Overcoming Supply Chain Issues

The Small business show episode 351 for Wednesday, October 27, 2021. Greetings folks and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co, the place where we are small businessing together every week. Sponsors for this episode include shopify.com SBS where you get a 14 day free trial and netsuite.com SBS where you can get one of a kind financing for number one financial system out there. We'll talk about why that's the case in a moment. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire.

I'm Dave Hamilton and Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. I love both those sponsors because I've used them both and like Shopify, you know, phenomenal way to test things, start, try, do different things, you know, and then the NetSuite stuff, controlling that data, they're both really heavy, data driven things. I love it. I think they're really great for small business owners. So happy to have them on board.

Yeah, same, same. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's very cool.

How's your week been?

You know, my week has been hectic in the sense of managing. I mentioned to you before we started the show, managing time and jumping in and out of projects. But you know, it's been great. I, I always say I have no complaints, I really do, but nobody wants to hear about them.

No, no. We could complain, but we just sou old white guys complaining. So since that's not the name of the show, I mean we could, you know, why do we always come here? I guess we'll never know, right? We could, we could do that. But like that's, I don't know.

So we're here, we're talking about all about solutions, right.

And, and he likes to solve problems, not just talk about, not just complain.

About the ones we have. And you know, a couple of topics I've really been seeing a lot. I'm sure everybody else has that.

Waldorf and Statler. Is that right? Is that two guys on the Muppet Show?

I think so.

Names of the old guys.

Grumpy old guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. I love them.

We're not going to be walled off from Statler today.

No, no, not today. Maybe sometime in the future, but.

That's right.

I could do a whole show. There's a. I have this concept I've called old man disease.

Okay.

And as you age, I think it, it, you start to get this disease no matter what every old guy get or every, every older person in general. And you make certain assumptions, they're harder to unstick if you Learn something different. You, cognitive, Cognitive dissonance increases a bit. Your biases are stickier. So I always try to focus when I hear someone talking, I'm like, you know, that's old man disease.

I do the same thing. I've never called it old man disease, but I'm sure that won't ever leave my head now. But what I. But it's a perfectly negative term to entice me not to continue with that sort of behavior. I catch myself doing it for sure. But you know, what I always think about is I want to maintain my neuroplasticity as I, as I get older. And it is a thing that naturally does, you know, it sort of declines. But there are things we can do to, you know, keep engaged. And it's change resistance man. Right. Like, yeah, you know, aware of it. Yes.

Being aware. Step, that first step. Because then you can do a great example. Not to make the show about this, but a good example of old man disease. Men or women can get. It doesn't matter. It's gender fluid. It's. I was at an event the other night. We were talking about, just telling stories about our youth. And I talked about I was in the heavy equipment business and I drove this 40 ton crane sure. Halfway through California, didn't have all the right permits, getting lots of laughs of it. It's a great story. I love to tell it. And I was shocked that these people had not heard it before. Since I tell it all the time and I think I was 20 years old or something like that. In the comments after, we laugh and we're talking about our kids who are about that same age now. And people are like, oh, my kid could never handle that, could never do that. And I was like, no. I go, that's, that's. I didn't say this, but that's old man disease.

That's old man.

When I was 20, my son is buying and selling stocks, doing all these different things into crypto, learning about all this stuff. I go, it's just different. You know, they're going about it in a different way that's harder for us to relate to, but it doesn't make it any less riskier or challenging. And when they get older, they'll probably tell that story like, well, When I was 20, I bought SafeMoon Crypto at, you know, a tenth of a penny and this kind of thing, all that kind of stuff.

And that's how I built this house on the, on the ocean that you're standing in right now. That's Right.

That's exactly right. So. So that's good to be aware of that stuff and always try to. I'm always just reminding myself, of course.

No, that's what it is. Whenever I see that in someone else and I notice a strong reaction to it. It's almost certainly because I've seen myself do the same thing and it's like, oh, I don't like that.

I think if you look at media. Yeah. Lots of media companies, especially legacy media companies, they have old man disease. It's talking about. They kind of romanticize the past and talk about the future and not so positive phrasing and framework. Right. And so I always make it a point to tell my kids. Kids. I'm like, don't ever, don't let anybody ever tell you that the future is not going to be awesome. Of course it is. You're in charge. You make it what you want, you know, And I, I really, you know, lash out at that concept all the time because that's the last thing you want to hear as a young person.

Even as a not young person.

Yeah.

I'm not going to say I'm old.

Future is not going to be great. But. Yeah, you know, if the future's not.

Going to be great, why are we sticking around for it? And I'm definitely sticking around for it. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

My constant, you know, remark is a. Our best years are ahead of us and why coming back to the. The opportunity as small business owners to tell our own story. Why would you think otherwise? If you could, you know, talk to the inner judge in your head and you could get beyond whatever stuff in your life, maybe have negative. That you could do it. Sure. Thinking that the best years ahead are what keeps you moving forward to having a great life. In my period, you have to assume.

That the future at least can be better than the past. And then because as you said, you're in charge, you get to make it better. You tell the. Choose the ending to the story that you want and then figure out how to get there so you can tell it.

Yeah. And I would say if you embrace that concept, that positivity, and if you bring that into your business, you share that concept with your employees, they will look at you differently than an. Than that. A job they've had before at some other place where the, you know, people are stressed out not having a good time, and it, It'll help build your culture of that. Oh, wow, look, we're working towards something better. And, and that includes making your customers have a better Life, you know, creating the best product you can, offering the best service. So all that, that, it's. It really trickles down from your frame framing of things and your mindset, and it can have just a great impact on your small business. It can be related.

It can be related. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it all is related because it's us. Right. We're the ones that are doing it. So.

Yeah, yeah, you're driving that. And I had no intention of talking about that today, but I'm glad I bring it up because, you know, we're going through times right now that are difficult. We're feeling some long term effects of this pandemic and stuff. And so keeping that framework now especially should be easier than ever to say, oh, our best years are ahead of us because we're kind of slogging through the, you know, the garbage. Right.

If I wanted to be pessimistic, I could argue probably pretty well right now that our best years are definitely behind us. Right.

Well, you. You can look at it that way.

I'm choosing not to. But I'm just saying if I wanted to play devil's advocate, we could have a fun episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we could.

But why would you want to do that and wake up every morning thinking that?

No, I don't. That's right. But I'm just.

You have a choice.

I have found you're a contrarian. I am a contrarian. No. Well, I found it to be a valuable trait when matched with the right people, partners, whatever.

Yeah.

Because it helps identify. I need to be able to temper it because sometimes I go overboard with it and then stop the business from evolving. Right. But you know, being able to look and say, okay, well, the flip, the devil's advocate side, the flip side of that is if we do X, Y or Z, here's the negative outcome. Or, you know, if somebody says it's the negative outcome, I'll say, well, here's the positive outcome. It's not that I'm a pessimist, it's that I'm a devil's advocate. I'm a contrarian. You're totally right.

And that is a good tool to have as well. But you do have to have that offset.

You got to be able to use it as a tool, not. Not let it use you. And, and I. Ramping it up and ramping it down and ramping it down, that's the key. Get out of the way, let things roll.

Y. I ramp it down so much that I definitely get blinded by optimism sometimes and there's a price to pay for that.

There is, there is just as much as.

Well maybe not so much. I think there's a higher price is getting blinded by pessimism because I think you're stuck and you can get stuck.

And no go anywhere by pessimism.

Oh, I like this T shirt term right there. Yeah, but yeah, so, so you can. It can go the way. So you're right. That offset. If, if I were to look back on the. Some of the best business partnerships I've had, that other person, that partner was definitely not as optimistic and they were far more grounded than I am and that helped me a lot.

No, I was going to say thinking back on especially when we were running deals on the web and even going through the sale that never happened. I was going to say Meckler Media but it wasn't. It was Jupiter Media. But you know that that whole time like we, we balanced each other very well with, with that I thought back then.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. It was great. I learned a lot. I would have liked and take taking a bunch of money off the table.

But I learned a lot. Yeah, it's fine. Whatever. We learned a lesson. We learned a valuable lesson that I think is paying off has paid off for both of us in many ways since then. So yeah, that's great.

But today I want to talk a couple of things that I think they're impacting small businesses and toss back and forth with this dynamic that we have some systems that can help you get through it as small business owners and get your feedback. Dave, we're going to talk about supply chain constraints that everybody seems to be going through right now and also this creeping inflation that has kind of skyrocketed up above 5% for the first time in a couple of decades and best ways to deal with it.

I like it, man. The next thing that I want to do is talk about our two sponsors. If that works for you.

Yeah, absolutely.

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Yeah, well, I mean, we could talk, we could do a whole show or multiple shows about why it's happening. But you know, on the quick side, you know, we all know the pandemic obviously impacted. We've got some labor shortages here in California where there's a couple of massive ports. We've got some new laws and regulations on the trucking. I just read about today, there's been a shortage of containers because we were not sending as much stuff back to Asia this in the last year. And that's a big problem too. And the cost of shipping has gone through the roof as well.

Skyrocketed. Well, yeah, I listened. There was a great episode of the New York Times, the Daily back earlier this month on the 15th. They titled the episode the Great Supply Chain Disruption. And it was super informative about how and why we are where we hear where we are. And the issue is it really sort of boils down to at the core, what you just said, where, you know, we have these shipping containers and we send them or they get sent from Asia to wherever. Right. But then since nothing was going back, they just sat and. And so, yeah, there wasn't, there isn't, wasn't enough to, to move around. And then the other part of it was this just in time, we, especially here in the US but really Worldwide, we had gotten, instead of a manufacturing facility or even a repair facility, keeping all their parts on hand for what they would need. They would use algorithms and such to decide how to order just in time to get the things when they would need them so that they didn't have to pay for warehouses and all of that. Right. Like, that makes perfect sense.

Well, when everything's working, it makes perfect.

When the system is working, it all makes perfect sense. But, you know, there are these ripple effects that happen. And, you know, the shipping container thing was one of them. You mentioned a couple of others that caused it so that these things can't happen. And now it's like, okay, well, do we want to get this stuff and warehouse it? And there was a, I think a shipping port somewhere on the East Coast, I want to say in Georgia, where the, the shipments were coming in, but the people to whom they were going were not coming to pick them up. And they were effectively using the port as free warehouse.

Oh, wow.

Like, and it wasn't just one, you know, it wasn't a fraction of the company most of them were using. It's like, we have nowhere to put this stuff, so it's staying there, which means you can't empty the container, they can't go back. And so the system, yet another disruption.

We were definitely it.

Go ahead.

Well, it's definitely a stacking of all these different things going on at one time.

That's what it. Yeah, exactly. I was, you know, I was saying to you before the show, but I was thinking about it all day. I had a, I had a stacked day with my time today, and it was fine, everything was good. And then I had a surprise phone call come in that I did not, you know, I didn't have enough buffer time accounted for. And I had two or three things and I thought, this is interesting. I'm running a just in time operation here with my time as the commodity, right? And so as soon as those two things interrupted the supply chain of my time, there were all these ripple effects. And so here I am recording this show. I haven't published the last show I recorded. That's stacked up. Now, what's going to happen when I finish this one? Do I get this one to you? Do I do the other one first? Like, what order do I have these? How late in the day is this.

Going to push the Dave Hamilton supply chain?

The Dave Hamilton supply chain dilemma is what it is. But like, that's. I never was in the commodities business. Like, I've never had inventory. I've never just. That's just not the world I've lived in.

Lucky man.

Well, it's been intentional, but yes. Right. You know, I mean, I don't know. I've also missed out on opportunities by now too.

Different.

Yeah, it's different but, but you know, as I was thinking about it today, it was like oh like this is something I understand my time like and it's the same kind of thing. You have a little ripple effect like your time winds up getting monopolized and suddenly you can't spend it somewhere else because you know, you only got one of every minute.

Yeah, yeah. So, so let me, I wanted to just throw out a few. I'm certainly not a supply chain expert.

Sure.

But I think it's worth having this discussion and then you know, of course we always want to hear from our listeners, from you. FeedbackusinessShow Co Tell us how you're dealing with this or how it's impacting your business. One of the first thing that's critically important is to have control of your inventory in the first place. Knowing that you know what you really have on the shelves, what is on your warehouses or on the dock like Dave was mentioning and knowing that your data is good. Right. Stock levels, knowing what your historical demand is, what your sell through rate is, if you have a good handle. And I will be the first to admit this has always been a challenge for me because it's a lot of work to keep the data correct. It's just a lot of work to keep it up to date and that kind of thing. But the better you are at allows you to better forecast, forecast what your needs are going to be and you can work closer with suppliers on what those needs are and possibly avoid some of these supply chain things in the first place because maybe it's not as big of a problem as you as you might think.

No. But without the data you don't know. And you know, for those of us who, who are entrepreneurs, we're used to, most of us at least that I encounter and that we encounter here. You know, when we talk to all of you, we learn that trusting our guts is often the most reliable thing and there are times when that is true. However, there are also times when it's good to feed our guts data so that we can trust them better.

Big time. Big time. This is one of those times, you know, that data and checking to be sure that data is correct and that kind of thing is really important.

Yeah.

Another thing that I've, you know again, I always, I Struggle with this as well is always be thinking about finding new suppliers. It's really easy to be complacent when you have a great supplier or a few great suppliers that are really coming through for you. If you stop reaching out and trying to at least connect with new suppliers, new vendors, new opportunities, you don't even need to start buying from them. I mean, just having that connection with them, opening up new relationships all the time, it can eventually really help you. Especially if you look at that data and you see in the future that there's a problem coming down the pike, you'll have those people to reach out to quickly.

Yeah. You know, I mean, that's great advice for, obviously for this. It's also great advice for pretty much every aspect of your business if there's, you know, if you look. And one great way to look at this is to look at all of the people, companies, partners, whatever it is upon whom you rely, especially those that aren't your employees. But we could have this argument, you know, a good argument to have this about your employees, too. But certainly, you know, your suppliers, your vendors, and even your customers and assume that one of them is going to go away. Now prioritize them and make the one that's going to hurt the most go away. How much is that going to hurt? And whichever one that is, that's the one you want to go find a. Not a replacement for, but a backup for.

Yeah, it's a great idea.

And, you know, it might be. Well, yeah, I get, you know, we sell widgets and I've got this one company that makes our widgets. Okay, well, maybe find somebody else that can make 15% of your widgets. Right. So that you get 85% from the place that you know and you trust and it works really well. And then you've got this other little thing that's just sort of cooking along here. And if company number one goes away, well, you don't have to get company number two started from scratch. You just need to convince them to ramp up for you.

Correct.

Right.

They already know who you are. You've established some credibility.

Yeah. You sent them some money.

Yeah. It's an entirely different discussion and relationship versus, hey, all my stuff is stacked on the ships or I can't get it off the dock. I need you to produce X. And they look at you like, well, I've got all these other customers waiting for me to produce X and I've got, you know, I don't know who.

You are, I don't know who you Are. Well, it was that company. They were a sponsor of ours, Hopsy. Right. They. They had. They had a great. What I thought was a great idea. It was. You had like a mini keg at your house and they ate beer and. And I got one. Yeah, yeah, I know you have one.

I had some testing.

We. I did some testing as well. And then I could no longer pay to have the test unit sent to me anymore because they lost their shipping partner on the East Coast. And I remember calling you. I'm like, do you have a problem getting from Hopsy? And you're like, no. And it was like, I can't. If I went to Hopsie Beer or whatever it was, I just couldn't. That was it. So I had to, like, throw the thing away or what? I don't know. I don't get it. Yeah, it was worthless to me and I would have kept paying them for it. It was a nice little thing. It was a fun little thing. Yeah. So they didn't have a backup. And it. I don't know if that business even still exists, but, you know, if it does, it's because they figured it out.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. The next thing on my list, Hopsy.

Dot Beer is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy. So let that be the lesson to you all.

The beer was good, but the model had a little problem.

The model had a. It had a fatal flaw. The model was actually really good. It's just. They didn't. They didn't diversify enough.

Yeah, right. Yeah, that's true. Okay, so next on my list is all about communication. You know, having really transparent communication with your customers. We're talking about it with our suppliers a few moments ago, but keeping the lines of communication open on your website, your newsletters, your salespeople, when they're talking to your customers, talking about the supply chain issues that you're working to overcome in case things change. Right. So that they're ready. Everybody knows what's going on. Everybody who, you know, looks online or hears the news or whatever, you know, it's an opportunity to talk about how it's having an impact on your business. And it may not impact them yet at all, but if the time comes where it does, if you can't provide their product or their service or their piece of the bundle, or you have to implement some changes, you're going to have a foundation. They're like, oh, yeah, they mentioned this a couple of times over the last few months. So I'm. I'm prepared for it, they're not going to feel like they're getting the rug pulled out from underneath them because you've been talking about it.

Yeah.

Important.

Yeah.

And then the other thing is looking at, I mean I, I've seen a bunch of stuff. Well, if you just bought it here in the, in domestically, nobody would be waiting for this stuff. That's not necessarily true. You need to talk to your suppliers and find out where they're sourcing this problem as well or those products and so that, you know, if the supply chain slows down from Asia, for example.

Yep.

That it's going to roll downhill and it's going to impact you so you can prepare. Right. And a couple of concepts that, that I think are important to understand and I hadn't heard them phrased this way before, but I really like them. One is tts, time to survive. How long can you keep up with customer demand with your current inventory level? Do you have three months, six months, three weeks? Right. How long is your sell through going to continue to occur with what you have in stock or what you know is, you know.

Yeah, right.

That's important to know that. The other one is ttr. Ttr, Time to recover. How long will it take to get back to normal inventory levels after your supply chain is disrupted? Right. You want to try to try your best to look at what those numbers look like because then they're going to help you make better decisions. You're going to be able to communicate better to your customers because they're going to ask you that, hey, how long? What do you mean when can you get it? So you want to have that number in advance.

Yeah.

And you know you're going to talk to suppliers. Having that data again allows you to make data based decisions will help you a lot. So time to survive and time to recover. Really, really important.

It's interesting as you're saying these things, I've never, I mean I'm sure I've seen, seen or heard these terms but I've never thought about them before because my businesses have not had inventory. But my businesses do have inventory. You know, they're, they're listeners or page views. And, and you, what is it? Well, it's ad spots, but it's how many people are going to see or hear those ad spots? Right. That's the key. Because if you play an ad spot in the forest, do you get paid? No. This is an answer with a question with a definitive answer. So this is interesting of looking at publishing business and saying, okay, where does your inventory come from and what could disrupt it and then what's your time to survive while you recover? Whatever happened to disrupt things? And there are all kinds of things that could disrupt it. They aren't, you know, the, well they, they could be related to the global supply chain but generally they're a little more closer to the vest. But yeah. Huh.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, when you, when you're looking at all this stuff, it's again, you're just always trying to rely on good data.

Right.

Not emotions, not stressed based reactions. And like one of our favorite phrases on this show that one of our earliest guests, Brian Friss from oh man, I'm blanking on this company name. He said don't make fear based decisions. And especially going through this kind of stuff, it'd be very easy to make those kinds of decisions. So rely on the data and dig deep to do that.

From Digistore, by the way.

That's right. Thank you.

I got you covered. It's all good.

And a couple things to kind of wrap up this topic. You know, as small business owners, we often have advantages during these times. Right. It's a little easier to pivot, easier to change our product or service up to deal with a shortage of maybe a particular item. And also, you know, when you go out and you're trying to reach new suppliers or find if you're in the inventory or you need some component, you can be happier maybe taking a smaller chunk. It's not some, you know, Mega Corp that oh, we need 50,000 pieces. Well, you could go and say, hey, you know, 500 pieces would get me another couple of weeks. You could take small chunks where larger companies don't even want to hassle with it. Right. I think that's a great concept to understand, is to be agile. And you know, I think a good example of this, even though this company is not a small business, they often act like one. And I was listening or I don't know where I read it last week where Tesla came through and had their engineers rewrite the code in their vehicles so that it would work with some different types of semiconductor chips that were available versus waiting for chips to come back on the market like Ford and Chevy did. Ford and Chevy parked tens of thousands of vehicles that they couldn't get the chips for. That was the last thing they needed. And Tesla had their engineers, hey, we can get this chip. Maybe it's, I don't know, whatever it is. And they rewrote the code. It took them three weeks and they shipped more cars than they Ever had, you know, in a quarter, something like 300 plus thousand. So think like that.

That's amazing. Yeah. Really smart. Like. Yeah. Okay, we can't get that. What does it take to adapt? To get plan B? Yeah.

How do we do it? You know, if you're in a food business, are there. I listened to a Goldman Sachs podcast and they were, you know, one restaurant owner was talking about avocados and it was just so difficult to get at avocados. And they were shifting ingredients around to try to, you know, take that into how it impacts their food.

Sure.

Can you adjust your menus to keep your customers happy while still having enough stock on hand to run your business? Right. So again, yeah, there's some really interesting ways to look at it. The key takeaway for me is, number one, always communicate what's going on and be transparent with your customers because you've built all this credibility, Right. You've been listening to this show for years and you've used all our tips and tricks and your customers trust you and you've got a great reputation. You're building this great story that you're going to look back on that's going to keep you nice and warm as you get older and that as you build your wealth and if you let them know up front, you're going to keep that credibility and trust. You're like, wow, I'm sure you've been reading, you know, online or seen it on the news that we have a massive supply chain shortage or problem going on. Let me explain how that's impacting our business and the services or products we provide to you. People love that stuff because you're honest, right. And you don't have to tell them everything, but you need to get it out there that, that you know what's going on and be prepared. Like, especially if you can say at this time, it's not going to impact, but we are preparing in, you know, weeks or month. When you look at your TTS numbers, you'll be able to say, well, we expect in 90 days it may impact whatever. So keep those lines of communication with them.

Well, this is, I mean, it reminds me of everything you say all the time, which is choose what story you want to tell and you can start this here and potentially avoid having to tell the like every other business, we are now suffering. And here's how you, as my customer, is going to suffer. Right. If you can avoid telling that story, that puts you ahead. Yeah, it does.

And you can. Even if you eventually have to do that, you ease them into it and they'd be like, oh, you know, they've been talking about this for months. I wouldn't see this on the shelf. Or I couldn't get that. So they're, I'm ready for it. Last couple things. Base your decisions on data. Always look just like we talked about. Go back and listen to the show again and then be agile. Always open to new ideas. Don't get stuck in old man disease, no matter what age you are, and keep changing and you'll get through this stuff. I do want to talk about inflation, but I have a lot to talk about, how to deal with that as small business. So I think what we'll do is push that out to next week's show.

I like that idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we're all small businessing, so, you know, we don't have time to listen to two podcasts back to back here. And, you know, a trick for all of you, I've started, and this took me probably longer than it took all of you because not only am I am I a podcast listener, but I'm also a podcaster. I've started listening to my podcasts at 1.5 speed.

Man.

It'S so easy to get used to. And I blast through shows now. It's fantastic.

It is a great way to do it.

I highly recommend it. Yeah, I know I'm late to this particular party. I use an app on my phone and on my Mac called Overcast, and you can set the sort of the target speed. So I set it to one and a half. But the author of this, he's a brilliant programmer. He was the first programmer to work for Tumblr. So Overcast. Yeah, he did okay when they got there, when they did their acquisition. Yeah. But he is a fantastic programmer and he really does this. It is his business, but it is also a passion project. Right. And he is a podcaster and a podcast listener, and so he wants to make the experience better. So he's got this thing called SmartSpeed in there that it sort of fills the gaps by accelerating it faster. And then if somebody's talking really quickly, it'll slow it down a little bit so that it really keeps it paced very nicely. It's actually really well done. So that's cool. Yeah, I'll put a link to Overcast in there, but yeah, that sounds great.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, again, share your tips on how you're managing supply chain, or maybe it's not impacting you at all because you planned ahead and did something different that we didn't talk about here. So let us know. Feedbackusinessshow.

Co. Yeah, absolutely. We'd. Yeah, we'd love to hear from you. And, you know, it's how we do it here. It's how it works. Got anything else, man?

Maybe go leave us a review. We haven't talked about that in a long time.

I like it.

Go tell your, you know what you honestly think about the show? You know, dig deep when you're thinking of how many stars to put out there. That would always help us. Using your podcast application of choice.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. And check out our sponsors, of course, Shopify. Com sbsnetsuite. Com sbs. Keep on living that charmed life. Keep on small businessing, and we'll see you next week.