Agency principal Jason Mlicki talks to me about the terrifying, yet necessary, business decision to narrow the focus of his agency and fully commit to content marketing and marketing automation. You’ll hear how that decision “ruined his life”, while also paving the way for 3 years of growth unlike the company had ever seen.
We begin with Jason’s memory of what it was like to officially commit to transitioning from a full-service, undifferentiated agency, to a much more focused position on professional services firms.
Transcript
Jason: At the time, Blair’s model of positioning an agency, that idea of narrowness; an inch wide and a mile deep. It felt like extremely radical I thing for most agencies, even me at the onset. I was kind of scared. Actually, I was really scared. I remember being in Florida at an event and talking to Blair on the phone. He was like “I’ve just ruined your life, haven’t I?” I was like “well, yeah. You ruined my life.”
It was like you ruined my life in the sense that I smell this better reality that I had to reach and try to grab and I was scared as heck trying to grab it. The thing I thought was interesting is when we did that for us, our umbrella is professional services. At the time, oh my God, that’s so narrow. That’ll never work.
There was a lot of fear around the narrowness of being an agency specializing in professional services. Now, three and a half, four years removed from that I think more often our conversation is it’s too broad. We need to be operating at a narrower slice inside of that. What’s really fascinating is also I’ve seen a whole crop of agencies our size carving out some of the same categories as us. My whole long-winded comment is: I wonder if that message is really taking hold. If you’re seeing more and more agencies say “we’ve got to specialize. We’ve got to get narrow.” That doesn’t seem as scary to agencies maybe as it did four years ago. Maybe it wasn’t even scary four years ago. I was scared and nobody else was.
Mark: Once again, you’re really on par with your peers. It was terrifying then. It’s terrifying now. It’s really scary. What you just mentioned is a key insight which is people need to get into positioning. The agency thinks they’re about to close off massive segments of the possible hireable work, and they’re going to select this narrow niche which terrifies them, ruins their life as you mentioned. Because it is. It’s the scariest thing to do and then just like you saw a few years later, wow. It should actually be this step and then this narrow, and this narrow.
Jason: It becomes microscopic. I’m reading this book called the Sixth Extension. It’s all about …
Mark: My friend just read that one! He told me to never start reading it because it’s horribly depressing.
Jason: It is horribly depressing, but what’s really fascinating about it is that there’s this whole segment talking about species and how in the tropics, there’s incredible specialization inside of species structures. What was really fascinating about it was they all sort of inter-rely on each other. There’s species that specialize in these incredibly narrow things in life to survive. If that ecosystem falls apart, then it’s not viable.
The analogy in my head is, and you’ll love this, Google is the fabric that enables that specialization, right?
Mark: Yeah. I agree.
Jason: Google is that connective tissue that enables agencies like ours or any agency to say we’re going to get this narrow. We never could have done that 20 years ago because how in the world would we have ever found clients. It was just way too hard. Google is doing that. It’s just really fascinating to see all the analogies inside of that evolution. We’re just in business in general. What we’re all struggling with is you can now be so much more narrow today then maybe you were able to ever be even five years ago.
Mark: That’s a huge point. You hear us talk a lot of time about those roles of attracting, informing, engaging, and nurturing. Those are only really able to be properly executed if you’ve got the foundation in place. The right positioning. The right content strategy. The right contact strategy. It all starts with that position and its role is all about being as narrow as possible. And that is possible now because Google has the ability to do what would otherwise be impossible, which is bring every single person who is desperately searching for you right to your doorstep. Fifteen years ago, how did that happen? It didn’t happen.
Jason: Yeah. Yeah. This is really an interesting kind of analogy. That’s kind of a sidebar.
Mark: That’s really interesting.
Jason: My point was we are definitely seeing, in the categories we work, we’re seeing new agencies pop up that I wasn’t aware of six months, nine months ago. We’re seeing more people embrace that idea of “we’re going to get narrow. We’re going to go after this sector”… which has forced us to raise our game. Oh my gosh, there’s more players here. Luckily we got a head start on some of them. We better get even better. We better double down and really drive into the heart of the issues that we think are absolutely most critical to the clients that we really want in that sector as quickly as we can. That’s why we have a runway.
I think that’s a good thing on the whole. I’d much rather compete with a group of specialists than a sea of generalists in the long run.
Mark: Having some competition’s great because if there’s no competition you maybe worry that you’re in the wrong pool, right? You mentioned about having a runway. You started this during the beginning of the process of the positioning exercise with Blair three and a half years ago. Then you took the content very, very seriously. You really committed to this and you’ve been executing it in a consistent way for a long time now.
In Google’s eyes, you’ve got a very real head start. You also have the discipline. You know how to do this. For you, it’s not a matter of figuring out how to do it or getting lucky with running three smart articles. You’ve got this engine and you know how to keep it running. These other people are keeping you sharp, but that’s a benefit. Whereas if you were just starting out now you’d have to work a lot harder.
Jason: It’s funny because it’s easy to forget how hard it was to get to the first hill of success. In the beginning it was so hard for any content to get any traction at all. I think you guys always talk about it and I think you guys are spot on. This idea that it’s a long marathon-like grind. You’re not going to win with one piece of content. You’ll get blips. We’ve had some pieces of content that I still don’t know why they did as well as they did in the moment. But they did really, really, really great for us.
But it’s really about the marathon. It’s about that long run of constantly writing, consistently producing and learning along the way and trying to figure out and driving down to the heart of the need. What are the fundamental challenges and how do we actually solve it. Just being that open-minded about everything I think is the critical piece of it all. When we kind of step back and go “oh my God, we’ve been thinking about this entirely wrong for seven months, or whatever.” That’s great for us! That means it’s like “holy cow, there’s a whole new level of learning here that we didn’t even know was there.”
We actually view every kind of client engagement almost like a big A-B test. We’re like trying different approaches and process. We’re seeing what happens. So it’s like we’re constantly optimizing that whole experience. Then, of course, we try to drive it back to the sales loop and determine if it worked or didn’t work and we’re going to do it differently this time. We’ve kind of applied elements of digital marketing to just kind of running the agency I guess if that makes sense.
Mark: There’s a cycle there right? The first thing you mentioned is the discipline and the marathon, the grind of creating content. When agencies, they’re on the outside looking in, the first thing you think of is well how are we going to have something to write about for that long? The second thing you mentioned is the answer to that. Because you committed to this niche you’re always getting deeper, and deeper and deeper and deeper and you have these breakthroughs. All of a sudden you’re looking at everything differently.
So you’ve got a whole new world of content to write about. I’ve never seen any agency get to the bottom of that well. I’ve never seen the end of that. From what I can tell it just keeps going. That’s a thrill. That’s one of the greatest rewards of our profession; the fact that we get to engage in something like that; an endless task like that.
Jason: I think too, it’s like the more we get at it, it’s the more we find out how much we don’t know. I’ll have a very strong hypothesis about how something works and then all of a sudden I’ll dig into it and I’ll start talking to marketers about how they’re doing that and it’s not at all what I thought. Suddenly it’s this epiphany that “oh my gosh, there’s a whole different way of looking at this topic that had never even crossed my mind!”
Mark: A theme there, which is interesting, is that the key ingredient was deciding to let Blair ruin your life and commit to positioning. Looking at something and realizing that “wow and we’ve been thinking that it’s all wrong”. The theme there is courage. I mean the courage to take a true leap of faith. Having the heart to say “ah, maybe my idea on this isn’t right.” When you have the courage you’re able to check a certain amount of your ego at the door. That allows you to grow in the way you need to grow as an individual and organization. Courage is the main ingredient there I think.
Jason: Yeah. I’ll say thank you, I guess. I appreciate you saying that. I don’t think of myself as a courageous person in terms of the decisions we make in the business. I do think that, to your point, certainly in the early stages there were a lot of people that looked at me like I was probably half way crazy for making some of the business decisions we were doing. I mean, we had a PR guy we worked with that just was like beside himself. He could not possibly understand how this was going to work and how it made any sense at all.
For me I think about it as, you even said this to me… Early on, when we were working together you talked about do you get paid to market yourself, which ultimately was the question of “can you get paid to speak?” Of course the answer at that point in time was “no, not really.” We really weren’t in a position to do that. Now we can. When you stop and think about that for a second, that’s a gigantic sea change. The impact on everything, right.
Both our clients stress about whether or not content is a model for them. The thing I always come back to is: “well how are you getting clients now and what’s the cost of that? And how hard is that? How could the world be different if, just on occasion, someone read something online and was like “Wow, these guys are like really helpful. These guys really know something. What if I talked to them.” How much can that change everything about the business development process?
For me that’s all of the business development energy, right. That’s the whole effort. It’s a much more enjoyable. You know what I mean. It’s way more interesting and engaging and fun.
Mark: One of the key things, there is the idea that we’re small organizations and so we have much more of a broad perspective. There’s no silo between business development and marketing because business development and marketing are the same people. That does help. That allows you to see trends and patterns very quickly. Rattleback is your own little crucible and you’re experimenting as you mentioned earlier all the time inside of that.
You’re seeing where these connections make sense. Then you’re able to bring them to your clients because you made it work for yourself. You’re going to bring it to your client and tell them a very clear picture that makes sense to both the sales side and the marketing side. That’s also a theme that’s really, really helpful. These tools lend themselves to that, especially once we get into automation. We start talking about generating leads, this whole lead development idea. What sort of leads do we want to end up with?
That has to come from sales. Marketing can’t tell us what leads we want to end up with. That’s a sales based activity, right? So we talk with sales. They tell us what kind of leads they need. Then we create marketing programs to create those kinds of leads specifically. Now with technology we can do it down to the attribute point demographically. This kind of person, in this place, with this title, and these responsibilities goes over to sales. You, you’re both, right. You get to see the marketing and sales side of things, and see this technology come to really proper use in a much quicker rate.
Jason: It’s funny too. I see this in our clients a lot. We had it here for a long time. Almost like technology, keep at arms-length. Like CRM. I don’t know if that’s really going to work for us. We haven’t had good luck with CRM in the past. Blah, blah, blah blah, blah. It was always like all these a thousand excuses why certain things are used to their fullest extent. The thing I try to tell our clients and what I’ve tried to embrace in myself is you got to be all in.
I want to be all in on CRM to the best of my ability. I am going to learn everything that I can do with that technology as best as I personally can in the context and constraints of my situation. I’m going to be committed to learning about lead qualification and opportunity qualification and sales accepted leads and marketing qualified leads. All this stuff that seems noisy and at times probably doesn’t make any sense to half our clients and even to us but let’s understand it, break it down and synthesize it and use it.
I think market automation is the same thing. Clients hear “automation”, and they, at least for our sectors, freak out because they think of what they do as largely relational, the professional services firms. They can’t see how they can automate that. I’m always like well maybe that’s not what it’s about. Maybe it’s about understanding the data that’s there and how you can use that data to make relational marketing more effective. I think to do that you’ve got to commit. You have to embrace it. So you know what? We’re going to be all in, two feet into this thing. We’re not going to do it halfway. We’re not going to buy the technology and then just see what happens.
I think that happens a lot. We did it with Salesforce We literally did that with Salesforce back in 2006 or 7. We were in it halfway.
Mark: Yeah. Same here actually. We bought Salesforce. I wasn’t all in, right. It didn’t work because I wasn’t all in. Bringing it up to present day we talked about the fears you had and the concerns you had three and a half years ago. What do you look at today? Where are you? What’s going on with all this marketing now. How does it impact the business? What are you looking forward to moving forward?
Jason: I’ll give you some of the raw data. I think some of the raw data is pretty valuable. I’m going to look over here as I have some of this stuff written down. As you said over the course of the last three and a half years we’ve produced in excess of 40, 50 articles, 150 blogs, 10 webinars, handful of research studies. All that stuff has been the backbone of almost 20 or 30 different speaking opportunities at industry associations and clusters around the country. I always view it as the content is the backbone to get the speaking engagement because it allows us to shape a point of view on something. Then someone can say “well I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of this guy or if he knows anything but I’ve read his article and it sounds pretty interesting. Oh he did speak over here. It looks like he did a pretty good job.”
We view those as going hand in hand. I think that three and half year journey, we’ve seen the site traffic go up 400%. Literally we’ve quadrupled the traffic to our site. As you know I’m working with your team. We’ve got, in terms of lead generation, we went from never generating a lead online to generating hundreds a year. Looks like we generated 1,400 leads last year online, through the web.
Mark: It used to be just zero?
Jason: Zero. It was literally zero. Maybe it was a handful. But yeah it was zero. For definition’s sake for who’s watching this, we define a lead as anybody that raises their hand and gives us the right to market to them. To me that’s a lead.
Mark: That’s the classic definition of a lead. Yup.
Jason: So they sign up for a newsletter. That’s a lead. It doesn’t mean that they’ve specifically asked to work with us. It just means that they’ve said you guys have something to say and I’m willing to listen to it. that’s good enough for us.
Mark: And then, people get into your system and then you’re able to nurture them through every stage of the buying cycle. Without that that’d be 1,400 individuals you would not have the opportunity to market to.
Jason: Exactly. At this point in time we generate 90% of leads online essentially. The vast majority of our leads are online. Then over 60% of our opportunities, our new business opportunities, not from our client base, new clients are generated either through the web or through speaking. The combination of the two. I kind of view them as almost inherently intertwined because it’s very rare that someone comes to an event and says “hey we want to talk to you.” Usually they come to the event and then they interact with our site for seven months, fifteen months.
We had some opportunities come up recently that literally they heard us talk two and a half years ago. There’s a long tail to that that we don’t even really understand. I think right now our biggest challenge is, as you said earlier, it’s figuring out how to attract the very specific high qualified firms that we really covet doing business with. We know who they are. Some of them know who we are. We haven’t necessarily drilled down into the actual fundamental needs states and presented a product service bundle that literally takes away that pain so quickly that they’re “oh my gosh, I didn’t know you were there.” That’s what I’m trying to figure out how to do.
Mark: Well this is that next level of position you’re talking about.
Jason: Yeah. We’ve been struggling with that for a while, right. Like you said it’s like working pretty well and so you don’t really want to break something further once it’s working, even when you think that maybe it could be iterated and improved from there.
Mark: Where you are now you’re putting a stake in the ground with professional services. So you’ve got that. You could create a whole suite of content, maybe all your content goes towards a more focused area without overtly stating it. The content, any lists you acquire that sort of thing can be all based on a bit tighter range, but if you’re the average person and your search shows up on the site from the wider range, you’ll still feel at home.
Jason: Yeah. We’ve tried to do a lot of that. Tried to build micro-segments inside of the broad umbrella and then build content for those segments. Then we learned the hard way that I guess every agency’s going to struggle with his. You carve out a position, say it’s a retail agency. All we do is online media for retail companies. Inside of that retail umbrella, there are probably incredibly different segments with incredibly different needs and are in hugely different stages of their lifecycle.
That’s what we found for us is that there’s different segments that are in very drastically different stages of marketing maturity. We have to serve up content that’s relevant to their needs. We have to turn that content into products and services to meet their needs as well. That’s maybe the harder part of this. It’s one thing to say we’re going to write about this. It’s another thing to actually create a fundamentally different product/service bundle than every other agency has.
That’s the end state for us. We want to create service solutions that really nobody else is either capable or knows how to deliver. That would be the ideal scenario.
Mark: Well I think you’re getting close to that just through the exposure you’re having and that’s one of the benefits of positioning as well is that you become so intimately familiar with the pain point of the true nature of the struggle that you’re able to create solutions to problems that your competitors don’t even know exist because they’re not close enough to the client’s reality. So you’re on that road and that is nice.
This is a snapshot of where you are three and a half years in from starting this. This is not three and a half years since the website launched. This is three and a half years since you decided to reposition it, focus and rename, all that stuff. You’ve done a lot over the past three and a half years. You have the successes today but we’re also seeing the snapshot of “Well, we need to clamp down to this next level and if we do the same thing a year from now, (which would be kind of fun actually), it’d be great to see what happened.” What did that look like. What was the manifestation of this deep thought that you’re presenting here.
We should do that. It’d be kind of fun to have a year to year review. A little scary.
Jason: I don’t know if I want to hear that story. I think you’re absolutely right. One of the things that I’m really excited about right now for our clients is just this idea of bringing data into relational marketing. There is this wealth of data now that we have at our fingertips. I think that, at least for our clients, they don’t know how to use that real well yet. That’s where I think we could really help them with. I think that’s sort like the next big thing that we’re going to focus on: okay what do we do with this stuff because it’s not cut and dry and it’s not science. It’s art as well and help them understand what to do with.
Mark: You’re developing practices for doing it yourself because you’re looking at your own data and figuring out how to extract meaningful conclusions from that. You’re working those muscles. You’re exercising that. These days getting the data’s not the problem. Doing something with it is what the problem is. Like you said, so many people have all these great tools but they’re doing nothing with them. All this stuff’s there. It’s just sitting idle.
Yeah, I think that’s the next frontier for pretty much every agency we work with is figuring out how to make sense of all this great data that everyone now has access to.
Jason: There you go. I was feeling like we were really on to something there. Maybe we’re not. Maybe everybody’s on to that. We got to figure out what the perspective is on it I guess.
Mark: So big picture is real interesting here. Talking about from where you were, an undifferentiated firm going back a few years. Now where all the content investment you made and you happened to make it through the digital channel, the articles, the newsletter, the webinars, the research papers and the blogs. You’ve really invested quite a bit especially a firm your size. That lead to speaking and paid speaking. Now between the two of those things all the content, web-based automation marketing and speaking you gained 60% of the opportunities.
If you were to rewind back three and a half years and look at the two roads with facts. Now this road that looks scary as hell but 60% of the opportunities come from this or stay the course. What would staying the course look like today if you hadn’t done all this stuff? If you hadn’t made the brave decision where would you be right now?
Jason: I don’t know if I have the answer. Maybe I should say I don’t know if I’m willing to give the honest answer. I don’t see any future for an unpositioned, non-differentiated agency. I continue to be flabbergasted that small agencies are not specializing and are actually have any success. I have no idea how they’re doing it. I’m completely floored that anybody can do that. I don’t know how they do it. I really don’t and there’re tons of them. I’m missing something. I don’t understand something because they’re doing it all around us and I don’t know how they do it.
For me the simplest way to think about it is what’s the cost of business development? What’s the cost of a person who sits there and hammers the phones and tries to build relationships with people you don’t know and tries to somehow get them to pay any attention and remember anything about our agency. What’s the cost of that? It’s pretty substantial.
You kind of compare that to the cost of our time, my time, the investment of our people to get really knowledgeable about something and then create something that’s always on, that’s always telling our story and interacting with people we would like to do business with on our on our behalf all day, every day. That’s pretty hard to make the case otherwise, right. The relational biz dev guy is only available some of the time and can leave any time he wants. The knowledge that we’re imparting and building and turning into content about leadership can exist in perpetuity. No comparison there.
It was not an easy path. It’s hard to do those things. At the same time I continue to be flabbergasted that agencies are having any modicum of success without doing it. I don’t know how they’re doing it because we really did not feel like that was a viable path at all.
Mark: Typically what we see is that it’s a gorilla client. There’s one gorilla that is pretty much funding the whole agency. They’re just hoping that that persists. If that gorilla goes away things aren’t so good. There’s a lot of hope that’s involved in that.
Jason: This is random. There’s a freelance writer that I know who said to me one time, “Jason, you turn away more work than anybody I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how you do it.” I’m like, well it’s not necessarily that I’m turning it away, it’s just more like we have a clear understanding of what the ideal client looks like. If the client doesn’t really fit that scenario than if we stay the long course and say you know what, you really ought to go over here and work with these guys because they really understand that. Eventually it’s in our best interest. They’re going to come back around if and when the time because now we have incredible amounts of trust.
When we tell them I don’t know anything about public relations or whatever it is and I don’t just chase something because it’s in front of me. It makes a huge difference in the long run. That does kind of surprise me as we look around the marketplace. I’m just shocked at how many agencies are continuing to actually, at least from the outside, look like they’re doing pretty darn well without making those hard decisions. I don’t know how they’re doing it.
Trust me if I didn’t have to sit in a hotel and have my whole world feel like was falling apart and make all these difficult decisions I wouldn’t have done it, right. We felt like those decisions had to be made if we were going to be viable and we were going to at least get where we wanted to go in the long run.
I think too, you run into agencies where in effect the gorilla client goes away. There’s not really any concerted consistent repeatable thing that’s going to replace it, right? The working of the principals, the partners that know how to get a deal done, they know how to make those connections but there’s what do you have that’s repeatable and hopefully sustainable that can generate some opportunities even if it’s not everything, but generate opportunities in a way that’s more functioning and not requiring this incredible lifting of giant boulders which is what it feels like, right to get those big deals.
Mark: The whole ideal of the funnel, and you’re talking about big numbers, 1,400 leads that came into your system. So you’ve got thousands of people between quadrupling your website traffic and the contact list you already had, thousands of people are going to get exposed to you and the firm every month and you’re only really looking for two to four projects over the course of any six to twelve month period. You’re not looking for thousands of jobs. You need a huge funnel in order to have this predictable outcome of great leads of those sales qualified leads.
A lot agencies don’t understand that. They look at these numbers we suggest and say those numbers are way too big for us. We don’t need that many clients. No you don’t, but if you want to close two to four well, you need a certain number of opportunities in there based on whatever your close rate is. In order to get that many opportunities you need to be nurturing tenfold, a hundred-fold.
Jason: If you’re trying to pull two to four opportunities out of a community this big, then you’re going to be much more desperate to close those opportunities and you’re going to bend your service. You’re going to bend your product. You’re going to do whatever you need to do. But if you’re pulling them from a community this big, all of a sudden it’s easier to say this is what we’re really good at and when this opportunity comes in front of us even though maybe I’m like wow, we’d really like to do that. That sounds great but it doesn’t meet any of the characteristics of the strategic account for us. Maybe we should just say, you know what? Let’s not do that. Let’s just wait for the next one over because the next one over will probably become closer to meeting those things we’re looking for and it’s a better investment of resources for my whole team. They’re going to be happier with the relationship, with the project, the outcomes, with a work/life balance, everything that comes out of that.
Mark: And they respect you. They came in through the right door. They’re coming after you .. One point I want to make right there is that, you just made me think of it. This is why I love these conversations. You’ve got this system. You chose to position, to narrowly focus. Instead of any business pretty much across the U.S. being a potential client you said, okay, 2% of businesses in the U.S., probably obviously less than that could be a possible client.
When we look at it, it’s funny looking at the general full service firm against a positioned firm. The full service generalist agency does anything for anybody, doesn’t want to alienate anybody on the website in their marketing. They typically have a list of the 300, 400 people on the whole list. They’re technically or ostensibly able to work for anybody, do anything but they’re only marketing to a few hundred people.
Whereas the specialist we see, they’re looking at a much smaller, smaller, smaller sector of the economy, but they’re marketing to thousands of those people. Funny, it’s like the magnifying glass. You’re putting that on there but you’re actually reaching far more people ultimately in a far more effective way, even though you’re looking at a much smaller slice of the economy.
Jason: It’s funny. We’re a second generation agency. We’ve been in business for 42 years. I can tell you that when we were a generalist firm, I could probably call up just about any marketer at any company in our region and they would probably still have had no idea who we were and we’d been around for 30 plus years. But our visibility in that narrow segment that we’ve chosen to go after in the last three years is pretty darn good and pretty significant.
There are firms that know who we are that I have no idea who they are. They’re not even on my radar screen. All of a sudden they come in and I’m like “oh my God, this firms amazing. I didn’t even know these guys were there and they’re awesome. We’re lucky to work with these guys.” That to me, setting everything else aside, business development, contact, whatever you want to talk about, technology, that in and of itself is usually valuable. That recognition that we’re going to get actual meaningful visibility.
I sat in the office of the CMO of Nationwide, a huge insurance company here in town like seven or eight years ago. It was a Friday afternoon. The guy looks at me, really nice guy, he’s like “Jason, I hate Fridays.” “Why do you hate Fridays?” “Every agency principal in the western hemisphere decides they have to call me on Fridays.” Are you’re going to remember any single one of those agency principles that called him? No he doesn’t remember any of them. He doesn’t remember any of those agency. They’re all in one ear out the other. Never remembers their name, nothing.
If there was a specialist agency that knows everything about his issues he’s going to remember those guys every time. That in and of itself is worth the investment. Creating actual visibility and memorability within that sector is way more valuable.
Mark: Yup. Absolutely. That’s the way it works. Well I think we’ve hit almost an hour here. We should probably wrap up. This has been a lot of fun. This is perfect. There’s no structure for this at all. We just did what we usually do. We had a conversation and tons of territory and have a good time doing it.
Jason: I hope I helped. When something this open kind of scares me. Maybe I’ll alienate people. I enjoy doing it too. It’s always good to connect with you. Obviously I know this isn’t the intent of this call, but I can’t imagine how, we look at Newfangled as our R&D department in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of learning that starts with our interactions with you guys either written or direct working together. For me that’s a huge knowledge base that we pull from that helps us get smarter and get better. I think that every agency, they need to have those sources whatever they are. I think you guys are certainly one of those for a lot of agencies. Thanks for all you guys do and the value you create.