Meet David Aferiat

5,000 on Facebook. And hi everyone, we're just asking, uh, David asked me how many followers I have. So altogether about 35,000. So I'm a very micro influencer. LinkedIn is my, my top one. And I don't know, you know what, my regular profile, I have 6.3, not that I'm counting. Um, my Facebook, Adrienne Barker Speaks, 5.7, not that I'm counting, totally counting. If you haven't followed me yet, please follow me. So David, welcome to Adrienne Barker Speaks. No up needed. And the only thing I know about you is that you're bold, you're brilliant, you're handsome, you look like a movie star, and something about champagne, which I can't wait to talk to you about, and bloom growth. So you have to introduce yourself to my family.

Yes. Well, you make it sound effervescent, which is, which is exactly what, what, what I am in many, in many, in many occasions. But Adrian, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. And for all those listening now and who will listen, hello. Thank you. Yeah, we're kind of just sitting down, as you said, and having, you know, an afternoon coffee. Or as a mentor of mine used to say, it's nearly time. It's nearly time to marinate the ice cubes.

I love that. So, all right. So tell me about the champagne.

So the champagne is, well, The champagne is a result of one of the companies that I've started and I continue, but I have, you know, turned over to two other partners. That company started out as an importer exclusively of organic, sustainable Premier Cru champagne from France to be brought to the U.S. to those who know. And those who know, to those, you know, who love champagne, right? And to those who want to drink in a way where, you know, afterwards there are no regrets, because drinking this organic champagne, um, sharing it with others and consuming it with food, you know, we— is a guarantee that you will not have a headache, uh, afterwards, right? So it was started because I, I, you know, consuming, um, a drink I love, champagne and such, because it's part of my life in many ways as a French citizen, also as a dual citizen living in America, as someone who has lived in America nearly all my life, but who is a dual citizen and have raised my kids to also speak French. This was a drink I loved. And when I started getting headaches from it, I was like, no, no, no, no, this is— this— what's happening? And as we all age, we just start to get more susceptible to the histamines and the preservatives and the additives that are, you know, that are part of the winemaking process. And I wanted to concentrate on first, it's got to taste good, which means out of Champagne, it's got to taste good. If it's sparkling and from any other part of the world, it's not Champagne as we know. But to make a long story short, the company has evolved. And so I've now— we now import more than just French Champagne, but it's from Europe, it's from France usually, and a little bit of Spain. And we are a broker more. We now sell directly to online national retailers and help them to communicate the story of our wines rather than sell it state by state and try to get it into your local wine shop or restaurant menu, which is again for another conversation, very inefficient, very cost prohibitive, so and it's a huge waste of resources.

So I mean, it sounds like a really difficult business, very romantic business, You know, I have the picture of flying and you're looking at the vineyards and you're tasting the grapes from what I see on TV. But what are some of the specific challenges that you faced creating your champagne company? Like just finding organic— is it grapes?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm not the winemaker, so I would go and find the winemakers who were doing this. And that has its own, you know, every, every pleasurable, imaginative thing you can imagine I was doing, walking, you know, and finding these, these producers. But it mirrors the experience of growing a company and the struggle that many entrepreneurs have that, you know, that grow their business, how lonely it can be, and how many mistakes you have to go through before you get like the right product-market fit. So this is an evolution of having to readjust the product-market fit because I meet the winemaker, I get the story, I try to convey that story as the importer to the state distributor. That state distributor, you know, through their sales reps, again, has to learn the story. The sales rep then communicates it to the store clerk or the store owner or the restaurant owner or the waitstaff. And then it tries to, you know, then it eventually reaches the consumer. I mean, good luck. That story, you know, starts off like fourth generation and ends up like, oh, the guy's name is Joey and nothing really else matters. So to preserve that story, we have found that online retailers in this modern, in this day and age do as good a job as that most dedicated and one needle in a haystack kind of retailer who cares enough, you know, to curate wine selections for his customer, his or her customers. And so there aren't, there are too few of them and hard to find, and they have to pass through distributors still to get through it. Have found out another way to do that. And you know, I can just simply say that you should research your online wine options and know that they, you know, pick the ones that have great reputations, and we're probably selling our portfolio to them under the name of Avid Vines. And if they don't have it, you can ask for it. But I hate to be vague, but it's just a collection of online retailers that we sell it to. And again, I just don't sell it, you know, to direct, and I don't sell it to the, um, to, to, you know, wholesalers. But as you're showing right now, you know, that experience of growing that company was, I would say, you know, an up and down, you know, experience, as are all businesses that you grow. And, um, the import company came after growing a software fintech company for 20 years. That experience of— and we were on the Inc. in that case, you know, it was up and downs, but we also had a fantastic ride that led us to being on the Inc. 5000 list for 6 years in a row and having wonderful partners like TD Ameritrade and E-Trade at certain times because we sold our technology to individual active traders so that they could make better decisions in the stock market. The, um, that experience of growing that that company for 20 years. And then, you know, the import company combined with 10 years or so I've had the privilege of being in an entrepreneur peer group that's global in reach that's called the Entrepreneurs Organization, EO, allows me to start this new chapter, which brings out a lot of passion in me in, in, uh, in leading other entrepreneurs like I have for the last 10 years. I bring that to Bloom as a Bloom Growth Coach, where I help CEOs and leadership teams get to the next stage of scale and growth. So, go ahead. No, no, I was gonna say, so they can reclaim their time, you know, reclaim or nurture profit, not just growth for growth's sake, and then reclaim the leadership of their teams in a better way.

So you definitely have the background to do that. It's so funny when, you know, meeting some other coaches and consultants where they don't have such a great background. And I could imagine just the, you know, the, the highs and lows of bottling anything first of all, and then shipping it across the country. I mean, you know, just sometimes finding the right packaging. So, but what I got out of that too is research and understand your vendors and understand what's out there. Let's take a look at your website. Is that okay? If you are just listening, I am on bloomgrowth.com, and I want to look at this because I feel like there's a lot more to it. And as you know, I, I do not research my guests, but let's talk a little bit about this. So you offer a few different things, right? So tell me about the software solution, right?

So Bloom Growth is an operating system. It's a business operating system. There are For those that are not necessarily solution aware, the problem that we solve is I'm growing, just like in my software company. Sometimes we would grow in moments where we would double the revenue of the company because we signed a big license agreement with TD Ameritrade and/or 9 months later with E-Trade. And each time we would double the revenues of the company, we'd break all the systems and ways in which we operated the company because we needed to change. We needed to add more, another customer service representative, or we needed more people in this, you know, in the conversation to make a certain decision as related to product or so forth. When that happens, you constrain what goes on in a leadership meeting. Priorities can become confused, and there's just The weight of more growth sometimes, if it's not properly channeled, can add a lot of drama. It is the biggest new guest, you know, that takes a seat in that leadership team meeting. And when that happens, that's when I step in. So it can also happen where just on regular growth that the CEO starts to become the employee of the month. We don't like that. No CEO wants that, right? The employee of the month kind of award belongs to the team members doing the work, not So when a founder or an owner or CEO starts to be in the business instead of on it, that's a big— what happens? They become the bottleneck to so many decisions and everything starts to slow down. And those decisions aren't great because they're only getting the real input from one as opposed to the collective thoughts and decisions from a group. So we remove that bottleneck and Business operating systems help do that. So when you hear of a CEO that you care about, you know, who is complaining about the, you know, my life is inside this company and it's, it, the strain is too great and I'm, everything flows through me and I've got to separate myself for my own health, for the relationships I have with my family, for, for many things. This is the way to reclaim that freedom and do so profitably. There are other systems besides Bloom Growth, but Bloom Growth does— the reason why I chose it as a framework to hang my 20 years experience with the software company, the 10 years of leading other entrepreneurs, is because in addition to the way you run a meeting, which is what the software you alluded to does, there's a huge section and emphasis on how do we elevate the relationships of the people in that leadership team. I'm not an individual executive coach. I don't work with one-on-one. I work in that team dynamic that says to a leadership team that surrounds the CEO and her, you know, her capabilities, the easy decisions are made within the organization by those who are on the front line, those who are customer-facing. Right? It's only the hard stuff that we need to decide that's going to propel the company forward that rises to the level of this group. So we better be able to solve these, you know, these issues. And if we can't— I was just writing an article about this on my LinkedIn page. You know, most leadership team meetings, people bring their updates and discuss. Well, that's not the kind of meetings that we run to, you know, that I run for a leadership team to really get momentum and start making decisions that are permanent and inspiring. To do that, you don't just bring your updates. You have to bring what are the issues that we need to solve to get to a quarterly priority that moves us closer to the year goal that we have? OK, because we have 13 tries each quarter to get there.

Oh, wait, 13? Tell me about that. 13 tries?

Well, 13 weeks and a quarter. Every week we got to show up and say—

Oh, yeah, of course.

Hello, are we that, you know, are we moving the ball here? And, and so what do we need to solve, you know, for, for when something is not, you know, when we're not able to, it's, and we just need to discuss this. Sometimes it's even longer reaching, but we're bringing it up now to take a bite of this, you know, one, how do you eat an elephant? You don't eat it all at once. You break it up into small bites. And out of those meetings come outcomes and accountability, like assignments. Otherwise, if it's just an update and conversations, you wind up turning a leadership meeting into a podcast, right? You know, it's not a conversation just to walk. And I've had too many meetings like that where I walk out and go, "Oh, we debated something, but man, really sloppy on the what comes next and who does what," which tells me we're going to be talking about this again next week. No, no, no, no. That's not what we do.

Is this similar to the EOS system?

So there is— so if we're talking now about after the problem-aware, solution-aware, one solution is Bloom Growth. The other is what you just mentioned, the Entrepreneur's Operating System, EOS. If you understand what EOS is, and I've used it myself, you understand about 66% of what Bloom Growth does. The extra piece is this relationship aspect that drew me to the community of coaches and the frameworks that, that I use.

Interesting. So that's where you— because when I, when I looked at this first, my first thought was, okay, you have software, you know, that maybe includes accounting software, purchasing, you know, just invoicing, all of that. But you're saying no, it's really to work on the leadership to make sure that they are doing things that they should be doing to make sure that they're listening and hearing and working towards a success?

Yes, in that this is not an enterprise resource planning. This is not an ERP software. It's not going to tie into all your systems and require big integrations. This is a simple executive back-of-the-napkin, better way of organizing a meeting. And it comes with a standard kind of agenda that's timed for certain topics. And think of it as a notepad during the week where executives can say, hey, we need to talk about this, or I would like to take the group's time to solve a particular issue that I just ran into. So if, if finance is running some numbers and says we have a gap somehow in what we are, you know, in marketing, it's not a blame or anything. It's simply I'm bringing awareness to this issue. I'd like for us to discuss it. And that can surface from anywhere. And that starts a list. And when we start our meeting, we kind of say, OK, what's on the list of things? Parking lot, not parking lot, if you want to call it, but a sort of what is, what are the issues that are, you know, that this group wants to solve today? And after we get through some preliminary kind of check-in and some headlines and, and, you know, updates on the to-dos, like we pass over briefly the dashboard of the company. Right, which is there and everyone should know it's likely in another system. It says, you know, what are the KPIs that we measure the health of this business, you know, with? And are they— when we— when I do an engagement, we do a quick inventory of them and we make sure, do we have too many of these? Do we have just the right amount to focus, to keep our, you know, to be focused and not to be scattered? We clean all that up. But once we get past that, then good KPIs are meant to say, Look, lights are green or red, and if they're green, we know that today's operation of the business is meeting its target. Fantastic. What we're here to talk about now is quarterly priorities that are meant to move the needle and help us grow. But by God, if something is red on this dashboard while the plane we're flying is, you know, is in the air, we have to address that. Now we got to stop the meeting, or that's one of the first priority items that we're going to discuss in this meeting. I'm not stopping anything, but we will address this first. Then again, and any other red KPIs.

I totally understand because I do go to the 90 meetings. So I understand the scorecard, the rocks, the to-dos, the quarterly. I get all that. So really great system. I love that you created that. And but it sounds like— well, go ahead. Sorry.

Two things I need to correct. One, I'm not the creator, right? So I use this framework. It's developed by and polished every 3 months by a group of, you know, our group of coaches. We all meet. It's a wonderful thing. And EOS, I think, is a much bigger organization. But regardless, both systems have a software. If you understand them, then you're, like I said, 66% of what, you know, you know what Bloom Growth does. I would say also that Bloom Growth, for me, gets rid of a lot of jargon. You know, we don't do rocks and what IDS means or anything like that. We call them quarterly priorities. We call them to-dos. And we say, we're in a meeting now. We're going to discuss the obstacles and opportunities that are in front of us.

I love that. I could see where that would work because sometimes it's just a little— it doesn't do as much as I would think that it could do. But I, I love what you're doing. Oh, look, you guys, you could get a download the ebook, Scale Your Business Fast and Win. Tell— well, hold on. First I gotta just download it because that's what I do. I want to make sure I get a copy of it before I forget. I grew up in an entrepreneurial family and my father always said, do it now, don't do it now or it won't get done. Yeah, make the call now.

I can tell you're a lifelong learner, so that's great.

I got my— and, um, okay, so this is really This is really definitely a lifelong learner. But still, I mean, there's so much to learn with this and I love it. So, so we're talking like what size businesses does this really— what is your focus on the size of a business?

So different coaches have different focuses, but generally, generally I work with companies that have a leadership team. So you have to have at least 10, 12 employees, right, of which a leadership team might compose just 3 or 4. The CEO and the ones around her, 3 or 4 or so around her. Generally, the, the ideal clients for this kind of framework are running with revenues of $10 million, you know, at least $5 million, but $10 million and more. This works all the way up to divisions, companies with divisions and departments. So you can go quite, quite large. And, um, but the, the Sweet Spot are for companies at $10 million or more. 10, 10+, right? $10 million, 10 employees, and plus means they're growing. And they're just trying to get to the next stage, but, but being buried by the process.

What's the difference between working for a family business? Do you have a lot of family businesses that are clients?

Yes, yes, the answer is yes. And they provide a unique opportunity and a challenge, right? So, and through the ways I've just distinguished Bloom Growth from EOS, one important aspect is elevating these relationships. What I like about Bloom and what I try to do as a coach is, you know, the answers are in this room and among the team as it exists today. And if we're not getting the best answers from this group, it's not necessarily, you know, the intelligence issue. And it's not exactly— it's not the quality of the people. It's that people are holding their cards closer to their chest than they should. And they are not— they don't feel, call it safe enough or vulnerable enough. And man, I have walked into meetings where the— those on the leadership team Don't respond unless, unless, unless, you know, unless addressed first. Right. And it's, it's, that is not what gets, that's not what gets you to the next level of discussion that needs to happen once you've identified a priority that needs to be discussed and to do so in a way that says what I'm about to share, I feel safe in sharing. I'm not going to be judged or I'm not going to, it's not going to get slammed down. But too many times for speed and efficiency or sometimes for panic and chaos reasons, ideas and suggestions get slammed, and someone eventually learned, like, oh, I'm not going to do that again. We try— we, we not try, we reverse that, that behavior. And we do so by intentional— when we do the day workshops, engagements with my clients, these are day, you know, workshops where we will take and devote precious amounts of the time that we're spending together to elevate relationships so that even in a family environment, you get to see I've known you for years and yet I never knew that about you, or I never knew that you looked at an issue this way, or that you found this aspect of your life most important. Does it solve a problem? No, but it gives a lot more context about what's shared, knowing who that person is, and then giving them the space the next time when we need to discuss what needs to get solved. To hear them and let them have a floor.

What do you think about— so around the table, it's easy to have the leaders all say yes, yes, yes, yes. I've always been the 10th man. Is that something that— the 10th man, it's so funny, in World War Z with Brad Pitt, this kind of answered my questions when I was younger, was he picks up a man from Israel and he says, what do you do? And the man said, I'm the 10th man. And Brad said, what does that mean? And he said, you know, a forward thinker. I question everything where everyone else says yes. He said, I'm the one that questions things. And I, I was like, oh my God, that's me. That's me. Because it's a very— it's— I'm a very positive person, but I was always seen as very negative because of that idea that I wanted to dig a little deeper and not just be the yes person. Is that something that you see in different groups? And do you help that that 10th man, as I call it, be able to be heard?

The answer is yes. I mean, everyone has that itch within them. It's either just been extinguished in some way, you know, because of— I've seen visionaries, you know, I've seen situations where the owner is a visionary and the operator, which can be a very bad mix because you have all the passion and yet you have— and they're only doing one of those two things very well functionally at all. But when you see them doing both, the rest of the team just like sits and waits for the fire to go out or, you know, after being burned so many times. So if you created the right space and you gave people the right roles, you know, in terms of designing the organization, how it should and must function so that this owner, visionary, and even the CEO is not the bottleneck anymore. That means letting people rise up to the occasion. But they can only do that if they have, you a 10th man mentality, and if they are bringing questions, and because they feel safe enough to do so. One of the first exercises that we do on day 1 is just to kind of say, bring something that you're most proud of and talk about why this totem or this symbol— it can be a picture or, you know, physical is often great— and, you know, talk through it a bit. Why is it important? I wear my grandfather's ring, and, you know, that's often my my reminder of the kind of man that he was, an entrepreneur that he was, and the huge risks that he took to— I mean, the ultimate change in moving, fleeing one country to arrive here in the United States so that my father could take root here and so that I could show up on the scene as well. And we— that's just scratching the surface, right? Part of also When you're— the goal of all this, as I said, is next stage of growth. But it's building the routines that get the company to a better version of itself, which means growth, but getting the people in the leadership team to better versions of themselves as well. And so that often means removing the stories that people tell themselves about each other, about themself, about the company. And if you— I work on ways in our engagements to do just that. And it really means nothing else but bringing sunlight to some stories that are like, that doesn't make any sense when you say it out loud. And in a judgment-free zone, it can be shared and say, poof, that goes away and we'll never have to think about that again. Much lighter. You know, you get lighter when you do that.

This is so cool to me because I think of a business and I think, OK, processes and getting everything set up that you need. But it's almost like— and correct me if I'm wrong— building a process within your leadership and their, and their personality, their minds, how they work together. Am I, am I off target with that?

No, you are, you are, you are landing on— I just wrote about this again, another plug for my LinkedIn profile here. But my last article was about what you're describing is the routines. We all curate positive routines so that we can meet The expectation is a better future version of ourselves. Why do we work out? Why do we eat the way we do? Why do we, you know, walk in the sun? It's to— if I do these routines, I'm expecting to arrive at a better version of myself where I drop the keys off and go, 'Hey, I did my job. Now it's yours to think about the next guy or next gal, you know, in the future.' Same thing with companies. And what you're describing is we build a decision factory within that leadership meeting from one that just went the conversation and updates and reactive, you know, reactive ways of speaking to each other to like mission-driven, prioritized, simplified, well-discussed issues that then get decided permanently and in an inspiring way. And boom, the needle just moves. And now take that from a leadership team and bring it down into the organization. And I don't care if you're family-owned or, you know, or it's a staff of all-stars.

You know, I just want to show your movement in progress.

Movement in progress. Smooth over a lot of things. There we go.

Yeah, I did. I did go. I was looking for you for just a minute just to get the website down. So I went to your LinkedIn. This—

if you go to my, my, my company's name is The Avid Group. All right.

Let me go. Let me look at that.

And if you go to avid.coach, you'll get to my Bloom Growth.

Is it too avid?

Avid. Avid. Avid.coach.

Oh, let me go down. Let me do that.

Yeah, you'll see this real time. You'll see go from avid.coach takes you to my coaching page. There we go.

Boy, I really have to say that I wish that this was available, you know, years ago. It feels like You know, before it was just like, you have around the table who you have around the table. They're good for their job, maybe not the best, but they're okay for what they're doing. They'll be okay. Even when I worked for Muscular Dystrophy Association, the nonprofit, that was the piece that was missing. It was 100% the piece that was missing. I could come in and I'd raise $1 million a year, but the conversation around leadership— wow. This is really interesting to me. All right, where was I? Wait, where am I? Avid?

Sometimes I've been known to sometimes calculate, like, the leadership team. What's the, what's the hourly rate of this leadership team that can be calculated, right? And so, my God, if we're going to spend an hour, 90 minutes, you know, on a Tuesday, which is when we have the leadership team meeting, or your, your leadership team may happen at a different cadence, this is an expensive time for all these heads to come together. We, let's, let's solve great things here. So let me— you're scrolling here. The Bloom Growth System can be looked at as a kind of an infinity loop across 8 pillars, or really 8 ways just to look at a business. And if I pinned you down and said guess, you'd probably get 7 or all 8 of them. But they're, in that regard, the common views of looking at a business, like process, like people, like sales and marketing, like finance and data. You know, and more, right? And when I— the process of engaging with me as a coach is I meet with the CEO first, and we have like a half an hour conversation. You know, I often ask questions like, you know, we're at the end of Q1. So I'd say something like, how, you know, let's look at last year. Did you get everything that you hoped for from the business? 9 times out of 10, people will say, no, I didn't get everything I hoped for. I'm like, well, OK, a little grace for what you did accomplish, for sure. But for what, you know, what did it cost? You know, whatever you did for the business, what was its cost in terms of your personal and family and, and, and again, whatever gap that you had for the business itself? And what are you doing about it this year that's going to change? And if you haven't changed anything, why do you expect things to be different? If that conversation is interesting enough, then I say, well, look, You know, I'm happy to give 90 minutes of my time for you, to you and your leadership team to meet together. Well, we'll bring up some of these issues. And we'll have the leadership team take an average of how they would score the company across these 8 elements, you as well. And it becomes a really interesting conversation to see, especially, again, in family businesses or, you know, or in a regular leadership team, how do the average of the 3 or 4 people at the leadership team think about sales and marketing versus what the CEO and what she thinks. Um, it can be an interesting play, you know, to say, ah, you guys think sales and marketing is doing a great job, but the CEO, uh, you know, thinks it's terrible. Well, let's— why is that, you know? And let's explore that. At the end of that 90-minute conversation, the conversation eventually turns to like, well, Bloom Growth and the method of not only running a meeting this way, but elevating the relationships that we have amongst each other to get the best answers is how we'll close these gaps. And if you think I'm the guide to help you do that, then let's schedule a day one and start going. But that's what this image here evokes when you show it. And then, you know, it's a loop. So it elevates every time you come back around, you're at a higher ground.

I love it. So I'm thinking that you probably have some CEOs that are thinking after they talk to you, like, wait, I don't want you talking to my leadership. Maybe they're worried that they haven't been as kind, haven't been, you know, as strong. Maybe they have many different things with their personality. Could come up? Are you finding that most CEOs, once they've kind of called you, they understand that they need to be open and transparent?

Well, it's usually out of two things. One, a deep desire to see more success from this group or a bit of pain that they're carrying. Right. The idea that I'm the bottleneck and this just cannot keep going like it cannot keep going like this. The cost is too great to the business, to, you know, one's freedom, one's relationships. And out of that pain, there's like, I know I need to— I'm problem aware, and I think this is the right solution. And David, then you might be the right, you know, product here.

Yeah, so being self-aware, I think that's really important. Wow. Okay, this has just been really interesting for me because I could see where this is needed.

You know, again, think about, think about those. And, you know, for those listening as well, think about those CEOs that you care about the most that you would see struggling with growth, right? They've got to be on an upward trajectory. This is not a turnaround kind of framework. And I don't like to work with customers that are, you know, unstable in that way. The growth has to be there, and we're just trying to make this get to clarity, simplify things, prioritize them, start executing in a meaningful way, and then communicate all the successes that we're going to get. In that way, you want— we're going to tie all this up, Adrian. I, you know, given the champagne business and the import business in the past, I had a client call, and this is, this is stuck because I love the term, but many call me the clarity sommelier.

That's awesome. Oh, I need a corkscrew with that. That is awesome.

That's how we celebrate the wins. We'll celebrate the wins with champagne, I guarantee you.

Oh, that, that is fantastic. So if someone was listening and they wanted to be a coach, what does that look like?

Right. That's a, that's a great question. Bloom Growth is a community that, that, that is growing. And but it grows on those who have, you know, clearly run businesses, grown them and exited, and, and, uh, um, and developed companies to, to great heights. So if, if you have that experience, then learning the Bloom Growth, you know, framework is secondary to that. But if you have that experience, you can, from this page, from Bloom Growth, uh, BloomGrowthCoach, I believe,.com, or from any of the links that you've seen so far, there's a section there about how to become a coach.

I love it. I want to ask you to say Bloom Growth Coach 10 times fast, but I won't play the game because it's not—

Because you like me too much. You like me too much, Adrienne. We're having too much fun here.

Je m'appelle Adrienne. That's the only thing I remember from French.

Class. Not bad.

I know, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. Pretty, pretty bad. All right, so I love what you're doing, you guys. If you go on to bloomgrowthcoach.com— say it 5 times— send me a message, uh, you can come in here and see. Oh wait, let me see who's next to me. Hold on before I let you go. Orlando.

Orlando.

I'm in Daytona Beach. Okay, so let's see who we have here.

Kurt. Oh, Kurt's great. Celine. Yep.

Nice. Michelle. Wow.

Yeah.

Valerie. Beautiful. Ricard. I love— this is fantastic. So just the growth within your, your own company. Who's that handsome man? You're Georgia. I love it. Wendy. You know, it's funny, as I was looking at this, I'm like, oh wait, we have, um, some mutual connections, which is great. And I always love that. But I am curious. I saw— do you happen to know Paul Corey, K-O-R-Y, in the promotional products, logo merchandise industry?

I'm sorry, I don't.

No, no, no. It's just interesting. I'm like, OK, that's kind of my background industry. But I love looking at— you guys connect with David on LinkedIn. And I think I'm following you. And is there any question that I should have asked you that I did not ask you?

Great question. Um, I think we really covered it all. I like the way that you kind of let the popcorn go and, uh, and we just kind of bounced around a bit.

And I put butter on it too and saw it because I'm really great with champagne, by the way.

Of course, there's not much that doesn't go up.

I do like pop-up questions actually, so popcorn reference is great. I love all the champagne too. I, it's, it's— I, I could see Why it makes sense that you've gone into this, the whole idea of the bloom growth. Very, very cool. So thank you so much for being my guest. I really loved it.

I enjoyed it too, Adrienne. This was a delight. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Uh, au revoir. No, how do you say it?

Au revoir.

That's so awesome. All right, I'm gonna end the stream now. Thank you so, so much. That was great.