The Rebooting Show

Thanks to everyone who has sent notes and left reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks to Jrdoog, who called the podcast “essential for anyone working in the media industry.” Note for future guests: Jrdoog wants me to keep badgering you for numbers. Be forewarned. This week’s episode with Protocol president Bennett Richardson is brought to you by Audigent.Publishers often struggle to know which partners bring incremental value. And the complexity of programmatic advertising has only exacerbated the problem. Audigent has been focused on demand generation for publishers’ premium data since day one, delivering customized solutions that drive additional direct and indirect revenue. Audigent’s platform is simple to integrate and focuses on a combination of technology, service and unique demand, providing a proven solution for what pubs need most today and into the cookieless future. White-glove service, superior technology and demand generation are three primary reasons why some of publishing’s most-recognizable and innovative brands rely on Audigent.Many publishers want to run the Politico playbook. What Politico managed to do is take politics and cover it like ESPN covers sports, attracting big enough audiences for a robust ad business, while focusing on narrower slices of must-have information on legislative minutiae to power a high-priced subscriptions business. It only makes sense that Politico itself would look to do the same, as it has with the two-year-old Protocol, which is applying the Politico playbook to the sprawling world of tech.Tech has long since matured as a vertical topic, rooted in Silicon Valley, to a horizontal story of power and influence that spans industries, governments and societies. It also happens to have both deep pocketed investors and advertisers..“The very core of Protocol was an extension of that same thesis, which is, can we use this similar influencer-focused, unbiased model that made Politico successful and made Politico Europe successful?” said Bennett Richardson, a Politico veteran and the recently named president of Protocol. “Could we take that out of politics entirely and bring it to a different power center in a different industry? Unsurprisingly, given everything that media and every other industry are going through, tech was the obvious first place to bring that thesis to.”Protocol is currently 55 employees, with eight newsletters that collectively have 250,000 subscriptions. The site gets about 1.5 million visitors a month, Bennett said, adding only that Protocol’s revenue was up 150%.Bennett and I discussed the Politico playbook, balancing consumer and specialized publishing, and why some ad categories like public affairs are booming. Below are some highlights of the conversation.The power of influenceFor all the downsides of the news business, there will always be a place for publications that can break through and serve the needs of elite powerbrokers. These audiences are simply too valuable. There’s a reason Axel Springer bought Politico for $1 billion, Axios has grown so quickly and upstarts like Punchbowl are making a splash. That’s also why the still-unnamed global news venture from Justin Smith and Ben Smith will target elites, promising “unbiased journalism,” and why upstart Grid secured $

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyI’m continuing my look-ahead series of podcast episodes to kick off 2022. Last week, Sara Fischer, media reporter for Axios, laid out her big themes for the year. This week, I spoke to Troy Young, the former president of Hearst Magazines, who over the years I’ve found to be very thoughtful about how the media business is changing. Reminder: If you like the podcast, please share it with others who might also find it valuable – and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts if you’re in the blue bubble brigade. Big thanks to mpm318 for this nice review.If you’re making bets for a Word of the Year in digital media in 2022, identity is a good candidate. The nature of digital advertising is changing as the industry transitions away from the third-party cookie as a key audience identifier. Identity, both on the page and across the ecosystem, is an evolving and complex component to publisher monetization. Audigent’s Hadron ID serves as a cookieless “container” solution, delivering cookieless solutions at scale while being fully interoperable with other ID systems. It is simple to deploy and instantly enables end-to-end cookieless programmatic buying while delivering addressablity. Audigent is transforming how clean first-party data powers the programmatic landscape by putting the control back in the hands of publishers and advertisers.Troy Young has been through the various interactions of digital media going back to the start. During the dot-com boom, he was an executive at early web marketing agency Organic. During Web 2.0, he decamped for video ad network VideoEgg, which turned into Say Media, a hybrid tech platform and vertical publisher, eventually landing at Hearst Magazines, where he was president. Now, he qualifies as officially Web3 curious, if not ready to start his day with “gm” tweet and regularly rely on riddles to explain what’s seemingly inexplicable in crypto. “It's an incredible time to be a curious person,” he said on The Rebooting Show. “There's so much to learn and there's so many people who are not part of what is a sort of classic media ecosystem that are writing about things that there's really an unending source of inspiration.”What stood out to me from the conversation:The need for media companies to use Web3 to rethink their relationships with their audience as well as within their organizations The promise of Web3 – and yes, we’re mostly talking promise vs reality at this point – is a fairer deal for all involved rather than the benefits and power going to a select fewThe opportunities for new brands that are part of communitiesFinally, I’m often struck by how few people deeply involved in the development of digital media are particularly pleased with many aspects of how it has turned out.“Let’s face it, monetization on the open web never really worked that well outside of the datasets and buying interfaces that allowed Facebook and Google to sweep up the long tail of advertisers and take over huge amounts of that ecosystem, including everything f

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyHope everyone’s 2022 is off to a good start. I’m kicking off a new mini-season of episodes this month that will focus on what to expect this year in digital media. To start, I spoke with Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, who has chronicled the industry for the past five years with the Axios Media Trends weekly newsletter.  As a reminder, please leave a rating and review of The Rebooting Show on Apple Podcasts.The key to sustainable media business models is having a tight relationship with your audience. That means understanding them. Audigent helps leading publishers like Penske Media and Fandom to unlock the power of their audiences with an industry-leading data activation, curation and identity platform that’s supported with best-in-class tools and teams that boost business outcomes. Audigent was founded on the belief that first-party audience data is a critical asset, today and into the cookieless future. The Audigent Platform is a flexible, turnkey solution that improves business for publishers of all sizes.I’ve always thought of the opacity of the digital media system as more of a feature than a bug. As a reporter that means sorting out what success looks like in an industry where smoke and mirrors have long been deployed as a strategy.“The industry is going through sort of a reckoning around measuring success,” said Sara Fischer. “It's hard to quantify progress in the industry, whether it's television or digital. We just don't seem to have a ubiquitous understanding of how to measure success.”Here’s what Sara expects to be major storylines in digital media in 2022. Expect more consolidation, only smaller deals2022 presented a unique M&A market for the digital media industry. With a booming stock market and ample opportunities for financing, the focus was on big corporate moves like BuzzFeed’s SPAC and Vox Media’s purchase of Group Nine. But the year to come will likely be less splashy as big digital media players do smaller deals.“There's going to be less talk about consolidation happening through SPACs. It's going to be more traditional and that's just because we've seen with BuzzFeed that there are some challenges to doing it that way. The SPAC market is cooled. What you're going to see more consolidation, but it's going to be private. So similar to what you saw with Vox Media, merging with Group Nine. You're also going to see more low hanging fruit continued to get scooped up. We're going to see a lot more of the Some Spider Studios getting acquired by Bustle.” The pivot from general newsTrump was very good to news publishers. Top news publishers racked up record audience gains and the obsessive attention Trump commanded from those who support and oppose him gave a boost to these publishers’ subscription programs. Of course, what goes up often comes down. For Sara, that means expecting news publishers to follow the lead of The New York Times and diversify their products into lifestyle categories to expand their customer bases beyond political obsessives as people increasingly tune out a “boring” Biden presidency.“Given the absence of a very volatile news

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyHappy holidays. I’m wrapping up the year with a final podcast and then, on Wednesday, I’ll send out the second annual Rebooting Awards. In the meantime, my final podcast of the year is with Rishad Tobaccowala, a longtime advertising executive who is now also publishing his own newsletter, The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past. If you enjoy The Rebooting Show, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts – or share it with others. But first, a message from this week’s sponsor, Mediaocean.Next week many are heading to Vegas for CES, the annual confab of the tech, media and advertising worlds. I know some of you will be skipping the action this year, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out. Mediaocean has set up a livestream of its programming of the Mediaocean Retreat so you can still enjoy the thought leadership the Retreat will feature from an array of top executives, including Twitter chief customer officer Sarah Personette, Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady and S4 Capital CEO Martin Sorrell, not to mention my podcast guest this week, Rishad Tobaccowala. The programming will run Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 from 12pmPST to 4pmPST. Check out the agenda and register now. Be sure to tick the box for virtual and you’ll receive access links. Also, the recordings will be available on demand following the event.Rishad Tobaccowala has long been known in the advertising industry for his sage view of the need to embrace change – “Change sucks. Irrelevance worse.” – often delivered through pithy phrases and neatly numbered lists of points. For the final episode of 2021, I wanted to speak to Rishad to take stock of where we are and where we’re going as we come up on two years into the pandemic era.For Rishad, the pandemic is a marker of a profound shift, part of what he calls the Great Reinvention. The pandemic is not a singular crisis like previous shocks such as the Financial Crisis, but is instead a polycrisis affecting health, the economy and society. That is leading many to reassess their approaches to life – just see the rise of the so-called anti-work movement. As he put it at the start of the crisis: “We had not just a financial crisis, not just a social crisis, not just a health crisis but all three, occurring not just to some people but to all people, not just for a short period of time. If you take the entire world and put them through a financial, social and health crisis for two years and expect things to be the same, you should not be in business and should resign immediately.”Below are highlights from our conversation.The unbundling of mediaOne impact of the rise of Substack and other newsletter platforms is they have given a convenient outlet for people to share their expertise in their fields. Rishad is one of them, starting a Substack back in August 2020 to “remain relevant and keep learning new things.” It became much more, serving as the basis for a new

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyWhat a strange end to the year, with Omicron the march, inflation jitters and more unknowns than seemingly ever before. But there’s not the same amount of panic and anxiety as the spring 2020 — positive Covid tests seem to be the new social media flex. Nearly two years into this pandemic era, we’ve grown resilient, whether we dwell on it or not. We have so many more tools and knowledge now than when this all started, and we are also just better equipped ourselves to deal with the ups and downs and uncertainties. The last two episodes of The Rebooting Show this year are tied to this theme, considering what we have figured out since the pandemic began. This week, I spoke to Spencer Bailey and Andrew Zuckerman, co-founders of The Slowdown, a media company focused on making sense of the world around us. When the pandemic hit, they started At a Distance, a podcast in which they shared conversations with an array of influential people about how we should rethink the world. The resulting interviews became fodder for a new book. Thanks to Mediaocean, sponsor of these year-end episodes.Covid was momentous from the start, even if we just called it by the generic coronavirus. Once cities started shutting down, it was clear this wasn’t a passing blip or even a localized shock. It wasn’t 9/11 or the Financial Crisis. The scale was unimaginable. The entire world on pause. For those lucky enough to be forced to isolate — health care and essential workers didn’t have this luxury — the pandemic was a forced period of reflection. Many didn’t like what they saw.For The Slowdown, just a year old as a company, its bet that the frenetic pace of the world was unsustainable turned out to be on the nose. Without being able to host its intimate conversations for Time Sensitive, The Slowdown’s conversation series with influential figures in business, arts and culture, Spencer and Andrew decided to move to Zoom with a new podcast, At a Distance, a podcast that gathered luminaries to use the forced isolation we all dealt with in order to think big thoughts about what comes next. At a Distance has compiled over 130 interviews so far.“We realized everyone we were talking to was thinking in a really different way,” Andrew said. “Everyone had permission to think big picture, like this rupture had occurred and everyone was thinking about the world in a very different way and seeing opportunities and the issues were super coherent.”Finding an intersectionMy theory of media businesses is those from the creator or content side typically start with the need to make something they want into the world, then they fit it to the market opportunity and business model. People coming from the business side tend to work in reverse. Both can work. The Slowdown is the first type. “We wanted to make something that we wanted in the world that we couldn't get,” said Andrew.  “So we figured we'd make it ourselves.”“Our philosophical foundation was not in terms of scale, growth and the attention economy. We didn't see in the world a company that was truly looking at this vector of culture, nature and the future and where that comes together.”A time capsuleFrom its start, t

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyThis week, I’m wrapping up the first mini-season of The Rebooting Show. This season was dedicated to modern B2B businesses. If you haven’t already, please check out the first four episodes of the season:Adam White of Front Office Sports discussed the advantages of bootstrapping.Julia Noran Johnston of Business of Home shared how she found an underserved niche in interior designers.Angus Macaulay of Stat explained its Politico-like model for life sciences.Industry Dive’s Sean Griffey spoke about the advantages of finding valuable but overlooked industry segments.To cap off the season, this week’s episode is what I’m calling a Spotlight episode. This is an opportunity for the underwriter of the season to explain how they’re partnering with publishers to build sustainable media businesses. I treat these podcasts like all the others, and I only work with companies addressing real problems in the building of sustainable media businesses. This week’s Spotlight episode is  a conversation with Bernard Urban, CEO of Silverblade Partners, a strategic finance partner to publishers agencies and ad tech firms. Thanks to Silverblade for being The Rebooting Show’s launch sponsor.When I started to report on the media business, two things quickly became clear that I found odd: nobody could agree on how to measure audiences, and nobody paid each other on time. Publishers and agencies always complained bitterly about crazy payment terms. The way it usually works is those with the most leverage, ie the most money, force the smaller party to wait for long periods of time, up to 180 days.Of course, the problem is your everyday costs as a business – salaries, rent, tech systems – are constant, creating a cashflow crunch. Stretched payment terms has created a velocity mismatch: The media business moves incredibly fast, only the financial system underpinning it slogs along like molasses. For many publishers, this means running a business with high fixed costs in terms of salaries, benefits, rent and more while the financing structure means publishers often wait a long time to get paid. That’s why I was happy to partner with Silverblade Partners to sponsor the first season of The Rebooting Show. With access to over $1 billion in financing, Silverblade has the financial resources to solve liquidity challenges arising from outstanding accounts receivable for most media companies. Silverblade was founded by veterans of the media industry, with a deep understanding of the particular nuances of the business that your average bank simply does not have. Silverblade has built a cashflow solution that will finance accounts receivable and accounts payable on more flexible and favorable terms than an option like factoring from a bank. Bernard and I spoke about some of the basics of trade finance, why traditional cashflow solutions like lines of credit or factoring are a mismatch for advertising media, and why finance should be a strategic function within media companies. Let me know any feedback you have on the episode: bmorrissey@g

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyThis week’s episode of The Rebooting Show features a conversation I had with one of my favorite media success stories: Industry Dive, a collection of vertical industry sites. Sean and his team have grown Industry Dive into an example of a sturdy media business, on pace to break the $100 million in revenue mark next year with healthy margins. One request: If you listen to The Rebooting Show on Apple Podcasts, please leave a rating and review. Thanks to Alfred Westcott, who left a very nice review that ranked me “one of the best interviewers in media.”Industry Dive is one of the most successful modern digital media businesses, even if it doesn’t get the attention of splashy consumer titles.Sean Griffey, who founded Industry Dive in 2012 along with Ryan Willumson and Eli Dickenson, doesn’t mind flying under the radar compared to splashy consumer brands while Industry Dive focuses on industry verticals like retail, marketing, utilities and more. “This is a better business. It’s great you’re targeting millennial fashion consumers, but I’m in the electric utilities space and that matters to everyone. The industries we write about touch every person. I leaned into the boring part because I know it’s important. You call it boring, I call it profitable.”It helps that Sean has receipts.340 employees2.5 million email subscriptions25 publications$85 million in revenue this year, $100 million expected next yearEBITDA margins above 25%Here are key takeaways from our conversation:Details matterFor all the talk of vision, the media business is an execution game. Industry Dive began in 2012 with a handful of publications and the idea that it would differentiate by providing a better user experience, focusing on the right industries, and sticking to what the team knew best.“We thought there would be a chance to use the mobile experience to differentiate ourselves. We wanted to invest heavily in design. In business media it was pretty horrific. We wanted to invest in content. We thought niche media had abandoned that for leads over time.”The power of nicheScale and niche aren’t in opposition as often presented. But many digital media companies born around the time of Industry Dive took a different path. They focused more on general news audiences instead of specific areas. Industry Dive developed a formula for targeting industry sectors.Industries changing rapidly due to tech and/or regulationHigh capital spendingA buy and a sell sideEvidence of a vibrant market in the form of competing publications and trade shows“There’s real value in 100,000 incredibly targeted, valuable people. In each of these markets, you could create a $10-20 million business, just marketing supported. But if you wanted a $500 million business, you had to do it a lot. For us it was how do you build a scaled niche business.”Email is more than just a delivery mechanismEmail is the lifeblood of B2B media, allowing a direct connection to an audience – and a way to collect relevant information to understand the audience better. That’s why Industry Dive email subscribers can have a lifetime value of of hundreds of dollars.“It’s a platform you own and nobody can take away. More importantly, it’s a push platform. There are very few things you can push to audiences vs pull, where they come to you. Email is also personally identifiable. You can start tyin

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyFor episode 3 of The Rebooting Show’s mini-season focused on modern B2B media, I spoke to Angus Macaulay, COO of Stat, the health-focused site that’s one of my favorite niche media brands. Please send me an email with any feedback. Also, please rate and review the podcast. Thanks to Niceguyappreviewer, who said The Rebooting Show is “such a valuable podcast for media entrepreneurs,” noting the “insightful, actionable and relevant information.” Thank you, Niceguyappreviewer.Politico’s model has long been an aspiration of many niche media companies, even before Axel Springer shelled out $1 billion to buy it. The reason: Politico was able to pull off the “prosumer” model of providing in-depth, insider coverage of a niche (politics) that straddled the line of consumer impact but with the advantages of a B2B business model that typically affords an opportunity for high-priced subscriptions.Stat, born out of the Boston Globe Media in 2015, wants to pull off the Politico model for life sciences. The site, which operates independently and has 70 people, had a breakout moment during the pandemic as the world’s attention by necessity turned to the issues that are squarely in Stat’s wheelhouse. Stat’s monthly traffic peaked at 23 million in March 2020 vs 4.7 million the prior month. The site’s revenue was up 40% in 2021 vs 2020, with subscription revenue up 24%.“Before Covid, when we’d talk to people at conferences or to advertisers, it was either we know Stat and love it or I never heard of it,” said Angus Macaulay, Stat’s COO. “We were still a new brand. There was still an awareness brand. When Covid exploded, people in the healthcare industry were also trying to keep up on all the breakthroughs, and many in the ecosystem relied on us as a source. Our awareness in the healthcare ecosystem went through the roof.”Here are five key takeaways from the conversation:Find a local story with global impactThe idea for Stat came out of a dinner Boston Globe Media owner John Henry had with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who noted that while Boston didn’t have the tech scene that Silicon Valley has “you have the life sciences and the entire infrastructure with the academia in Boston as well.” While the Globe is mostly a local news company, the opportunity was to build a niche publication with global impact from the position of Boston’s outsized role in life sciences as home to over 1,000 biotech companies. “If you lived in Boston and Cambridge over the last 25 years, you can’t miss how life sciences has changed this area, it’s just exploded,” said Macaulay.Use “stars” to establish credibilityMany news sites focus on keeping costs low, particularly early on. That often means hiring less experienced journalists who command lower salaries. With the backing of a larger media company, Stat was able to take a different path. Its founding executive editor was Rick Berke, a 27-year veteran of The New York Times, sending a signal of the ambitions Stat had, Macaulay said. “They didn’t find someone working at a niche B2B trade site. They wanted someone who understood high-end investigative journalism.” The site went on to hire several well-known reporters with deep experience in their fields, including

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and SpotifyThanks for the notes following the debut of The Rebooting Show. You can subscribe now on both Apple and Spotify. We’re working hard to improve the audio quality, and I’m going to make sure the episodes get shorter. I’m always interested to hear your feedback. My email is bmorrissey@gmail.com. One request: If you like the podcast, please rate it and leave a review. This week’s episode features Julia Noran Johnston, founder and president of the Business of Home, a vertical media company focused on the interior design industry. I wanted to speak with Julia for a few reasons. I’m always interested in speaking to former journalists who are now running businesses, since I tend to think they build differently than those who come from the sales or operations side. The other reason is the category. B2B is often knocked as boring, but there are many areas that blend consumer elements. The home is one of those.Julia’s advice for those building new media businesses: “Find your community. There has to be a community to support what you’re doing. Find a place that’s relatively untapped because that gives you the advantage and opportunity for success.”Here are five key takeaways from the conversation: Finding your nicheBuilding a business media brand means finding an underserved audience, ideally one with buying power. In the 2000s, Julia had shifted from journalism to a marketing role at Condé Nast’s Veranda magazine. What she noticed was that many requests for proposals listed interior designers as their target. “They were the volume buyers of the product,” she said. “In some cases, they were 100% of the buying base. I started to realize they were very valuable and what a premium audience that was, and at Veranda we weren’t isolating that audience.”Community > audienceThe most sustainable media brands focus on communities that share an interest and want to connect with each other. That’s why some of the most successful media brands -- Complex (streetwear), Barstool (bros who gamble), Hodinkee (watch collectors) -- are built around communities. Going to many interior design events in New York, Julia recognized that designers were a real community. “I was hanging out with designers, it was a real community that existed and there wasn’t a publication serving that community at all. I saw the opportunity for the community to have a hub.”Be ready to pivotThe reality of most businesses is the path you plan to take isn’t usually the one you end up taking. For BoH, the initial business plan was built around assembling a database of designers with projects to match with product makers and bloggers covering the space. “It made a lot of sense on paper,” Julia said. But there was a problem: As BoH (then called Editor at Large) grew as a news source, the database business didn’t match since it was a PR play. Inevitably that would dent the credibility of the news content. In 2011, the company changed course. “We started to focus on that more because that’s what people wanted and where the demand was,” Julia said. “It’s much easier to meet demand than push something that people are resistant to.”Growing a sales teamGetting sales right is critical to any sustainable business. BoH has relied heavily on in-bound leads for advertising, but is now building out its sales team and breaking into new categories. But that comes at a price: The need to add more infrastructure and processes expected by advertis

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts — more platforms coming soon.After a year break from podcasting, I’ve finally started anew with The Rebooting Show, a weekly audio and video discussion that goes into the details of building sustainable media businesses with those building them. (The video is still in the works, and it will take a bit of time before the podcast feed is available on Apple and Spotify. Apologies.) The goal for the show is to focus on the mechanics and execution since I believe too much is generally made of “vision” in the media business. There aren’t a ton of secrets; those who succeed tend to simply excel at executing the details. My goal is to get beyond the PR spin that’s, unfortunately, a feature of most business podcasts. I always knew a podcast would likely suck if multiple PR people showed up with the guest. It was nearly guaranteed if the guest then took out a sheet of talking points. You’d be surprised how many big media executives feel uncomfortable simply answering questions about what, in theory, they’re responsible for doing.My plan is to break the podcast into mini-seasons of five episodes focused on a theme. This first season is focused on modern B2B media businesses, a topic near to my own experience. B2B has long been treated as something of a backwater, at best a stepping stone to consumer titles. That’s always sold B2B short. There are many terrible, old school B2B publishers and events companies, but there are a new crop of modern players emerging who are still focused on going deep on the ins and outs of their business areas but do so with a higher focus on in-depth reporting, slick packaging and diverse business models. In many ways, I think consumer media can learn more from B2B than vice versa since B2B has always focused on direct connections (often through email), communities and diverse business models that aren’t reliant on advertising.That’s why I wanted to talk to Adam White, the CEO of FOS, home to Front Office Sports and Sports Section. Adam started Front Office Sports while still a student at the University of Miami in 2014. His cobbled-together Wix site was meant as a foot into a sports marketing career but grew to the point where Adam made the plunge into starting a business out of it.I’ve always liked Front Office Sports and how Adam and his team have thoughtfully built the company and continued to execute. In our conversation, we discuss the origins of Front Office Sports, the white space they saw in the market, their approach to differentiation, and the decision to build off their B2B base with newsletters aimed at a wider consumer audience.Some highlights from our discussion:The importance of talking to your audienceFOS began as an informational interview project Adam did one summer during college. Putting them online seemed a no-brainer. There wasn’t a product roadmap or a business plan, but Adam listened to what he was being told. Many of the interviews veered toward career advice, giving him insight into needs in the market. “What they told me all the time was these young professionals that work in sports don’t get accolades.” That led to what in retrospect was FOS’s breakout moment: The Rising 25 awards in 2017. “It’s been the most impactful thing we’ve done,” he said.Not having money is a giftInvestment firm Steins backed FOS in 2018, but Front Office Sports took a bootstrapped path. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise in retrospect. “If we had the money before we did the informational interviews, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We would have never figured it out. They told us everything we should do.” That gave FOS a