Editor’s Note: In this partner interview, Robert Cioffi, CEO of Progressive Computing and Ted Hulsy, VP of Marketing at eFolder explore a variety of topics such as ways to sell against free consumer file sync services and the importance of training clients to meet your MSP’s technology standards.
Ted Hulsy: Hi Robert, thanks for your time today. Can you share just a little bit about Progressive Computing and maybe kind of how you found eFolder along the way?
Robert Cioffi: Sure. Progressive Computing is a typical MSP based in Yonkers, New York. For those of you who don’t know the area, it is just north of New York City, so we live in the shadow of the capital of the world and we’re about 15 people, have been in business 22, 23 years now and… you know, we’ve been using eFolder for probably the last 8-10 years, somewhere in that ballpark. We started out with file folder backup, then moved into the BDR stack, and now we’re looking at some of the other wonderful services and products that you guys offer, especially Anchor has our attention these days.
Ted Hulsy: And tell me what do your clients look like? And yeah…
Robert Cioffi: Great. Sure. Our clients are typically small and mid-size business, between… I mean they can be as low as a handful of people but we like to target specifically companies of 15-50, although a bulk of our business is probably in the 10-100 range, so there… really across the board organizations. We try to stay away from medical and retail for reasons that most listeners might understand right away, and our clients typically also do not have their own IT people. We are the IT department, right, so again nothing earth shattering for anybody who’s listening.
Ted Hulsy: Would you, if you came across an interesting account that had an IT manager would you… would you not, would you simply pass on them?
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, typically it’s not a good fit for us because of just business decisions that we’ve made in our business model. We really feel that when there’s more than one person accountable, then really no one is accountable so… and typically… yeah, I would say 99.9% of our accounts, it just doesn’t make sense for them to have an IT person.
Ted Hulsy: Great, and you actually… I’ve heard you speak in different forms about… you don’t call them clients, normally you call them partners…
Robert Cioffi: Yeah…
Ted Hulsy: Can you talk a little bit about that?
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, it’s a great conversation when I fire a client, just when they sign an agreement with us and their eyes wide and open… get very wide because, you know, they think they’ve done something wrong, but we introduce them to this concept that when they have our monthly managed services all-in agreement, they are no longer a client. They now become a business partner so we, you know, for short we call them a partner and there’s a big distinction. There’s a lexicon, or a language if you would, within our company of different words that we use. I don’t call my employees ‘staff’ or ‘employees’; They’re my team members. I want them to address me as such, even though I own the business and I’m the CEO, makes no difference. I’m all part of the team, same team and our partners, our clients that have our monthly subscription, all in price are considered our partners and we truly want them to feel that we are an extension of their business and if they don’t then, you know, probably wasn’t a good sale to begin with.
Ted Hulsy: What do you… so when you take on a new partner, what, how does… how do you, what’s your ambition around changing how they operate or how they operate…
Robert Cioffi: Mm-hmm.
Ted Hulsy: …or how they, how their business actually improves?
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think most MSPs both struggle with this and also know the answer. It really requires a lot of strategic thinking and time and commitment on both parties to be able to get together and do your QBRs or your TBRs, or whatever you want to call them, but to put in a lot of strategic time into planning… here’s where we are now and here’s where we would like to get to in terms of a vision and then do that gap analysis and figure out how to move them down that road. We don’t necessarily feel an account needs to meet 100% of our standards day one, as long as we keep moving them in that direction it’s always, it’s a positive thing. But it’s difficult because it can be like herding cats; getting them to commit to something, whether it’s the time to sit there and review reports or to have that discussion can be a little cumbersome for typically the smaller business as well, a 12-man shop where the owner is constantly on the go so it’s something that we all work hard for and we feel it’s just a continuous improvement process.
Ted Hulsy: What’s the biggest challenge in terms of getting people to, getting the partner to truly engage and make the time to evolve with you?
Robert Cioffi: You know, I think it, my experience has been that it really comes down to personalities. There are just some people who, you know, run their business, you know, like a chicken without a head and you’ve got to use some creative ways to get them to commit to you. Most people understand that value right away. I mean that’s what their signing up for to begin with and, you know, I think a lot of people hide behind email these days. We were just having this conversation in my office just two days ago where I was providing some leadership advice to somebody to say, “You know, look… stop sending the emails, right. You’re following the procedure and that’s great and you respond to emails. Why don’t you just pick up the phone and just talk to them. Why don’t you just go pay them a visit, get in your car and drop by.” I think there’s things that you can do like that to get their attention and let them know how serious you are.
Ted Hulsy: Were you speaking to a Millennial at that moment?
Robert Cioffi: Actually, actually no, no, no, no. It’s even a disease, an old Gen Xer like myself…
Ted Hulsy: [laugh]
Robert Cioffi: …who tends to just… and I was saying it to one of the leaders of my company. I said, “Look, I’m guilty of this too. It’s just so easy to send an email or volley back and forth, but you got to pick up the phone sometimes just to get your point across or to cut down all the noise.” But, I mean, to the answer of getting the owner or decision maker to make the time, I think you have to set that expectation well in advance and up front and let them know you’re really serious. You intend on spending time with them, that your time is valuable. Their time is valuable, but it’s worth the investment in their business and most people will… most people understand and appreciate that.
Ted Hulsy: Sometimes reluctantly agree, but they’ll agree eventually.
Robert Cioffi: They agree and my experience is, has been that most people even if they’re a little reluctant at first they start to see the value and then they look forward to the next time your meeting because they see that you’re really interested in improving their business, whether it’s their profitability or their efficiency or just, you know, making things better for them in some sort of way and then they start to look forward to that time because they know, “Ah, there was that big, burning issue that I couldn’t just, you know, call the help desk about.” It’s a bigger conversation and they look forward to that time now.
Ted Hulsy: And it kind of creates… it turns it into a habit over time and then there’s a mutual expectation of that happening. So are you on… do you guys call them QBRs? What do you call these regular gatherings with your partners?
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, admittedly the name that we use is not something… although I came up with it. Probably I would flip it around a little bit, but we call it a TBR, a technical business review. I mean, for anybody just starting out, I would flip it around and call it a BTR, a business technology review because it really puts business first…
Ted Hulsy: Yeah.
Robert Cioffi: …but I guess the acronym just kind of stuck and that’s what we call it so a QB… I don’t like QBR because QBR means that it’s always quarterly, and I think it’s a mistake for MSPs to think that they’re going to meet with everybody quarterly. It’s just not appropriate. Some people only really need an annual meeting and some people need a monthly meeting so to call it a QBR I don’t think it’s appropriate.
Ted Hulsy: Gotcha, Gotcha. So you want to tailor the pace and the cadence depending on is it a new client where you’ve got to do massive levels of refresh to their environment.
Robert Cioffi: Yep.
Ted Hulsy: There’s going to be more disruption or have they been with you for 10 years and everything is, you know, hunky dory and you’re not going to be changing a lot of stuff so it’s kind of…
Robert Cioffi: And it tends to be more about size and complexity of the organization. Obviously, the bigger they are naturally it’s going to be more complex but it, you know, the smaller ones, the ten-node networks, once a year is probably fine. A fifty-node network, you may be meeting with them quarterly if, you know, if required. In fact, I’m with an account right now. I’m sitting at a partner’s office, they let me use, there’s some free space here to have this call with you and I meet with them monthly.
Ted Hulsy: Great, great. Now you talked about standards that when you bring on a new partner you’re going to want to evolve them towards your standard. Can you talk a little bit about some of the standards that you have, either if they’re technologies or kind of business processes?
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, really interesting because we, again, one of these conversations that just happened at our office where the standards that we have, like most MSPs either have or are thinking about or can just, you know, instantly talk about, have a lot to do with hardware standards or, you know, every machine needs to have this kind of warranty or every firewall needs to be one of these two brands or a specific model… whatever that is, but at the bottom end of our standards list are also things like we need an onboarding and offboarding process for employees that’s not just regarding, you know, disabling user accounts but, you know, what type of training do they need when they come on board and, you know, do they have access to all the things that they need to have access to or have they been provided all the training, and I like to couch that in a sense of, you know, what about, like, keys to the office or access codes or business cards that have nothing to do with us, but it demonstrates that I’m providing them a framework that where Ok, I can feel in the IT portions here but I’m giving you an outline that you can then use to improve your own internal process. So that’s an example of about five or six things that we offer to our accounts, you know, like a computer acceptable usage policy. Things like that where either we just hand off to them and they can fill in the blanks or we work together to kind of complete, and I think that’s really important because it improves the level of communication. It shows an incredible amount of value from our perspective to them. Hopefully, they see the value and it just helps improve the relationship and the partnership – there’s that word, right, partnership – over time.
Ted Hulsy: Yeah, and it’s… I mean you really are demonstrating that it’s truly about their business success if you’re getting into areas like HR, physical security of their building, and their…
Robert Cioffi: Mm-hmm.
Ted Hulsy: …office space. I mean you’re really, it’s not just about the IT, it saying, “Look… here are some best practices.” You know, ITs kind of a touchstone because a lot of these things will end up back with a security breach…
Robert Cioffi: Yeah…
Ted Hulsy: …if they’re not done correctly or some other…
Robert Cioffi: Of course.
Ted Hulsy: ….problem, but it’s really around so many companies it probably doesn’t even occur to them to have an onboarding and an offboarding, like organized process when an employee leaves…
Robert Cioffi: Right.
Ted Hulsy: …but that’s really an opportunity that you guys are exploiting to really expand the value you can deliver to them.
Robert Cioffi: Well and honestly, Ted, it comes from the heart, and I know that’s a little weird to say in the technology business but it really comes from the heart. We truly care about their success and so I put these things on the table not to be, you know, you know, a hard ass but to say these are things that you really need to protect yourselves and I’ve synthesized the information and I’m giving it to you, you know. Hopefully, most people will respond that and say, “Gee thanks, that’s really important. I’ve been thinking about that and you just filled in a gap that I didn’t have the bandwidth to be able to do.” So…
Ted Hulsy: Yeah, and often just giving the playbook, I mean, you know, execution matters a great deal in followers, but half the time action will not be taken in the right direction unless you give people a template or a playbook or a framework that they need to then plug in to access.
Robert Cioffi: You take away all the resistance when you do that, so I’m in full agreement, yep.
Ted Hulsy: Now one of the standards and technologies that we’ve been talking about the past couple weeks is just the file sync market and…
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, big.
Ted Hulsy: …you know, I think, you know, you’ve kind of candidly kind of off the record with me said, “Ah, we’re kind of struggling to get our head around this space.” Can you talk a little bit about that?
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, I mean, and I’ll say it, you know, here on the record for your millions and millions of listeners to hear me talk about some of our deficiencies, but I’m happy to put it out there. I mean, we for a long time really didn’t have a good solution around file sync or, you know, how do we get our arms around shadow IT services like Dropbox and VoxNet and, you know, all these things that people are… Google. They’re just going out and they’re doing and they’re not consulting us, and unfortunately for us we’ve just turned a blind eye to it and I was pretty determined over the last month to turn that around and get ahead of it. We’ve been, so we did a full test of Anchor internally and we’re still in the middle of it but, I mean, it’s pretty much done. I can’t find any problems and it’s been working fantastically and the team absolutely loves it. It solved some problems for us internally so… and I had a conversation this morning about, with a client who, I’m sorry a partner, who was looking at different file sharing solutions because of the nature of the services that they provide. A lot of their people, about half their staff, is in the field quite a bit and they need access to files wherever they are, which can be in a lot of different strange places. So one gentleman on the team had offered to the executive director, let’s use Google, right. Here’s this whole platform that we could be using, and the conversation started out quite embarrassingly for me, “Hey Robert. We want to use this Google platform. How can you guys, you know, help us with this?” And it took me…. It took me about an hour to kind of wrestle that conversation and kind of turn it back around and explain how that’s not the appropriate platform for them, but that Anchor is and, you know, by the time I had left they were asking for, “Ok, the numbers sound good, just got to put it up ____ and get it over to us as soon as possible.” So… certainly this has been an area where we’ve struggled, and I mean for a while I was saying I don’t know why but I do know why and the simple answer is that as a typical MSP you’ve got a million things vying for your attention and pulling and pulling you and tugging you and, you know, dragging you in a lot of different competing directions and time is just, it’s a finite resource and I guess this is just for us just one of those things that we let go for a long while but, oh my goodness, the value that I see here is unbelievable. Not only will we be able to make money, but more importantly we’re going to be able to drive more stickiness and more value to our partners. They’re demanding this so we need to deliver.
Ted Hulsy: Let’s, I mean, let’s dig into that. So what in this particular partner’s case, what were some of the pain points that the users were experiencing, the folks who were…
Robert Cioffi: Yeah.
Ted Hulsy: …advocating, you know, Google Docs or something like that as a solution. What problems were they trying to solve?
Robert Cioffi: Well again, they’ve got about seven people in their organization who work and they provide services to a school district. They’re not employed as part of the school district. They work for a nonprofit agency that delivers some services on the inside of these schools and these people also tend to be very mobile, bouncing between schools, working from home, and even some of the executive team within that organization tends to be on the road quite a bit. They’re outside having meetings. They’re working from home today, you know, the next day they’re in the office. So the major pain point was how to I get to files and people were literally putting things on USB sticks or emailing themselves files or getting somebody in the office to email them something, and it’s just been a huge productivity drain that, you know, somebody recognized and, you know, you mentioned, you poked fun at me [laugh] earlier about… or you poked fun at the generational kind of thing. There were actually two advocates looking to go to Google and I can tell you both of them were probably no older than their early 30s, if they were even 30. So that generation looks at, you know, the suite of services and tools that are out in the market place as, “Yeah, let’s just sign up for that. Let’s just start using that.” And…
Ted Hulsy: Right, if you’re a Millennial and you’ve never even like, you know, plunked down your own money for a version of Office or for, you know, Microsoft Office. You’ve never purchased Excel…
Robert Cioffi: Yeah.
Ted Hulsy: …a Google Docs spreadsheet sounds pretty good until you discover you can’t really [laugh] do much in it…
Robert Cioffi: Yeah.
Ted Hulsy: …because it doesn’t have the features of Excel, but yeah, I mean I think that’s one of the phenomenons you see from the Millennial workforce is that there’s whole new rhythms and ways of doing things and there’s kind of assumptions that get made about the security or completeness of a solution…
Robert Cioffi: Right.
Ted Hulsy: …and if it seems easy, that seems right. Well that’s not always the case.
Robert Cioffi: So the interesting thing that happened this morning was that the two executives that represented the back office operation were of an older generation, right, and they were about, “No, security. It’s got to be centralized, you know, I don’t want things out on people’s laptops where they’re going to get lost or stolen or they’re just going to walk away with this data.” And I have to kind of… I found myself in this odd intermediary position of balancing the conversation like, “Look… These two folks who are out in the field, they’ve actually got some really great valid points here, and oh by the way, the executive wisdom here is security and backup and, you know, things like that are really paramount to the solution. So we can’t just willy-nilly pick something because it looks free.” And by the way, that was also part of the conversation was convincing them that free is not free. You know free had a much bigger cost associated with it and the free of the tool or the low dollars of some tool out there was just the tip of the iceberg, and I had to explain about all the support and standards and security and all of that stuff so…
Ted Hulsy: Well, double click on that, double click. I mean how did you convince… because we get this question all the time from partners, from MSP partners, they say how do I sell against free in the file sync conversation…
Robert Cioffi: Mm-hmm.
Ted Hulsy: …you know, in today’s meeting, how did you sell against free?
Robert Cioffi: Well, you know, to be honest with you I think I went out on maybe a little bit of a limb, maybe it was my A-type personality that kicked in and I could’ve found myself into trouble but I put it point blank, I said, “Look… you have an all in price from me. That’s a fixed monthly price that you love because you’re a nonprofit and it works well for your budget, but you’re essentially asking me to absorb more cost, more costs that I’m willing to accept by supporting a tool that I have not vetted, that I know that is insecure. It’s going to be problematic and it’s going to cause me a lot of heartache and harm, so for that I need to increase your monthly agreement price in order to cover my costs for supporting the tool that you want which is free so it’s free, yeah, on one line item, but you’ve just jacked up the price on another line item, and it’s not a healthy relationship. I’m the technical expert. You’ve hired us for our technical acumen and our expertise and our business reputation in this community. That’s why you selected us to begin with. So why are you not deferring to me at least for a big influence on this decision?” And I think that’s where the conversation started to turn around and I saw something kind of light up in the executive director’s eyes. She felt like, wow, like, I didn’t consider that so yeah, free is not free.
Ted Hulsy: Yeah, I mean I think that the MSP conversation around, I mean I think that always is where MSP business owners and principle led sales approaches need to take the conversation if clients want to customize or, you know, kind of be arbitrary about their choices and kind of dictate an approach to you is, “Ok, yeah, it may have this economic profile. You think it’s free but it’s not going to be free for us so we’re going to have to charge for that because it’s nonstandard and we’re going to have all this extra labor and headaches that we’re going to absorb the cost so we need to monetize that.” I think that’s ultimately where the conversation always needs to go in a MSP conversation because standards have tremendous value in terms of efficiency, doing the right things, having the right support and deployment structures in place so stuff doesn’t break and it’s secure, but even before that I think in the file sync conversation, if you let your clients or your partners, if you let them use something that’s free and insecure, there are going to be massive cost down the road…
Robert Cioffi: Oh Yeah.
Ted Hulsy: …I mean the costs are going to come in the form of data breaches. They’re going to come in the form of you know massive embarrassment or PR nightmares because you may have like a HIPAA breach…
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, I was about to say compliance is big, right.
Ted Hulsy: Yeah.
Robert Cioffi: Yeah.
Ted Hulsy: I mean you’re going to have legal bills and reputation…
Robert Cioffi: Reputation, yep.
Ted Hulsy: …problems and all these things down the road so, you know, taking the shortcut to the freebie solution is just going, you’re going to be paying for it in a different way and probably in a much more massive way down the road.
Robert Cioffi: And this is an organization that touches student data and there’s no compliance, meaning like HITECH or PCI or, you know, no public company compliance or anything like that so I turned the conversation in terms of security to, “Listen, even if this data exists in less than 1% of all your data, is that a business risk that you want to take?” And you know clearly the answer for them was, “No, absolutely not.” Right. You know, interesting enough, part of the conversation this morning as well was about some other technologies including their website and they had recognized, you know, you get what you pay for so I kind of brought that back into the conversation and said, “Hey, you remember the conversation we just had before about your website where you get what you pay for, well again it’s the same sort of mentality.” And I think you have to look for those opportunities where maybe in the past you’ve done a great job like most MSPs to convince them about a certain product or service that, you know, that why you want to spend the appropriate amount of money on a solution. It really is the same conversation all over again, a little bit more complicated because of the shadow, you know, the world of shadow IT and all these things that are kind of showing up in people’s inboxes, you know, sign up for this, do this, my friend told me to do that, you know, my brother-in-law… I love that conversation, right, “My brother-in-law uses this.”
Ted Hulsy: [laugh]
Robert Cioffi: And you’ve got to overcome… It is difficult but you know what, it’s our responsibility. I mean, this is the field that we’ve chosen and this is complicated stuff. You’ve got to be the steward and the shepherd. You’ve got to be the trusted advisor. I know that’s beaten to death, but you actually have to do that stuff in order to convince them.
Ted Hulsy: Right, and this and I think with this particular partner I think you’ve got the conversation kind of right where you want it to go, where I think it sounds like you made tremendous headway in their thinking and now…
Robert Cioffi: Oh yeah.
Ted Hulsy: …the balls back in your court to figure out ok, well here’s how we could deploy a business grade managed file synch solution into their environment, and then you’ve got to figure out, you know, how you’re going to price and package it and, you know, ____ it into their overall program but.. so that’s great. That’s great progress, I mean…
Robert Cioffi: Yeah.
Ted Hulsy: …just from the time when we talked about this kind of off the record a couple of weeks back to now, it sounds like your making some great headway there. Let’s kind of maybe shift the conversation just a little bit, just a couple of final questions and just maybe kind of talk about what are… when you’re looking at 2016, what are…
Robert Cioffi: Mm-hmm.
Ted Hulsy: …what are some of the… what are some of your big initiatives that you’re really focused on for your organization for this year?
Robert Cioffi: I’m glad you asked because we have a couple of big initiatives. One of them is around customer service excellence. We kind of wrote a book, or I’ll say a short manual, on what we perceive to be the way that we want to deliver customer service excellence, and this year we’ve decided to, instead of letting it just collect dust on a shelf, we’ve decided to break it down into manageable chunks through monthly lunch and learns that we’re doing with our team and some other internal exercises to really step up the game with delivering that service. Like most MSPs, my business partner and I started out as the two guys, right, and you have a certain way of doing things whether it’s genetically encoded or it’s because your paycheck depends upon it. It’s just the way we do things, but as you grown and you hire more and more people, you can’t just say culture. This is a way to instill your culture within the organization, and it can’t happen just by writing some stuff down. You actually have to lead people by having conversations and dialog and, you know, maybe over some pizza and soda and whatever. That’s one initiative that we’re working very, very hard on. The other thing is to really strengthen our technical teams abilities because we all know the vicious roller coaster ride that were on of the IT world. Things are constantly changing, constantly in motion. I mean take the Anchor product for instance. Granted it’s been around for a long time and we’ve been slow adopters, shame on us, but how do you then integrate that into your team. Well you’ve got to have a mechanism. You can’t just do the stuff ad hoc and willy-nilly. You have to have a form and a mechanism to be able to boost their knowledge. You know, there’s a multitude of vendors that we deal with obviously and we want to get our team in this rhythm of constantly learning. So that’s one objective, and then the third is really just execution around marketing. Something I think every single MSP struggles with. We still struggle with. I think we’re learning, but it’s a big investment of time and we decided this year instead of talking about a lot of things and planning a lot of things that we’re actually going to do a lot of things and we’re going to measure it and manage it and just execute even if it’s things that we’re only 80% comfortable with. We’re just going to do it and see what happens and then keep going back and refining.
Ted Hulsy: And what, you know, we talked a little bit about your marketing plans a couple weeks back…
Robert Cioffi: Yep.
Ted Hulsy: …you know have your thoughts gelled a little further on like… What would you say is going to be the tactic you’re going to feel like at the end of the year and you’ll go, “Wow, we’re experts at doing this?”
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, well…
Ted Hulsy: Have you decided? I mean it was just a couple of weeks ago.
Robert Cioffi: Yeah, I don’t know if we’ve decided yet. I can tell you what I feel, personally, works extremely well is getting in front of groups of people. If you can find ways to get involved in chambers of commerce or, you know, a local CPA society or you know a bar association or some business group. I think if you position yourself as a subject matter expert, with the goal of going in to educate, right, just educate. Don’t worry about selling. Just get people excited about a particular technology or a business process or whatever it is… that those people sitting in that room, if you can resonate with them, then you’ve made the sale without making the sale so to speak, right. Obviously, you have to have a passion for it. I personally, I mean, you know, I think I do a pretty good job of public speaking. You know, I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there better than me, but I like doing it for whatever it’s worth. So if everything I say in front of that group… maybe it’s not a perfect presentation, one thing for sure is that my passion comes through and I think people pick up on that. So if you’re a halfway decent speaker and you’re kind of passionate about what you are doing or what you’re talking about, I think that’s a great way to sell. Now you’re not going to sell, you know, in massive quantities but most MSPs don’t need, you know, 500 new accounts, you know. I think a good year would be onboarding 5-10 accounts. An awesome year might be, like, you know, 20-25. That type of engagement, in my mind, is something that will, if you do it consistently over time, will help you achieve your goal.
Ted Hulsy: Yeah, absolutely. Just to get to those 20 and 30 new accounts, you need 100s of conversations and I think my point of view on educational marketing is the best way to know whether you’ve hit the mark or you’ve got qualified leads in the room is are they listening.
Robert Cioffi: Yeah.
Ted Hulsy: You know instantly if you’ve got questions, if you’ve got people looking up from their steak lunch and actually making eye contact with you…
Robert Cioffi: Yeah.
Ted Hulsy: …and paying close attention and the way they linger and come up and ask questions afterwards. If you can deliver truly educational content, whether it’s at the, you know, the chamber of commerce or at industry societies or on your own lunch and learn circuit. If you can deliver true education, you’ll know immediately…
Robert Cioffi: Mm-hmm.
Ted Hulsy: …whether you’re making an impact and if those folks are listening, you know they’re going to be in tune with a conversation about outsourcing their IT services to an expert…
Robert Cioffi: Yep.
Ted Hulsy: Right, so…
Robert Cioffi: Make no mistake though here, Ted, it is time consuming to put this content together. It is hard to find those venues. We have struggled with it on and off over the last couple of years. What we’re trying to do is be a lot more consistent with it…
Ted Hulsy: Mm-hmm.
Robert Cioffi: But it’s, you know, it’s difficult and even in the New York area where there’s, you know, plenty of venues to speak at, it gets really hard so I would imagine in some smaller markets, you know, your options may be very limited so it’s certainly something to not rest your laurels on; however, I think it’s a great way to, you know… it’s a big piece of our puzzle, I’ll put it that way.
Ted Hulsy: I think it’s great advice and with that I think, you know, we’re just about here at the half hour mark so lots of great insights today, Robert. I really appreciate you spending time with us.
Robert Cioffi: Thanks, Ted.
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