only within the company but also within the consultant team that we’ve hired to perform the work about when the travel will happen, what will happen during the assignment, how we will execute for the client, when deliverables are due, and how people will get paid along the way? Then that person is or that project manager is the holding to and responsible for making sure that those pieces happen in a timely fashion and really it’s not rocket science if you put together proposal correctly, it should roll out the way that you propose it.

Owen: And this was something that you said, managing entirely all the different spectrums yourself. Both identifying the opportunities qualifying them, making a proposal and then laying out the entire project, this is something you used to manage yourself. I want to contrast how that was with how it is. Now, just sort of that the listeners can really see.

Stephen: Sure and also let’s not forget as well, I also administer the company as well so I was making sure payroll happen and I was making sure that the clients paid us and things I have to think. So contrast 2 years ago, I was the person or one of the people who was doing that. We still have several points but that was my full-time job where I was involved in every bid that was going out, I was helping to identify consultants and helping to identify opportunities and work on that. I was helping in project management, delivering material and actually going on travel again delivering the work. I’m working with other consultants, working with a client and then also at night, usually I was making sure that we’re getting paid, I was making sure that we were legally registered, making sure the payroll went out on time.

So to fast forward it 2 years now, now we put in place a director who takes care of the day-to-day operations of the company. He sets the vision and the direction of the business that we go for. We have business development associates that are overseen by that director to make sure that not only we’re identifying opportunities but those opportunities are being responded to. I haven’t written a proposal in a year and a half now. I haven’t touched one. Every now and then somebody will ask me my opinion because I’ve got a decade or more of experience and as you know, references and referrals are usually the best way to win business.

And then on the project managing side is the same thing where I’m no longer managing projects. The only time I’d step into a project is when sometimes it goes a little pear-shaped as they say or if a client gets a little squarely. Usually, I’ll come in as the owner of the company to make sure that not only we’re delivering but that we have a reasonable conversation with the client to make sure that we end the project successfully. And then the administration is now bookkeepers, accountants, payrolls.

Owen: Yeah, you mentioned there were the finances. If you broke it on to two components on the administration side I guess the project management side is literally after the outline has been laid of what you guys are going to deliver. Basically, mapping out maybe deadlines and all that and you provide the right people to go and then start doing it. Then, there’s the other part of it where the administration to make sure you get paid and all your thoughts are covered. That is the finance and legal.

Stephen: Absolutely and one of the key pieces of our business and any business has its issues. It’s a little more complex for us because we work in many different countries but you have to make sure that you remain legally registered. You have to make sure that you’re on the vendor lists. You have to make sure that your company is paying the proper taxes at the right time and those are all they can just eat away over time. Again, this is because of the type of work we do and we work with the human element, it may not be the same story that you’ve heard often from a lot of especially online entrepreneurs but it’s a reality and you can outsource that by either using virtual assistants. We don’t use any virtual assistance but we have legal help now. We have a system in place to make sure that our legal help identifies those needs and make sure they’re taken care of and as well as accounting and bookkeeping is taking care of as well. So that when we need to get paid, that’s the thing followed up on and when we are expecting to payout employee the payroll that happens on a regular time process as well.

Owen: You mentioned that on the finance side that you are able to systematize how collection of payments as well as invoices, can you talk a little bit about how that works?

Stephen: Now, one every project we have a difficult business on the financial side and that we have what I call a chunky business. As many consultants who may listen to this or your audience maybe familiar with, when you consult, you can either do a time and materials contract where you’re literally sort of billing hours or you can basically, you can contract on deliverables or milestones. Almost all of our business is milestone-based. So that means that we will have a 6-month project or a year-long project and along the way there’ll be certain milestone we’ll hit such as finishing data collection or developing a draft report or completing a set of interviews. And at those milestones we will then be allowed to or that’s an indication that we can then invoice for the work that we’ve done and that’s the project manager’s job to make sure that they’re paying attention to the time frame of the project. And when that milestone is reached, we would confirm with the client that they’ve received a high quality deliverable and then that is then communicated to the accounting department to make sure that we then send out an invoice and make sure they get followed up when it gets paid.

Owen: And this is all determined from the project management side of things where you guys literally have laid out all the milestones and the targets and the customer as you know or the client had agreed to them. And so now when the people in the project management side of things have executed and delivered and now they pass it on to the people on the administration and say “Okay, we’ve reached this milestone. Now is the time for you to do your job and get the money from that customer.” Go ahead.

Stephen: And we swear by technology. We’re a virtual company and we’re proud of that. We maintain an office in DC but that’s because we needed a physical space for some of our people to show up to collaborate and sometimes that’s how people work better together. But look, we rely on DropBox. We rely on something called Do.com if you’re familiar with that. It’s from SalesForce. We use Google Docs a ton. We use Office 365 and through those specifically, the Do.com we use for our sales process.

We use that for our sales pipeline and we also then use that as a way to hand over entire project to a project manager because then it’s mapped out basically; what are the deliverables? When are they supposed to have? When are they supposed to happen? How much does the deliverable work in terms of an invoice? So yeah, we really rely up on those technologies. File sharing over Dropbox and over Google Docs is essential. When you’ve got people working in Southeast Asia and Latin America at the same time, they’d need to be able to have access to the same program documents and we can provide that very very painlessly. We’re an early adapter of those types of technologies and probably like yourself, I’ve been using Skype for I don’t know, 8 years, 10 years now? I can remember when people don’t even know what it was but this has been an essential tool for us to be able to communicate virtually and keep our overheads at an absolutely fair minimum which makes us much more competitive.
Owen: On that part of the finances and you said that besides paying off, getting customers that pay you as well paying invoices to people who are part of the team helping you to do the work. You have someone in there who does reconciliation on a monthly basis. How is that different from the other one?

Stephen: I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand the question.
Owen: In the pre-interview you mentioned for the finance system that you created, you have the part where someone is actually collecting on project expenses as well as paying out against invoices and then there was the second part of that finance system where it’s like finances are getting reconciled on the monthly basis.

Stephen: Sure. Yes. So those two pieces, the project manager maintains a record again using DropBox and Do.com and Google Docs and what expenses have been used in a project. They have a budget that they know that they’re locked into. So they worked with our consultants and they work with our clients to make sure that those expenses are recorded, receipts are recorded, etcetera and those are then passed on to a bookkeeping team. And then that accounting team or that bookkeeping team as well is responsible for making sure when an invoices does get out, that is getting paid on-time as well as making sure that anytime we have payroll that needs to go out or a consultant invoice that needs to paid from our side that those are being paid out in there a lot of times as well.

Owen: And also you mentioned that you have on the administrative side beside the finance side you have the legal side. Just touch base on that a little bit.

Stephen: Well, I found again this is going back 7 years ago. I was doing it all myself. I was “How do you figure it out again in the IN and how do you figure out to register with US Government?” or “How do you figure out how to get in the UN vendor relationships?” and these kinds of things. We’ve sent that to an outsource. We’ve outsourced that to a virtual assistant now. So they’re responsible for making sure that our registration statuses are maintained. Making sure that our vendor statuses were maintained within UN agencies, making sure that our legal requirements regarding billing and invoicing with US Government are all maintained and that’s a matter of making sure that we check up with them basically once a month or so to say, “What’s new? Is there anything that’s changed? If it has, how does it affect us?”Do we need to sign anything? Do we need to take any actions?” There’s really a monitoring process that then pushes us to execution.

Owen: Okay and I’m assuming there’s also like an actual lawyer involved or not?

Stephen: Yeah. Well, it has to be somebody who has a legal background because they need to really understand those things in us.

Owen: Okay. So I guess the virtual assistant that’s assistant that first and is like, how does that work? I’m just curious. What you mentioned is a virtual assistant handling this. I was wondering if…

Stephen: It’s somebody that we have virtual assistant honestly that’s we told them where to look essentially. We said, “Look, these are the places where we’re registered. We’re registered with these 10 UN agencies.” Or “We’re registered with these governments” and we ask them to maintain and monitor any changes in those systems. Luckily, relatively rare because these are big bureaucracies but it’s something that you had to keep on top of to make sure that you’re always in compliance that you’re always able to bid on work and that you’re submitting the right forms and the right documentation to stay an active vendor so that you can continue to bid on work.

Owen: And so given that, in what you do, you cannot literally like spit out all the step-by-step assuming that it’s always going to be the same for procedure. So you’re basing it on a framework and it’s like a foundation I’ve been building out of the rest of the building based on that foundation. I’m just curious what has been the challenges that you experience when you’re trying to systematize your business based on a framework as opposed to literally mapping out step-by-step for series of who do execute.

Stephen: Well yeah, because we work with the human element that’s the biggest challenge, right? So there are two pieces. One, it’s all about talent for us. I’m lucky enough to work with or have working in ISG, some top talent. People who know the business that we’re in, they know the industry we’re in. They are supercharged. They’re executors and they’re people who are interested in getting the job done and getting it done right. So talent is one of the biggest pieces to having these frameworks because you have to be able to delegate with trust. That’s the only way that it works in a business that has human issues and we’ve had several times where we thought we had somebody that was going to be a rock star. We had somebody we thought was really going to deliver. We went through an interview process, we brought them on-board and then it didn’t work out for any number of reasons. Sometimes it’s a real quick dud or sometimes they just sort of burn out over time, they don’t deliver. So talent is the biggest piece.

The second piece is the problem with humans doing work in the human sphere rather than as you say, like I think a lot about technology driven solutions and that’s one of our sweet spots. How do you deliver social innovation through technology? So developing processes for delivering products or services online, that’s awesome because when a piece of technology breaks, “Hey, then its problem to fix the technology.” But when you’re working with consultants or a group or a team, they are trying to come together as a team of experts to get performance or strategy. When something goes wrong or something doesn’t get delivered, somebody has to show up and get it done and the biggest challenge right now that we’ve overcome but still sort of loses spectrum what happens if somebody gets hit by a bus or somebody is truly doesn’t live on a project and that’s where myself, the director or somebody else we’ve named as a project supervisor, we have to quite literally slip in and not necessarily save the day but figure out how to make sure that that project is delivered the way it’s supposed to.

Owen: I think what I kind of get out is if I cannot see step-by-step the procedures for a specific task but I’m basing everything on a framework, how as the employee that working for you, how do you show me that framework? Or how does the person who’s listening to this as a consultant, how he breakdown what he’s trying to explain into a framework like you have so that is easily completed to the other person? You understand what I’m saying? Because procedure is very easy, “I want you to send out a blog post for me. Here are the steps.” You literally just map out all the steps on how to do that but now you’re saying, it’s not necessarily a step, it’s a framework that guides everybody else for what you do. I was trying to see how you communicate that framework? Where do you have that framework documented? How easy is that?

Stephen: Sure. That’s documented within an administration folder wherein DropBox that we keep and that administration folder, we break it down in the business development, project management, and administration. So we have those three places and within each of those three places we have documentation on “Here are the places where we look for work and these are places where we expect to receive e-mails or rookie feeds for instance with business development for opportunities that we bring in.” Then we have a criteria document where we say, “These are the types of expertise that I actually have. So these are the key words that you’re looking for, these are the type of opportunities that you’re looking for,” etcetera. Then within that criteria document as well, we then break that down and say, “If it needs our expertise criteria, here’s how you determine whether or not it’s a low, medium or high opportunity based on financial output and based on our sweet spot.

Owen: And let me stop you a little bit and continue. So when you say “framework,” it’s kind of like rules. It’s not like explicit to say “do this” but kind of like rules that they can follow.

Stephen: Exactly. So rather than as you were just saying as well, if I were to hire a virtual assistant or whomever, just an employee to say “Look, I need a blog post to go out every Wednesday at 10:00 and I need it to be about this subject and I needed to get…” I could literally setup a spreadsheet. Of the topics, I could even probably hash together the top goal information and just say “Look, it’s going to go out system-by-system.” But what we’re doing is we’re saying “Look, it needs to be the decision you make need to be within these boxes,” right? And then this is where I was talking about, this is where the talent really makes all the difference, right? Because you can’t give it to a computer, you can’t give it to somebody. I couldn’t just go and hire somebody up the streets and do this. It does require some technical expertise within our industry. But what I’ve done is I’ve made it so that I don’t have to show up every time and say “Hey, here are the hundred opportunities we’re looking at today. Let’s go for these 5 or 6.” I don’t have to show up and do that neither does the director or a business development associate who is tasked to that has clear criteria and clear understanding on what works and what doesn’t work or what worked for us in the past.

And then I think when your later questions or maybe this is an appropriate time to talk about it. Within a framework system like this, you have to show up and review your success on a regular basis, right? So this is what we use Do.com for. This is what we use Google Docs for. We keep financial spreadsheets of when have we won money? Who did we win money from? And why did we win it, right? Those are basically the three big questions we ask and we go back and look and say “Look, how many proposals have we sent out over the last 6 months? Which one of those was successful?” And then we try to determine “Why they were successful?” and then we adjust those boxes accordingly.
So say “Look, this year we’re seeing a lot more work in disaster preparedness, disaster response work so maybe we should really be starting to target in refining our business towards that” or maybe it’s moving in a completely different direction and we’re not winning business there anymore so let’s look for other opportunities where we are appropriate. So being able to review those systems and being able to continually refine the criteria that are being looked at is essential. The same thing applies in both administrative and the project management side as well. If you’re a project manager and we’re seeing that projects are slipping or they’re starting to be delayed or they’re always coming in late, we need to determine why that’s happening because I’m sure that our clients aren’t happy and I’m sure that it’s causing us money, right? So is there something about either a criteria that we’re not giving our project manager or is there an external factor that we do not understand to make sure that that project manager can be successful? So officially again, when we talk about how do you get your business to run on autopilot. This is about making sure that you’re successfully delegating in giving people the tools that they can be successful so that you don’t have to show up every day to do it.

Owen: Definitely. And so I think and I’m pissed of myself for interrupting you when you are breaking down, showing us the framework now. A couple of minutes ago you were really getting to it and then I ask you a different question and that’s who you are. So that means if I could get you back into because first of all, you broke it down to three different parts of the business. You said you have the business opportunities like basically getting, acquiring your opportunities on the business and that’s based on the framework, right? And the framework now is a set of rules that people who are qualified have to make decisions based on it, right? And then there’s the second part of the business now where the project management side, right?

Stephen: Right. So I mean it’s a fairly simple. Let me to just sort of roll with it. Take me to the end of your question.

Owen: Yeah. I just want the listener to know what I’m trying to explain and have you jump back into it and so the project management part of it where after the opportunities come, now that the framework that people inside of it who execute the project, they have to live by that framework and make decision by that framework to get the stuff done and after that is the administration side where I think will have to also live by that framework. So I’m trying to see if you can jump in to each three of these different parts of your business and give us kind of like, describe the framework how it is or where you even put it into and sort of press again. You understand what I’m saying?

Stephen: Yeah. I’m trying to see how I can better describe the framework other than the fact that we’ve documented what it is that I expect from the business development process and project management process and the administrative process. I’m not sure if there’s a better way that I can describe. I wish that it would be greater to show you the processes that we have. I don’t have the ability to share that with you right now.

Owen: Okay. So let’s make it simpler and say on the business, I can’t pronounce the word, development side. So maybe the fresh thing that comes in, a couple of decision points based on the framework that they have to make and then we jump into the next one. I just want to get the listeners to get a feel for how it would work if they were trying to do exactly what you are doing.

Stephen: Sure. So you have to determine basically. Let me take it from an outsider’s perspective, right? If I were looking to getting into a consulting business, it doesn’t even have to be the same industry that we’re in but it’s just sort of a human consulting business, the first that I need to know if I need to know where this business comes from, right? How am I going to acquire it? Again, if you’re sorting opportunities, sort of an online entrepreneur. You’re putting out ads on Facebook. You’re putting out ads in Google. You’re trying to get traffic to your site because we’re a human business we don’t sell through our website so much as we just sort of we use that as a legitimacy piece, right? We tell people about why they should hire us.

So we need to figure out where we’re going to get our business from. That’s one of the key criteria in business development. Where you’re going to source your opportunities from? It doesn’t matter if you’re in international development or if you are a stock consultant or whatever you want to call it, it’s how are going to find that. So one of our key criterias is that we map out where are the opportunities located? Where are the marketplaces where people who give money or have procurements or have jobs? Where are those located? We keep a list of those so that if I were to hire a business development associates on market and say “Hey. This is where you’re going to look. This is where our procurements come from.”
Owen: Okay.

Stephen: And in any consulting business, that’s what you need to know. You need to know where your business is going to come from. The second piece in business development is once you learned about opportunities, you have to decide some way whether or not you’re a good fit for that business and unfortunately on the consulting business, most people try to be everything to everybody, right? But what we found and I’m sure you’ve heard from any other people you’ve interviewed, niche is king, right?

Owen: Yeah.

Stephen: And so we specifically say, “Look. We do performance. We do evaluation and we do execution.” We do strategy execution and those are really the things that we focus on. Sometimes we reach a little bit but mostly, if we’re looking in projects and it’s doesn’t say we want to evaluate projects, we want a strategy, we don’t even consider it because it’s not the business we’re in and that’s the second. You got to make sure that you can actually deliver the material. And then you got to determine whether or not the size of the project is right. If I were again somebody is starting this business tomorrow or starting any consulting business tomorrow, the thing that you really need to think about is; can you actually get the work done? How many times, well, again I don’t want to make assumptions but how many times have you seen, Owen, somebody attempt to take on a project that they’re not ready for?

If I was an individual consultant and somebody handed me a $2 million contract tomorrow, I would be very concerned, right? Because that I probably wouldn’t be able to deliver the mandates. I probably wouldn’t have the resources in place to take of it, etcetera. So it’s really about “Am I able to deliver and do I have the experience that I can make the client believe that I can leap on it.” So those are the types of frameworks that we use in order to, you know, if we hire somebody or somebody were to start this business, that’s the type of stuff that we’re talking about. Does that make sense?

Owen: Yeah. You just basically lay out on the business development side and then once that is a great job for you, the next thing is project management and now you have set of rules that a person and basically I can also ask on the project management side, what is the framework for that? Because I understand that you got to create milestones but what is the framework around the project management now that you accepted the job?

Stephen: Well, here’s the beauty of it though is if the way that if you do your business development correctly. When you hand a project to the project manager, the milestones are already defined, the budget is already defined, the deliverables are already defined, the people who are working on it are already defined, where the work is being performed is already defined and so the project manager, really, you want to have somebody or you want to put a system in place where you have an executor, right. You want somebody who can really show up every day and say “Hey, A is through that. We’re supposed to get done today. Did that get done today?” If it did, great. If it didn’t, why it didn’t happen and how do I have to adjust that schedule?”

So the framework for the project manager really is saying “Look, we have a budget, we have a margin within that budget, we want to make sure that we keep that margin as big as possible.” Just because that’s the life, that’s how we know the reason why we’re in business, right? And then within that, it’s really the criteria we hold our project managers to is, “Have you executed on the plan that we agreed? And if you haven’t, how have you adjusted to either make sure that we maintain our margin or made other amends so that our business can keep going and that our client is most important, client is happy and will hopefully give us business in the future.”

Owen: And I do easily get the part on the administration side with finance and legal, I mean where the project manager, go ahead.

Stephen: I mean the admin is really and this is where you could really get systematize. You could say “Look. Hey, bookkeeper. You’re going to look in this one folder every month on the 10th of every month. All the receipts of the month are going to be there. Put them in QuickBooks.” And you’ve already gone through a process to saying “Here are the codes for our accounts, here are the codes we use for each of our projects,” etcetera. So you can really sort of mechanize that process very easily.

Owen: And I like the fact that by asking you more questions just so that I can fully understand and we’re getting a clearer and clearer picture. So now on the administrative side, we can see that on the administrative side that you can really map out the entire step-by-step because of this is going to be mechanical.

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a matter of any time I’m able to say, I know that this process is going to happen exactly every single time. That’s when you can really create a map either on a Google Doc or you can create a video or you can sometimes we put in Do.com where you say, “Look. You’re going to do this on the same day at the same time, every single month or every single week” and that’s the kind of I’m sure that most of the people you speak with, those are the kinds of processes that they put in place.

Owen: On the project management side, is it ever possible that it completely be mapped out or is it always going to be based on the framework that the manager is going to be working based on a framework?

Stephen: I can’t remember a time when it would be completely be mapped out or you could completely go and say “Push and go on” on a sort of an automated time frame but in our business it would really depend upon how much interaction with either a client site, how much human interaction do I do. If we’re lucky enough to get consulting work where it’s just trying to research or something where we’re not responsible for interacting with the client but we’re just responsible for deliverable, you absolutely can map out what days will research happen, what days will analysis happen, what days will report writing and that can become very systematized.

Owen: Yeah. And one thing you mention during the pre-interview that there are really four parts of the strategy that really allow you to be successful with it is one of them was to know the business and the other one was income realism. To be real about income you’re getting on the business. The other one was delegation. Basically, being able to trust the people that you delegate stuff to and clear goes for employees, is there a way we could talk about briefly each of those four?

Stephen: Sure. So let’s go from backwards through forwards. So first of all, this is what I was telling about having the right talent in place but making sure that you have clear goals. When we start the year, we sat down with everyone. This is what one of my touch points in the company where we sat down and we say “What are our revenue goals for this year? What are our profit goals? What are our project win goals? What are our clients breathe goals?” And we make sure that we have just extremely figured criterion for people to say “This is what I’m trying to achieve and if I’m working to achieve that, then I’m probably making some wrong decisions about how I’m using my time or where I’m spinning my wheels waiting for client to get back,” those kinds of things.

So on the project management side, again as I was saying earlier, when you hand over a project to a project manager you need to be very clear about this is the logic of the project. This is a margin on the project. Here are the people you’re working with. You have the free reign about how you want to communicate. How often you want to have touch points with them? How do you accept and receive work? Those kinds of things but you have to make sure you show up with this budget, with this margin, with these things. So sort of very clear goal and if that’s not going to happen, you need to adjust the way that you’re working. So that’s what I mean by having really clear goals. So the people know what they need to show up with. So I don’t have much the written piece in front of me. What were the others?

Owen: Yeah. The other one was the trust in the person you delegate to. I think that’s what it is.
Stephen: Yeah. So one of them definitely, you know it’s the same time when you set a goal for someone and you are outsourcing work to them, you have to be able to trust them. You can’t come in and micro-manage them, you can’t look over their shoulder and you need to be able to step back and say “Look, we’ve agreed on a set of goals, we’ve agreed on how those goals are going to be achieved,” or sort of the parameters they can work to achieve those goals and let them go do it. Don’t check in on them every day. Don’t start sending them e-mails. Don’t call them up. Don’t show up unexpectedly, those kinds of things. Show up on agreed times or have agreed meetings but you got to trust these people to do it. Otherwise, ultimately you’re just doing the work.

Owen: And the other one was income realism, what did you mean by that?

Stephen: Our particular business I think just relates to one of the other questions that you had written on I think you call it a pre-interview. I like that. But one of the things about it is I’m a little skeptical of using the term your “company on autopilot” because if that is really true, we would see a whole lot of just machines making money out there now. We know that happens but you have to. So there’s a two part answer, right? First is that I think that you can automate businesses and especially online delivery of sort of digital products and those kinds of things but when you have any sort of human element in your business, you have to be able to say “Look, I’m going to have to show up at least on some regular basis.” In my case, I tune into a team meeting once a week. For about an hour we have a phonecall, we check in and you just have to sort of be realistic about the fact that you still have responsibility for the project. You have legal responsibilities, you have financial responsibilities. You can’t just sort of set it and go because the worst thing that you want to have happen or the last thing you want to have happen is to get the phone call on Saturday night at midnight. It’s like the police are not going to hear it or whatever because you want to just make sure that you’re always on top of what your business is doing, right?

And so to move into that when you decide to outsource, that’s a cost to your business and so you have to realistic about the type of income that you can make given the fact that you’re asking a lot of other people to do the work. In the consulting business that I’m in, the margins that we ask for are decent. We make a good living but as I think I said in the pre-interview, I’m not making millions of dollars a year but I make a healthy living because I have trusted other people to do the work, etcetera. If I wanted to go back to that schedule where I’m working 6 to 7 days a week, flying over the place, I would make a lot more money but I would also wouldn’t have time. I wouldn’t have time for my kids, these kinds of things. So I prefer lifestyle over those other types of decisions.
Owen: And another point I think is great, critical for this all thing of creating a framework is that you said, load the business.

Stephen: Yeah. Here’s the thing. We talked about this a bit earlier where niche is king, right? I think you got to really understand that. When you’re thinking about starting a consulting business or you’re thinking about starting any business, this is one of the place and things that I work with. We work with small businesses all over the world. On their strategy, I hear strategy statements all the time or business statements all the time about “We will solve hunger” these kinds of things and there’s just no realism there.

So what I mean by knowing the business is know where your money comes from, know where your sweet spots are for winning that business because even though there’s probably piles of money everywhere, where you most likely to get it from? Know and understand what your clients think is a high deliverable, or I’m sorry, a high quality deliverable because you want them to be wowed all of the time and then understand the language of your business. One of the most difficult things, the biggest various entry if someone listening to us right now wanted to get into the business that we do would be just the jargon. If you think about all of the UN agencies and all the government agencies, they have probably 10 million acronyms that they use every day and that create a massive barrier to entry. So the more that you can know the business the more that you can be immersed in it before you outsource it, the higher likelihood that you’ll have that you’re going to be able to talk the clients in the language that they understand and be able to give them confidence that you’re going to deliver the quality that they need.

Owen: And so since you are basically systematizing your business based on frameworks for the most part, how do you track and verify the results being delivered by the employees in the different divisions of it?

Stephen: The person that I work most closely with is the director of the company and I feel like I can have a conversation with him almost any day of the week. We usually check in, we have a standing meeting with the entire team in Washington, DC once a week and that’s where we discuss both of our pipeline and our project management. Both of those things are really where we take a sort of weekly temperature read of what opportunities are available, what were working on, what we have won and what we’re delivering for clients? And so over an hour long meeting, I’m able to really just get a very detailed sense about the health of the day-to-day operations of the company.
And then on the quarterly basis I do a sweep of the entire company of the finances, if any legal issues, of payroll, these types of things and that’s just the main half-a-day of communication with understanding to making sure that everything is in place. And then twice a year I work specifically with the director to set strategy to make sure that he’s happy, that he’s satisfied with his job. To make sure that the company is going in the direction that we wanted to go that he’s satisfied with how things are performing and if there’s any further contribution that I might need to give.

Owen: And also I think during the pre-interview you also were most specific about it. You said that the business acquisition is tracked to share online pipeline application and then project management side, their reports that you see that track basically to how the project is coming. Go ahead.

Stephen: Absolutely. This starts here. This is where we use our technology, right? So this is where Do.com comes in because do.com is the application we use both for our business development pipeline. So right now, I could click two buttons and I can see what is it we’re bidding on, what are the size of the projects, what do they do, etcetera and then I can flip to another screen and see what have we won, what have we lost, how much money we won, these kinds of things. And then again, in DropBox we have 2 to 3 clicks I can see what’s the health of a project, what’s the status of it, what has been delivered, what hasn’t been delivered and we’ll run those processes. And then the same thing with accounting, QuickBooks online, etcetera where two to three clicks and I know what’s going on.

Owen: Good. And so since you have your system based on the framework that you’ve created for your team members to follow, I’m just curious what has been the longest time you’ve been away from the business?

Stephen: Probably coming up, I’m going to have a child and my third kid in 2 weeks.

Owen: Congratulations.

Stephen: Thanks. So I’ll probably going to take several weeks off where I’m just going to concentrate on that. But I’ve gone several weeks without touching base. I can’t remember the exact timeframe but I know that I’ve been gone at least 2 or 3 weeks where I haven’t checked in. Again, it’s made possible because of the fact that I have people, employees that I trust and I know that they’re getting the job done. So that’s probably about as good as I get. If I really really wanted to, I could set the expectation with my director to say “Look, I’m going to be gone for the next 2 months or 3 months. If there’s a code red, absolute, the ship is sinking, emergency, call me but otherwise, I’m not participating.” But I found to check in once a week and that’s healthy for me and keeps me where I want to be.

Owen: What I didn’t ask and I should have asked is when you’re building based on the framework, what happens if the employee who’s making decisions based on the framework comes across a situation where the framework does not apply?

Stephen: Fails?

Owen: Yeah. It fails or either the framework had not even thought about is, how do they resolve that situation?

Stephen: That’s the reason why we have a director. If we had a truly automatable process where it works exactly the same every single time, I wouldn’t need a director. I just need several people who I could trust to execute on each of the piece of the business. We do need to have one person in place who can make those human decisions about awkward situations or I can’t make a decision about whether or not we should bid for this or I’ve got a consultant who has decided to change their contract criteria so that’s why I have a director.

Owen: And so does that mean that the framework now becomes modified and updated as moving forward as the new rule for that step?

Stephen: No, because those are true outliners. What I did was basically, I took what I was doing as an individual and I broke it down so that it’s a process and a framework that others can use. So I’ve been using it for almost 9 years, 10 years now and it’s still the same process. It’s just those outliners are questions as you say, either they can’t be answered or somebody doesn’t feel comfortable. You just needed to have a decision maker in place to say “Here you go,” if you don’t want to be doing that and if you don’t want to be the person who’s actually directing those activities.

Owen: And that’s why to know your business part of it is very important because I’m not sure you could have created this framework if you didn’t literally know the business and you know.

Stephen: Absolutely. If I were to jump into architectural consulting tomorrow, I would have no clue what to do. I wouldn’t anything about it. I don’t how to build a house, I don’t know anything about engineering but there are lots of consultants who were successful in that particular business. So knowing your business, knowing the jargon, knowing the criteria, these types of things, knowing the kinds of questions the clients have, it’s essential.

Owen: Yeah. And so has company now being transformed based on systematizing your consulting practices based on framework?

Stephen: I had to say my answer is yes. I think I mentioned in any interview with couple of different business cycles over the life of the company over the last decade. One time, like I said we’re triple what we are now but the realization after we went through our last business cycle of the fact that I want to work 7 days a week allowed me to take that leap. It took a long time putting these pieces in place. It was not sort of “Hey, get it done in a week.” It took me a year to get a system rolling that I really like and that I have high confidence in and if you want, the true criterias are dollars and cents, right? Since I’ve put this system in place, since we have this team in place that they’re working on this framework, we more than doubled and almost tripled our revenue. So I mean that’s the real nice piece of that in every work. We’re having trouble sorting enough talent to keep up with the group. So that’s where you wanted to be.

Owen: And also personally, how is your life being transformed as a result of this?

Stephen: It’s fantastic. I remember this question, the real answer is I’m an entrepreneur. It’s not that I don’t want to work, it’s that I know where my sweet spots are and what this has allowed me to do with work on other parts of my business and work on other ventures and other opportunities that I see out there. So I’ve developed new products ISG. I’ve developed new client relationships in those kinds of things and I have helped other completely unrelated businesses that I’m able to invest my time and energy and finances and then actually pay attention to. So it’s giving me a likeness, its given openness of my schedule and basically, I feel like I’m actually running my life again rather than having the company run it for me.

Owen: So now that you’re not in the grind of the consulting practice, where are you spending the most of your time? Where is your focus on now?

Stephen: Creative, absolutely. For me it’s creative. It’s identifying new opportunities or new innovations that would maybe something I could implement or finding ways about how we can use practices from other industries especially sort of the online marketing industry etcetera to enhance our business and maybe bring innovation in that way. But really it’s about creating new products and services because that’s what I love to do.

Owen: And we’re coming to the end of the interview, I’m just curious though. Now that listeners that listen to this so far are most likely someone who’s also in the consulting or a coach or someone who’s business necessarily and such that, you have different clients with different needs and now you have to provide solutions for them differently, right? What would be the very first step that you think they should follow in order to or the first step they should take in order to get more calm inside the whole chaos that currently they are experiencing?

Stephen: Right. Where I find when I speak with either individual, consultants or groups of people who are interested for me at consulting business and I meet them all over the place and this is not an unusual question. The first thing that I always ask them is “How do you win business?” And this seems counter intuitive because we all need to win. We all think “Hey, I have to earn money. That’s what I do.” But it’s much like answering any other question of the universe, if you start at the beginning of year your business is, the rest of the pieces fall in relatively quickly. So I first start asking them about like “Where do you get your opportunities from? How often and what’s your confidence level that you’re going to have enough work to take you through the next month or the next year? Do you have consistent sources that you can count on to make sure that you’re always going to be generating new business?” And often times, surprisingly, the answer is I do business development after I finish the project or that it’s something I do at 11:00 at night when I’m done doing the rest of my work or rather than the first thought process and that’s where I would start. So if I were somebody starting in the consulting business, I would just make sure that that is just a fine tune humming machine about understanding where opportunities are, how you’re going to win them and then what you’re going to do with the map after that basically.

Owen: Well, I like that. So what books or tools that you currently use now or let’s stick to books, what books you think have had the most influence on the way you think currently and why? Especially regarding creating the framework.

Stephen: Sure. Yeah. I’m a “getting things done” guy. If I’m going to pull something I think that is useful for this particular audience and this particular piece of information, I think David Allen has it together about looking in an e-mail once and then taking an action from it or making sure that you have filing systems organized and easily repeatable. That’s really where my brain goes and it speaks to me. I would say that that’s a high piece of influence for me. But also I think most of where I find my successes in being an early adaptor, on being very comfortable being an early adapter, as I mentioned earlier I’ve using Skype almost longer than anybody I know of. I was a DropBox-user before people even knew what DropBox was and being able to be comfortable in that virtual world and being sort of what I call the bleeding edge of what’s going on out there and it has allowed me to identify particular opportunities to not only put these systems in place that I have but then to innovate further within an industry that is fairly curmudgeon to be.

Owen: So is there a question so far that you wished I’d ask you during this interview that for some reason I just blabbered around and didn’t get to ask you? If so pull us the question and we ask it.

Stephen: One of the things that I think a lot of people want to do their business on autopilot is there’s that lure and one of the things you didn’t ask me is like where are you right now? I live in Costa Rica. I’m from United States originally but I live in Costa Rica full-time. My family has also lived in the country of Hungary. We’ve also lived in the country of Jordan and we’ve been overseas for years and the thing that I would encourage you when you’re thinking about systemization or somebody is thinking about going into consulting businesses and embracing and accepting virtualocity basically. I’ve been able to create a successful relatively nice business and I don’t sit in the place where we would think that we would win in most of our business. I don’t sit in Washington, DC. I don’t sit in London. I don’t sit in Dubai and so it’s possible but this sort of goes back to one of my criteria about being realistic about your earning potential and those kinds of things because if you don’t sit in those places, you have to give away that revenue to other people who are going to perform that work, etcetera.

Owen: Yeah. So what’s the best way for a listener to connect with you and thank you for doing the interview?

Stephen: The best way would be through e-mail or give me a phonecall. I mean I just give it to you right now?

Owen: Feel free, if you can handle the e-mails.

Stephen: Sure, stephen@ladek.com. That’s my ladek.com. That’s the easiest way to do it or you can find me on Skype @stephenladek.

Owen: So I’m speaking to the listener now and if you’ve enjoyed this interview so far and you’ve seen how Stephen talk about creating framework in situations where you cannot solely map out a procedure for but it does depends more on rules, if you’ve enjoyed this interview so far and how Stephen creates framework for his business so that other employees could make decisions based on the framework and you feel that this interview is useful, go ahead and leave a positive review for us on iTunes. You can do that by going to SweetProcess.com/iTunes. The reason for the review so that other entrepreneurs can read your reviews, finds your reviews useful and sign up to listen to the interview. More people showing up for the interview the more we get inspired to interview more successful entrepreneurs like Stephen.
And finally, if you’re on the point in your business where you need to literally get things out of your head and document them to your teammates or your employees, know on how these things be step-by-step how to get stuff done, check out Sweet Process and sign up for a free 14 day trial of Sweet Process and don’t forget, share this interview with any entrepreneur out there you know that will find it useful. Stephen thanks for doing the interview.

Stephen: Thank you so much, Owen. It’s been a pleasure.