#96 Adventure with Purpose: Rotorua Canopy Tours B Corp Journey with Paul Button

Hello, Kia ora Shimai. Welcome to the latest episode of the Be Better podcast, which is also live streaming into our Be Better client community group on Facebook. So if you're a client of us, you get to listen to the podcast way, way early, which is pretty cool.

So, yes, thank you. Welcome back to last episode. I've no idea what episode number this is going to be, but we're, we're creeping up to episode 100, which is pretty cool. So thank you as always to our regular listeners, that one person on the Internet who might be tuning in. If this is your first time, welcome. Hopefully you stay around, check out some of the back catalog. There's some pretty cool podcast with me today. I have got Paul Button from Rotorua Canopy Tours. Paul, how is it going, mate?

Kia ora.

Kia ora.

It's doing very good. Thanks, Tim.

That's what we like. It's quite funny because Paul and I were hanging out yesterday, sort of coincidentally in some ways. We did a webinar podcast thing with some of the cool people at Intrepid Travel who are themselves a B Corp. So we are recording this in March. This won't be airing so to the general public until later than March. March is B Corp month. And so, yeah, Paul and I, with Sara from Intrepid, we're on a bit of a panel yesterday talking about all things B Corp. So it's been so long since I've seen you. I feel like we had some of the same conversation we had yesterday. It's going to be happening here today, but hey, ho, here we are.

So for people who don't know you and Rotoru Academy Tours, who are you and tell us about what you guys are up to.

Well, so, yeah, Paul's my name from Rotorua Griffin, south island, near Christchurch. I'm the general manager of Rotorua Canopy Tours. And Rotatoa Canopy Tour as a business is essentially, it's a zipline business, right? It's got zip lines and bridges and an old growth forest. It's got six. It's got two courses, six ziplines per course and three bridges per course. And it's all at height to go tree to tree. But for us, it's more than that. It's about. We're a business that's all about connecting people to nature, connecting them to each other and to adventure. And we do that with small groups. We're guided, two guides, ten people. It's bespoke. We also run a conservation project alongside the business, which we immerse everybody into the conservation Project's been running for 12 years. We've got this ancient old growth forest of native New Zealand forest, never been touched. We sort of operate in a sort of a 50 hectare area of a thousand hectare forest. And right now to this date we've essentially got 200 those hectares pest free.

You know, there's no fence but it's essentially as pest free as you can get. So because of that the biodiversity has come back, the forest has come back to life, the birds come back and we sort of tell that story and immerse people into on the, the experience. So Cannabis tours is quite cool in that sense. Like all the, you know, the conservation works or voluntary like what we do at volunteer is no sort of no force commitment from anybody. But because of that full integration into the visitor experience.

We do okay. Like I said, it's a really cool product.

Nice, super cool. And so how did you get into this world of canopy tours like little Paul growing up in. Whereabouts in the south island did you outside Christchurch? Whereabouts?

Well, I was born in a town called Cheviot, which is about an hourch by probably famous by Gourbet or the bakery where you could when you drive the coach as a little kid.

Yep.

And then I moved to Rangura when I was 5 years old. Rung Yoda was a little town, 10,000 people had a school, you know, so it was pretty small town New Zealand. And since then, since the earthquakes, Ranger has got very popular. So it's, it's a completely different town. So don't get me wrong, when we were there, no traffic lights, no fast food, none of these bright lights, you know, no, no warehouse or no, no big box stores. It's just a, just a pretty, pretty average little town.

And so young Paul growing up in Rangior, did you always want to be general manager of a zipline tour company? Like what, what. How did you end up in the industry?

Yeah, I guess I learned how to kayak at high school at Whitewater Kayak. And I learned how to kayak and you know, seven form. That's old money and new money. That's year 13 and, and I love kayak. I thought it was really cool. We went away to the trip. We learned as part of our P.E. whatever our P.E. course and then finished school, picked fruit, you know, did whatever, went to university, kayaked a little bit university, enjoyed university life. I went to Dunedin, but I didn't, I wasn't going anywhere. Like I wasn't doing a course that I knew I loved. I went there to do more kind of drop down, you know, change courses within a month just wasn't for me. But I kept on kayaking the weekends in the canoe club and loved it. So then I was like, okay, well, I passed all my courses though. I'm really just wasting my money. And, and I kind of felt like I was surrounded by a lot of people doing the same thing, just, you know, spending other people's money on not what they generally wanted to do. So I, there's, I had a bit of a mentor there at the time, this guy Sam. And, and he'd just done the Typotini Polytech course, the adventure guiding, an outdoor leadership course in Greymouth. And so he was like, hey, you should try that. And I, and I did. And I went there purely because I just wanted to go kayaking. And I went there and it was amazing and just learned how to paddle. So I kept kayaking, but learn all the other sort of skills associated with outdoor leadership. Bushwork, you know, orienteering, navigation, climbing, like so did this over a couple of years. And when I was there, there's a tutor named Colin Sunnyvale and he's, you know, he was, he was an old raft guide and, and he's a great tutor. And one day I remember swimming. I was swimming across this current and I popped out on the other side of this, this really swift current. I was, I was quite a, I was quite a good swimmer as a kid. And he says, what do you want to do when you, when you leave here, mate? And I was like, I want to be a kayak instructor because I want to keep kayaking. And he said, no, no, no, you, if you want to be a kayak instructor, you're going to pedal on class two water. You know, you're not going to be in steep mountainous areas. What you want to do is become a raft guard. And I was like, oh, a rough guy. He said, yeah, you'll always be on class four or five water. You'll be in mountainous areas with a kayaking skirt and you'll be able to make money and travel to work. I was like, oh, okay, well, I'll do that. So then I left Gray Mouth and went to rotorua as a 20 year old and went kayaking. And there's a river here, the Kaituna. It's got a bunch of waterfalls. It's beautiful, it's warm, it's, it's really unique. And there's a commercial raft thing on it. So I trained up with wet and Wild kind of commercial raft gun and so I could keep kayak and so then roughed here for a couple years, went to Canada. So I'll get to the. Sorry, I'll get to the point of the story here.

It's all good, man. We want it, we want to hear the backstory.

So I went to Canada. I went to Whistler in British Columbia because at the time raft guides in New Zealand would travel. They still do, I should say, but they would travel seasonally. They do the summer in New Zealand, then travel to the summer over season. And with the exchange rate so pathetic, it used to actually be quite lucrative for, for essentially what was around relatively entry level occupation. And so I went to Whistler and British Columbia in Canada and I had no idea what I was getting into. People said it's good for skiing, but I kind of got. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. And the rafting was good. The rafting was good, but the kayaking was epic. Like the kayak was unbelievable. Steep, mountainous area. And then essentially traveled to and from for a bunch of years and. But I stayed there for 15 years, became Canadian, had children, had family. And then one day in 2017, we had a really cold, really cold winter. And it was because it was always cold, you know, compared to New Zealand. But we used to get sort of. And Whistler is like positive 1 minus 3. And Pemberton where I lived, because I traveled up to listen to work.

It was, you know, 10 minus 10, but and, and Whistler I was running, I should say, I, I worked at this rafting business for so long and I travel around the world, go kayaking, all that carry on. But the guy that I worked for sold the business and the next year and so he sold to this guy that wasn't rafted, but he had a couple of venture tourism businesses. So then the next year he bought the other rafting company. So then I became his general manager and we conglomerated the two. And then he had a zipline business, so we added that. And then as a snowshoe business and a ATV business and a snowmobile business and a dog sweat business and a tree top adventure business. You can kind of get where I'm going here. So we kind of added them all and I ran them all for him. So it became quite, you know, relatively accomplished in sort of this multi activity type business. And then one day when we had that really cold winter, my wife says she's British, she says New Zealand. And I'm like, we're lying in bed and I'm like, no, I don't go to New Zealand. She's like, come on, let's go to New Zealand. I'm like, because it's so cold in the spring, it hadn't warmed up, we're all a bit over it. So I jump on my phone, you know, and Google tourism. I go and trade me and I Google tourism business, tourism management jobs. And the job Academy tours popped up. And you read the, the job description, it was like it's written for me. And it expired the next day. I think I was just like, holy shit, look at this. And showed that showed my partner and she's like, I'll apply for it. And so I did. And the next day this guy, you know, named James goes, hi, thanks very much for the application. We're actually going to be in, we're going to be there next week. And I'm like, hey. And he said yeah, we can meet in person. And, and I double check because the town is called Pemberan. So I Google New Zealand and go Pemberton, New Zealand and there's a Pemberton in Taranaki. And I replied, hey, awesome to hear from you. You know, I'd love to meet you. Just double check it. It's Pemberton Canada, not Pemberton Tanavaki. And he said no, no, we'll be there next week in person and we'll meet up. And so then I met the two owners, the two found the co founders and the owners and they were, they were awesome. It turns out of the town of 2, 000 people I lived in, his brother had just moved there, so he's over visiting his brother and Academy Tours had just won the, we just won the Supreme Tourism Awards. And, and part of that they got given a bunch of Air New Zealand flight credits. So they were flying to a couple of places checking out more zipline courses because they're about to, they want to build a new zipline force and part of that was checking out new courses and then they needed someone to run it. So it all kind of, it was incredibly serendipitous, the whole process. And so when I was, you know, when I was studying the, you know, the busy nights at the night before and you're googling, but it was so clear and obvious from the digital comms that Canopy tours was people led, environment led and you could really see they looked after their people. So, you know, that's how I really like. And.

I got the job, we flew home and six years later we flew, flew home on September 9, 2017 and I started work on September 11, 2017. And then the rest has just been history, I guess.

Man, that's super cool. It's amazing the number of interviews we've done recently, it seems, where there's just been this serendipitous moment where the universe has just collided and it's just gone. Here's the thing. And everyone has taken that thing and it's led to some cool stuff. It's. It's. Yeah, I'd be like, say, are you sure this is Pemberton, Canada? Not like, how does that work? It's like, why?

And if you don't meet them, you don't like them. Would you. Would you. Would you do that? Would you put all your eggs in one basket and fly across the world? Like, well, we wanted the kids to be kiwi in that, but, you know, for a little bit. But, well, we didn't have to leave. And by the time. Actually, by the time James took ages, by the time he'd rolled around and got warm again, and we've forgotten all about it, like, oh, yeah, okay, whatever. I do agree with you. Like, one of our customer experience managers, been with us for six and six years, whatever. She, you know, she's really good at her role. I met her at the front row of a Salmonella Dub concert and just started chatting and she's like, oh, can be tours. Yeah. I saw this job, advertising can be tours, and I was like, oh, you should apply for it. She's like, well, what do you do? I'm like, the general manager. It's kind of like the 10 beers she drank just all disappeared out of her body. But then she's been amazing, you know, and it's just such a fortuitous meet. Yeah. So I agree with you. This is cool.

It'd be interesting to do some kind of study of serendipitousness and B Corp versus other business as usual. Like, are B Corp people more like. B Corp's quite a. It's still quite a niche, you know, concept. So are the people who are involved in the big movement, are they generally more open to opportunity than businesses? You know, business as usual? I don't know. It just feels like a lot of people we talk to on this podcast, they have seized opportunities that other people, you know, would have just. I just want to. Yeah. Just completely hypothesizing.

Well, hiring so tough because you get the wrong person. It's awful. You get the right person. They say there's, you know, there's not much middle ground. You don't just get notified person and things are okay. It's like it usually goes either, either extreme.

Yeah. And so I've only got one Canadian joke. How many A's are there in Canada?

Canada. So there'd be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Well, yeah. Yeah. Because it's like C, A, N, A, D, A and then there's a fourth one, A, Canada E. Yeah.

Yeah. Well the Canadians and the Kiwis are quite well connected because we both like to say A and then shorter sharp are like, oh, hey. And this is more of an odd Canada E. Yeah. Eh. Yeah. There was.

I didn't listen. There's such like, it's such a, such a cool culture. Like really influenced by immigration for a long, long period of time. You know, so really welcoming as, as a country.

Yeah.

And, and really open to having more people because they understand the more people, the bigger the economy, the healthier. Yeah. Multicultural type community base.

And their population density is like so low. You've got like what, three or four main cities and then that's pretty much it. Yeah.

And 90% of people live within 60 kilometers of the border.

Yeah. So room to expand possibly. Yeah. Every, every Canadian I seem to have met the main one. Shout out to Dave Ellis, who used to live around the road for me with a mate of mine in Auckland. Just absolutely insane when it came to outdoor sports. He's like, you know, should we go mountain biking? Yeah, sure. Thinking nice, nice little bit of cross country mountain biking. No. Next minute he's doing like 20 foot gap jumps and back flips and then yeah, you know, should we go skiing? Yeah. He brings out the telemark skis. It's like, yeah, all right, just stop showing off. But yeah. So no, no, no regrets from leaving, Leaving Canada?

Oh yeah, definitely regrets. I really miss it. I missed that sort of Mr. Mountains miss that warm culture. You know, it's a really inclusive culture and they teach that inclusivity in schools. They're very polite culture. Like the jokes around Canadians being polite is actually, is true. Like, but they, they. It comes in the whole education system. Like it's. Because at times, you know, like maybe it's just the sort of the North Islands, but more dense, you know, population can be tough. Right. Like, you know, but over there a lot of your touch points with humans are quite warm. But you never say never. Right. Like we're Canadian citizens and, and so it's not like the door's definitely not closed. We have property over there now we don't, you know.

Yep.

And in some areas, the areas we particularly like to live the Properties on gang buses since COVID Like, that was the areas of demand, like those small amounts of houses where people went right.

To get out of. Get out of Dodge.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They wanted to get out of the cities. They are their apartments. And then, you know, they got the 1% interest rates because interest rates were 1% over there when I was in 2000.

Nice.

Oh, it's amazing.

Yeah. And so, like, obviously, we'll get a bit more into Rotary Canopy Tours. And you sort of alluded to it at the beginning. You. The company does a lot of good, you know, socially and environmentally. Was that always the experience in the tourism sector? So, like, was that. Were the companies in Canada, were they focused on doing good or was it more commercially focused? And you know, what. What's your sort of story? Been over your sort of career path? You know, have you always been looking for that contribution, that purpose, or is it just like, I just want a job as a rife guide and then, you know, has it come to you later in life?

That's a good question. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. No, like, I think tourism is interesting because the majority of tourism. Well, in adventure tourism, people take.

They.

They need to use their natural environment to create revenue. Like, that's the product. Exposing people to nature, exposing people to risk via, you know, one activity or the other.

Sorry, not exposing people risks. Exposing people to perceived risk, some real risk, but, you know, you're not just throwing people in danger. It's not. It's not. It's not a gambler crapshoot, but. Yeah, no, no. I think as a human, I've always been really aligned to. To being nice, you know, like into and connecting and giving back. I think Canada definitely felt like it was, you know, I wouldn't say greenwashing, but it definitely felt like you're always exposed to nature over there. So you're so much more part of it. You know, you live in these forested areas and. And like you say the population density is so close to the border that it's so easy to get into the back country. But it always. It definitely felt like it's very for profit. Like, you know, it was about. Through the seasonal nature of Canada. You know, you'd get your people, you'd get your employees in, and you'd have these really steep peaks, you know, like the July school holidays in the summer, and then sort of December, January, February, and the winter, you'd have these steep peaks and you create as much revenue as you can. And then, you know, you dissipate your people and and over the, you know, like New Zealand's got some pretty strong more human focused labor laws where over there they're definitely a bit more business focused. And we're on the west coast, like we were definitely more left. We, we had sort of more employee focused labor laws and get off the east coast. Like they were really, they were definitely more business focused. So I'd say that there's probably always a frustration it to not be crazy, you know, like either people focused or environment focused particularly that you're using that environment to make money. But you know, over there like you know, oil, gas, forestry, fisheries, it's all the primary industries are so dominating. And that's a really good thing about coming to New Zealand is that tourism is a really well recognized industry. And, and when we, when we sit at the table with forestry, fishery, like I think there's a pretty even seat. We're over there. Like.

A lot of the concessions that were from the government, there were these Clauses called the 90 day clause that if they found. So you have this 25 year concession to run your, you know, zipline or your stonewall business or whatever. But there's always a 90 day clause from government that if they found anything to have added value from forestry, fishery, minerals or fossil fuels, they would remove the concession and give you 90 days notice. You know, so nobody would invest into tourism because at any point you put your 5, 10, 15, $20 million in there in 90 days you could lose it if they found gold or if they found mineral, they found oil, or if they wanted to sell the trees to tree farm license instead of letting it use for tourism. So, so I guess it was double edged sword. The government didn't enable tourism to grow. So in return people just leveraged the revenues off it to then you know, sweet. We made some more money. Great. Let's put it away, you know, take the business up for another six months, open up again and try to make some more.

Wow. So yeah, sort of a bit of short termism almost imposed on the industry just by.

Because yeah.

Logging dominated. Like you show up, you're a snowmobile business, you access this trail all winter. You'd show up on a Wednesday in March. And then the snowmobile, the, the logging companies just completely plowed the entire trail because they want to start hauling out of that area first thing. Like there's no communication, you know, so. So tourism was always kind of the, the poor cousin.

Yeah. Yeah, that's gonna be tough. Yes. Like okay, if you're gonna take the trees down, could you just maybe leave the 10 trees that have got the wires on them so we can at least keep running.

You know, we're living in rocks. It was amazing. Like, the bike in here is so good and one of the reasons why it's so good, like the logging company will go and log or work or do whatever during the day and then they'll open up the trail at five o'. Clock. Yeah, they destroy these trails, they. They rebuild them and then give them back to the recreational community or, or.

Move the trails around. Say, look, this one's closed, but there's one like you can get to the. It's the same here in Burwood Forest where there's lots of forestry. There's like, there's so many trails that, yeah, this one will be closed off for a few months or maybe a year or two, but there's one that kind of does the same loop but, you know, from a different angle that you can still get on so that you're not.

Yeah, it's just amazing, like, just to have that. And I guess it's just council ue. It's just the group's working together, you know, it's really cool. But they make it a priority and over there they don't. And that's. Everything's a bit more vigilante over there. Like illegal trail building is normal and, you know, and everybody gets annoyed.

But then you get.

But you kind of have to. Because if, you know, you could lose that one over here next year and then you're going to get that one. Or they destroy Hillside because they want to have a housing development.

Well, literally. The Wild West.

Yeah. Yeah, it was. Yeah, you're right. It's the Wild West. Yeah. Correct. Yeah.

And so, so, yeah, I mean, is the idea of doing good, like, is that. Has that been something that you feel like you've had throughout? I mean, I mean, I say that you wanted to train as a lawyer, so, you know, not so sure.

But like, yes. The idea of, you know, doing good, giving back to. I mean, obviously you. You were clearly committed to the outdoors early, early doors, you know, has that been something that you've. You've pulled through your business career, you know, like looking after the planet, looking after the environment, is that something that's deeply within you or, you know, or was it something that you got to be thinking more about over the years of working in the environment? Like, was there a key moment when you maybe saw some logging or something happening in Canada and you're like, okay, this is fact.

Yeah, that's A good question. But I think, I think deep within me, I've always wanted to, I love capitalism, I always have. And I've always wanted to use it for good. Like I've always wanted, you know, like my dream would be to be a hit, to own a heavy hitting, huge commercial organization, but then have a huge commercial arm on the background, you know, like Patagonia or something would be a cool example of how they do that. Because I think you gotta, you know, with business, you don't be ruthless with business, but you got to be efficient and you've got to run for profit because profits are the breath of the lifeblood of a business. Without profits, there's none of this B Corp stuff could even happen. But then on the background, be ruthlessly aggressive on giving back as well and enabling opportunity for other people. So I guess I do believe in that a lot. And that's always been in me. And this frustration in Canada was you get all these humans, right? You get all these staff and you bring them in and you kind of. My perception, they wouldn't get paid that well and you would train them up and you'd run all these products and then you just get rid of them in the, in the fall and the autumn because there's no business, you know, there's no. But that was just culture. People would essentially, you know, you know, they are a tool in the toolbox to create revenue, but it was just so extreme. Bring them in, do whatever you can to get them working and then when the business is done, they got, they're gone. And it never really felt that good. So we're, but they're saying that there's a real challenge doing the opposite, actually keeping them on and, and giving them a good life. Because tourism is so seasonal and New Zealand, it's not as seasonal as North America, but it still is, it's seasonal. Right. You still got a lot of challenges.

Yeah. And I guess almost by its nature you are possibly attracting a transitory mindset amongst the staff because it's like, yeah, I want to come to New Zealand, maybe only for a few months. So that, yes, you know, it's as much about a potential employee experiencing the location and the rivers and the trees as it is. You know, it's like them having some money to being paid to run a tour is almost secondary maybe to their own experience of coming here. And so try to capture them and go, you know, actually almost like, what happened to you going to Canada? It's like, hey, no, Paul, actually come stay here. It's really cool. And there's lots of opportunities. So, yes, I guess it's. That's probably the biggest tension, I would imagine, in the employee side of things is making people want to stop in one location when they have that wanderlust like you did. And, and they. It's. It's a career, it's a vehicle that can help you travel the world.

So, yeah, I think that's the key. I think it's about making tourism a career and making people see it. Like academy tours, we. We used to only employ Kiwis, so we would only employ out of a local Kiwi market that you. And the challenge is that, you know, you do see the seasonal nature. So instead of hunting in the international labor market, we used to go to all the politics around New Zealand, the adventure tourism politics and the sustainability courses and say, hey, come Academy tours, you're going to get these wicker skills. It's going to be fun. It fully aligns with, you know, what you're doing. But then, you know, we'll take you for three months and you go back to school, you know, go back to university afterwards or whatever, which worked really well. It's about finding that right person. And then you've got the ones from Rotano who live here, you know, they work five days a week. They got their farno here, there, and then they're awesome employees too. Quite funny too, because when you actually advertise and hunt for these people, like depending on the time of the year, is what sort of employee you get. Like if you recruit May, June, we found we get really good local employees and you get them for, you know, you get into two, three, four, five years. But then if you, you know, when you go looking for these politics, you're getting, you know, you get them on November, December and they're just stoked. They'll come here and they'll share a bunch, you know, the bunch will go in a house and then they'll. They'll all be gone by February, March, January, February, March. So it's quite a lot of effort, like with a normal. I'm always quite jealous of if you had it. When I consider a normal business, somebody has revenue year round, you know, like if you're a gas station or whatever or a telecommunications company, like you hire somebody and then they're there.

Yeah.

You know, but whilst you hire them, you kind of balance their revenue levels and then they're gone and then they come back and you've got to hire. This induction, this firing, not firing, sorry, this hiring and Induction process is just ongoing and it can, it gets really tiring. Right.

But yeah, I can imagine.

Yeah. And hr, like most business leaders will tell you, HR is not their favorite part of the role, you know, but it's the most important part of their job.

Yeah, it's tough. Yeah. I mean, at my peak general manager career, I think I had like 10 or 12 people underneath me and it felt like I just spent most of the week dealing with other people's problems.

You know, it's important.

I. Yeah, I mean, I think the highlight was a six year old guy coming to me for marital advice. It's like, dude, I've been married for about a year.

I got nothing. Like, I should be coming to you for advice on, you know, on relationships.

I got nothing, mate. I literally, I got nothing. Have you googled it?

It's like, yeah, it's, it's, it is.

Challenge. Yeah.

Part of what we do, academy tours, which, which I think is really cool, is we have emotional. Well, we're very value driven. And I think that's a lot of businesses say that cliche, right? Like, we're values driven, live our values. And you go out to see a staff and we say, hey, what are your values? And they're like, oh, I don't know, like, I don't care. But we're values driven. We have behavior, values and mission and vision like a lot of people do. But we try to make it come alive, but to support it, we have emotional values because we kind of have that mindset of like, we know everybody's got something going on and you know that's exaggerated today. Right. We all know that. So we're like, hey, instead of saying leave your baggage at home, kind of like our generation X's, we like, you know, you just leave your baggage at home and you just come to work and front it up and you go home and you're an absolute disaster. And you know, over a long period of time you just go, you know, it gives you a crazy anxiety or whatever. We say, hey, bring it and we'll deal with it. Like with this emotional value session with this guy named Adam who he runs, he runs this, I think it was business is called. But he's an old tourism buddy and he left tourism after Covid and, and he started this, this sort of HR events business. And, and he, he always talked about. Because we'd always hang out at these conferences and he always talked about his. This card deck and I never read the emotional contact.

Yeah, yeah. So we, we offer that ourselves. Yeah.

Yeah, it was amazing. Hey, like we, as a middle of COVID you know, we've been operating for about a year. Like everyone's pretty tired and burnout. But we, we had about 25 staff at the moment. Like we've got 70 on at the moment. Like now by the time we had 25, we all got into our small group. So you know the process and just watching these people a. Like you pull out an emotional card, you attach your emotion to it. And even on the, when we pulled out the first card, there's a positive emotion we had. In my group of five, we had three people crying and I was just like, holy smokes. Like, this is mind blowing. And, and even. And then as you got through it, like, even the people that I thought were the strongest had stuff going on. And I was the most amazing day as a leader. I was just like, this is that like, you know, for me, you know, the one thing I learned that day, the clear thing I think I learned was the best thing that I can do is to be kind. And not that I wasn't kind, but the first thing you should do every day is just say hello and be really nice everybody. Because all they want is a community and connection at workplace. So our five emotional values, certainly. So you'll resonate with us. You know, the five that we chose together as a group was to be loved, connected, supported and proud and energized. So everybody's really in it. They were really proud of what they do. Accounting. We do some amazing stuff. So they're already proud of the physical experience, but they just want to be connected to the organization, supported by the organization. They want to be. Have the energy every day to come and perform and they want to be loved by the organization. So we put those emotional values at the bottom. Because I guess what I learned was that you can't expect anyone to deliver value if they're not emotionally, like, emotionally stable because they're just gonna be like, I don't care about better, never stops or making every attraction counts. I feel like every day nobody here likes me, like, oh my God. So, so we did that. And then every day ever since then, we use those five emotional values for all decision making. It's the basis of everything we do. And then everything else just flows because you know our mission, to have world class guide adventures, raving fans, to restore an ancient forest and be the best place to work in New Zealand. And. And then the vision is to be New Zealand's most loved tourism brand and to be the best place to Work in New Zealand is like such a lofty goal. Well, they all are lofty goals, but you've just got to scratch the itch. And for me, that day I learned that the itch is actually emotional with these employees. And we employ mostly young. Right. Like 18 to.

27, 28 is probably average. Right. We have a couple older ones. I'm the second oldest in the company at 44.

But it's just, they've got to be stuck. They've got to just walk in here and go, oh, my God, I'm going to a place that I love, that loves me, they care about me, and then I can perform. And then we're a people business. Like, we don't sell, you know, we don't sell soap or we don't sell a product. Well, sorry, we do sell a product, but we sell human interaction like we sell a service. Our touch points that we're our value adds. If the guides are so if the customer experience team start, the customers are stuck. This co. And I think, and you can tell me, actually, to me, I don't think many businesses do that. I don't think they have an emotional value set.

No.

Totally agree. The. What I love about it is, like I say, most companies have got values. And, you know, I used to work for a large global multinational company, and they had their values literally chiseled in stone behind the front desk of their two international head offices. And yet every day they worked, often completely in violation of those values, yet they're chiseled in stone. So, yeah, most companies, it's. It's almost like values bingo. You know, bullshit bingo. You know, if I, I'd always love it when you see, you know, like, excellence, knowledgeable. It's like, you know, that's table stakes. I'm paying you for that. That's what I expect. So, yeah, there's typically some bullshit bingo and they just take them from someone else. But what I really love about the emotional culture deck and why, like I said, we offer it as a service and we've had it. We use it with a few clients and they get similarly great results. They have, you know, they have that real breakthrough is because, yes, okay, I want to feel loved, but you then get each person to say, this is how I need to feel, to feel loved. So is it a pat on the back? Is it a reward in front of everyone? Some people don't want to be patted on the back in public. They want to, you know, they want you to take them to the side and just go, hey, I saw what you did today that was like really cool. Like they want that one on one. So it's getting to that depth of understanding of your team as to what actually motivates each individual and how to just, you know, it even astounds me. Like one of the other things that we can help people with is just understanding basic communication skills, understanding personality types. Most people don't know what their own personality type is and they don't recognize that there's three other personality types and they don't recognize that actually with that there's only about, I think it's about 20 or 30% overlap with how you communicate is going to be effectively received by other people. So even just understanding that other people see the world in a different way from you is foundational to it. And for me, having come from a sales background where, you know, communication skills, understanding human psychology, understanding how to create connection with people, it was so drummed into me. I often forget that for a lot of other people this is all like, I had no idea. And they see this. But the, one of the best examples, we did this sort of communication skills personality profile with a company and one of the managers was basically like the CEO, athlete style, personality, so driven. I just want shit done yesterday. Like I want to win, you know, go, go, go, go, go. And all his team were what I call sort of like blue personality types, which is like your nurse or primary school teacher. So they were all giving, you know, very all about the team first and empathy and emotion and story and wanted to be led on the journey. And he just said after he was made aware of that, he's like, oh, it's me, not them. It's like, yeah, you might just want to modify your approach. Like you can't just be so bull in the china shop. You just need to slow it down, bring them on journey. And he said after, just literally the first week after that session, he said it's amazing. Like my team now, like me, they get it, I get them.

Yeah. And I think it's some of this softer stuff, you know, inadverted commas. But we are all humans, we're just basically sacks of meat and emotion. And so to not connect to that I think is a real, is a real disconnect. And that's what you know, you're going to get a better, better result on the hard metrics by focusing some time on the soft metrics.

Yeah, yeah, cool. It's remarkable. Like it's.

That's pretty funny. I'm quite similar to how you Just described actually the. The. The athlete style, leadership. Because you just like, let's go get it done on this one.

Yeah.

And then.

Yeah, no, that's cool. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's. It's tough. Hey, like, it's.

You can never.

You can never. You can never win. We. I've done it with a few of our, you know, the love language.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can go online and do that test. So that guy's book. We do that. If, you know, you can do that with your staff, which is quite cool because then they tell you, like, oh, I like to be patted on the back or I like to be taken out for dinner, or I just like to be ignored, like, yeah, so that's. That's a good one. That's a nice little tool.

Yeah, the. I can't remember what piece of research this came from, but one of the biggest wins. So if you're a leader of any business, whether you're a B or not, one of the biggest wins on the daily, weekly basis is just genuinely, with authenticity, thanking your team for. For good work.

Not, you know, being facetious or, you know, oh, well done, you know, you. You took a phone call, you know, to the customer service team. But, like, if someone actually does a good job, it's like, hey, I. I've seen that. And that. That's really good. And it. There's a lot of research that. That also works on a relationship level. Like, if your partner does something that you're like, hey, actually that, like, you know, that was just really good. Like, the other day, I'd done like three loads in the dishwasher, put two loads of washing on. I got to the end of the day and I was just like, oh, man, I'm just shattered. And there was one more dishwasher that needed. Wife did it. And I was like, oh, just, you know, like, just. Thank you so much. Like, I. I just really did not have the energy to do that, that last one. And so thanks for doing that. And just even just a little thing like that, which would be an easy thing to slide or just, you know, what's your job? Because I've already done three. Just those little moments of just like, hey, like, that was actually really. I really appreciate that. And I think the US is typically probably over.

Does that over overly and inauthentically. Hey, you know, have a nice day, y', all, and all that. It's like, no, you don't mean that. You're on minimum wage and you had your Job and you're told you have to say that versus possibly typically, I think Kiwis in particular, Brits probably the same. Just that kind of like, oh, it's a bit awkward having any kind of emotional connection with another human, particularly maybe male to male. But just like, yeah, pat on the back. Hey, that was really cool. Really, thanks so much for doing that. That was like, that was really cool to get that done this week. So simple. But we forget about it in the busyness of business.

Yeah. Acknowledging and making people feel important, that's kind of like our ethos academy. So as always try to make those little moments big. So people do feel important.

Yep.

Show them value that way. Yes. My wife has just been away in the UK for eight days and, and you know, I contribute around the house a lot. Like we're pretty active parents with our kids but she works, you know, nine to three. Shot away school hours. Yeah. But I just never had the appreciation of how busy her world was from 9 till 6:30, 7 o'.

Clock.

Driving kids here, there, there, there whilst doing, picking up kids whilst doing dinner, going to the grocery store, walking the dog, you know, because you're at work and you're busy too and you get back and you're like. And you still contribute but you just kind of, you just. I never realized how intense those three hours actually were.

Yeah, it's. Yeah, I mean, because I, I work from home so I chip away at a lot of the, you know, the domestic stuff. So yeah, mostly during the week, you know, I can get up, put a load of washing on, do some work for 90 minutes, have a cup of tea, break, hang the washing out, you know, it's a nice sunny day normally. Cool. You know, that's done. And then we normally get, try and get our daughter to empty the dishwasher before school. That's hit and miss but you know, if it's empty, cool. I'll stack a dishwasher, you know, get it going during the day. And then there's all these little things I can kind of chip away at. I typically walk the dog, but yeah, so we sort of try and balance it. But yeah, kids, man, they, they take up a lot of time.

Around 100.

Your ones 7 or 8?

No, no older than that. 11. Almost 12. 12 next month. Yeah. So yeah, she's big into her dance so we're generally ferrying her around town to various dance lessons and singing lessons and.

Yeah, well that's the time consuming stuff I just said just a taxi driver. But then, you know, we're so supportive like you are, but it's like sometimes you're like, did they do too much?

But yeah, well, at whose cost? Yeah, because it's. I think it, you know, it comes back to the idea of community. You know, it takes a village to raise a kid and I think we sometimes forget that in the modern world, you know, like, only, only recently we sort of worked out that on Wednesday nights when our daughter. So she does dance like five till eight, you know, so you can't really. You're not really going to stay there because it's too long, so you kind of have to go there and come back. But then if you go there and come back, you know, the other person has to have cooked dinner and then the other person goes, you know, so it's just. It's still not a great relaxing evening. But yeah, we've. We've worked out that there's a kid who lives around the corner, so. Cool. We'll do turn about on the pickup, you know, so just. I think again, in the modern world, we've got so used to just. I've got to do it by myself and maybe with this, your wife is the same as me. Like, I'm originally from the uk. Like, I've got no extended family here to take any load. There's no cousins, there's, you know, there's just nothing locally. So we're kind of reliant on the community. But then everyone's busy, everyone's in their little bubble and, yeah, it's tough, but, yeah, yeah. So getting back to Canopy Tours, I said one, one question actually, just on. On sort of the career path. So the, the. I think there's quite a few people, myself included. Like, I went to university, I. I managed to push on through and got a really useful degree in Medieval History. Luckily I. Luckily I didn't have it. If I had paid for it, I probably would have had some bigger conversations with myself, but, yeah, that's all. Career path to law, were there. Were there conversations with parents or other people where you're kind of like, hey, yeah, you know that law degree that you possibly were quite keen for me to go and do, but actually I want to go and be a river guy. But was that an inflection point or a tough conversation time with family or any of that point, or were they, like, super supportive?

I was kind of a bit of a lone ranger, like the law thing. I'd always wanted to be a lawyer growing up and. And so they kind of. As I got older and older and Wasn't really into it that much. They kind of kept me kind of focused on that part. But I, like, I really want to leave home. Like, I left home three days after I left school, so. And I went. I lived in, you know, that North Canary area, but I went down to Virginia just so I could not be at home. So I was kind of. I don't think I even talked to anybody. I think I just. This sucks. Like, I just remember. I just remember how competitive everybody were because I think the first. First year went from 300 to 100 or something. I think second year, they only took 100 people through. And it just wasn't a cool vibe. I just been sitting in lectures. Apart from elections were really boring. Yeah. I was just like, hey, you know what? I'm not gonna argue Bargie.

All year.

I just want to have some fun and learn some stuff. And then I did psychology in geography and. And once again, for no reason that I thought it just sounded good and it was interesting because the. The physical geography, I was kind of like, oh, okay, this is cool, but I'm not that into it. Where now I am just infatuated by physical geography. But at the time I did human geography, which I was completely infatuated by. I just. I just took it and just loved it. So I have a little bit of. Not regret, but if I had stayed, I would have taken that human geography side and really run with it. Like, I just loved it. Just the whole concept of human space where people live how they live.

Yeah, I just never been exposed to that as a concept before, and I just really enjoyed it. And then I supported that with psychology, so. So in a way, if I'd actually stayed, I would have done probably something quite meaningful. But I was just scratching the niche and to do something fun, right. And I was always really physical. I was one of those guys that if professional sport was, you know, particularly rugby was a thing when I was growing up, it was just kind of. I would have really given that a shot. I think I would have just loved to do something like that. So it's just good to be physical and outdoors and. And it's funny because all I was was a kite bum, you know, like. But being a kite bum has led through a. What I would say a really enjoyable. A really enjoyable career. And I've learned, you know, you get being a raft guide, you get a degree in people skills because you get these six humans together or eight humans, however it is that you've never met before, then within seven or eight minutes You've got them flown down a raft, paddling class five rapids, you know, and trying to get them safe. And there's not many environments and there's not many jobs in the world where you could have in a Split second have seven people in the middle of a Class 5 river that you've got to deal with upside down or something. So there was a lot of pressure. It was like. It was fully like a sport. So I really enjoyed that element. And then the. Why would a kayak? And I lost a Class 5 kayaking. Lots of traveling. Like, you know, you get deep into these communities. Like it was a really cool, a really cool time. Like at one Stage I did 16 summers in a row because I'd go summer, I'd go summer New Zealand, then I'd go spring to like California and then I go to Whistler for the summer and then go to Ottawa for the fall and then New Zealand for the winter, you know, like kind of out of that for eight or nine years. So it's good.

I mean, I'd say though, to be fair, it's always interesting, like trying to pick the purpose journey. But you kind of are doing human geography, physical geography and psychology in what you do. So it's kind of, you know, I'd say you say you've done it maybe whether you've realized that you have done it.

Well, I remember this lecture and it was, it was. The lecture was called How Soils form one. This is the first lecture the next day, the next lecture was called how soils form 2.

2.

And I was just, I was just like, why does anybody care about Harris Soil? I just thought it was the dullest lecture in the whole world. I just sat there and endured it. I don't remember a thing. But now if you sat down with me, I would sit here for 10 hours and just listen to how souls form. I'd be so infatuated by it because like, you know, at Canvichurs we've got this. We met this volcanologist, this guy Darren, he's from Christchurch, he works at the university and he's the most studied volcanologist of the Mamaku Plateau where we operate. And the stuff he has talked about, how the land is formed here is just mind blowing. You know, like just the knowledge that he has, the, the. The research that he has, but just the, the enormosity, enormousity.

How this is, how this, this whole land was formed. It just blows my mind, like. And that's the sort of stuff that we get across on the visitor experience of the. Of the tour, like Academy tours, you're walking around a rock. There's one rock that we've got this platform that's 50 meters in the air. Platform's like half. Well, there's a foot wide and the handrails on the inside, you're clipped in so it's perfectly safe. But you're walking around a rock that's 240, 000 years old.

Yeah.

Where does that happen in New Zealand, you know, like, it's so cool. Yeah. And people are like, Harold's Forest are like, oh, it's, you know, trees are a thousand years old. But, you know, do we know? Not really without cutting them down. But. But what we do know is that the last volcanic eruption out of the rotorua caldera was 15,000 years ago. There's a 4,000 year old cold snap. And then. So that area has been growing as organisms for 11,000 years. Yeah, but nobody believes you if you tell them that they just, you know.

Like you just made a number up. Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, like how old is that tree? Well, typically it's actually 11,000 years old. Like, oh my God.

Yeah.

So it's amazing. So to your point, the journey's funny. There's a point. And that I was, you know, definitely like, you know, when I was a bit younger. Oh God. Like, you know, I'm just a raft guide and trying to transition out of rafting into other sectors was really tough. Particularly if you weren't in New Zealand. Like we're in the UK for a bit and people like, so what have you done? Floated down a River for 10 years. It's like, well, kind of, there's some.

You know, there is some transferable skill set. Like I say, leadership, people management. Yeah. You'd think people would see that. It's pretty transferable. Yeah.

With tourism industries are strong. People, you know, they just see, they see tourism as something you do for a year and then you go do your real job, you know. So that's when New Zealand's good. You know, Western Canada was good. But they really see value in those skill sets. But there's a point where I was a bit bummed. I was like, you know, what have I done? I've got a student loan. I've done this, I've done that. But then, But I think looking back on it now, like incredible people skills, you know, risk management, like stuff that really applicable to business because I think from what I've seen and maybe the perception of myself, like I'm very different from a lot of business Leaders that I've met, you know. So I think, and I think all that background has been. Was been attributed. Like I didn't go to university to manage a hotel or I didn't do this corporate life and go. I would. Should go to tourism because it's more fun, you know, I generally have lived it, breathed it, and then come from the bottom up, but use those skills to, to lead a business, which I think is incredible, but also to. To give these humans inside the business a really cool platform for them to live each day of their life. And that's where, you know, their emotional values. Like, I just think in a place, in a world that can be so tough, you know, and we're not picking porn off the ground, like I get that right. But I think in some ways, like this Upper north can be. It can be quite isolating. Right. And for these young people, I think to come into this place where they're. They're open for relationships because they're at that stage of their life, but then be able to let their guard down, connect, form community, form a support layer, they're going to make friends here that they'll have their entire life and I'm really proud that I can do that for them. And then in return, we get great visitor experience. They're open to learning. They sort of deliver the product how you kind of. You think it should be delivered, but you let your personalities flourish. Like, they get confidence as humans. Like some of these people, when they come in here, they can hardly open their mouth and then they leave two years later. It's just these incredible young adults. Like they wouldn't have done that without being here. Sure, they would have grown, but they wouldn't have allowed to be. They wouldn't have been allowed to be themselves and they wouldn't have felt value in who they are because they are the product. And I think that's remarkable and I think that's something that cannot be. Does give them anywhere I've seen. And I would owe that to the background that I've had. Yeah. And the fact that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talking to human geography. So I did some, obviously from the uk. And in the UK you do A levels. And so my A levels, I did biology, geography, history, which is quite a weird mix. But there was one other guy, Ollie. Ollie Grisby, if he's listening, probably not, who did exactly the same. And so we were literally the only two kids in the whole school who did the same three A levels. So we were literally the same class the whole time. And yeah. On the human geography trip, we had to go to Carlisle in the northwest of England. And what we were tasked with doing was starting in the city center. And we were put into groups, like five, and each group had to take one road out of Carlisle and take, like a transect of the changing demographic of the nature of the. You know, so you move obviously from a city center, you know, commercial, you know, shopping district into, you know, sort of like commercial and then through to residential. Anyway, we got about, I don't know, probably 500 meters down the road and found a pub. And we said to the landlord, are you from Carlisle? He's like, yes. Do you know this road? He's like, yes, like the back of my hand. Great. Can you help us draw a picture of. So we sat there, had a couple of pints and got the landlord to describe. We just got. Got the OS map, you know, there was no Google Maps, so we just got the. Got the Ordnance Survey map and got him to sort of just describe. Oh, yeah, that's ark rights. Yeah. No, yeah, I call them light commercial. Excellent. Yeah. Have some peanuts for that point as, please, mate.

Yes, that's amazing. That's very British. And then 10 years later and off.

Yeah, back in the minibus. It's not a smell. Beer. Well, not me, sir. No, no, not us.

No, no, that's good.

I love. They obviously. I think they obviously completely saw through that one, but we got away with it. So getting back to the customer experience and. And kind of what you do. So let's just talk a bit more about the. I think the depth of what you offer, because, sure, there's a lot of. There's a lot of adventure tourism experiences you can go on where, you know, they put you in the kayak, all they do, whatever. And it's kind of like, yeah, here's the experience. You get some bad dad jokes, you get the whole, oh, is that buckle done up properly? Oh, it is. Oh, it isn't. Oh, push you off the edge. Oh, it's too late. But, yeah, I think you guys go a bit deeper than that. And I think that's where the meaning and the contribution and the impact and what you're doing is all about. So maybe just talk a bit more about the. The stuff you're doing around the nature side of stuff.

Yeah, well, we cannot be tours. 3, 3. Our delivery is 3 parts. Connection to nature, connection to adventure and connection to each other. Like the whole theory of canopy tours. Right, because you go into the forest, you know, and. And for us, the Every touch point is really important. So the journey starts way before they get here. They're digital and when they turn up it's a welcome. And well, like we call every client the day before and we find out the motivations, why they're coming. Because for kiwis, because we're 40% domestic, 90% of Kiwis come here for a special occasion. So we get a hold of them and like, oh, it's Johnny's birthday. Oh my God, Harold's. Johnny 11. That's so cool. And so then we've got a welcome screen, right? Hey, happy birthday Johnny. So happy or happy, you know, like graduation or whatever it is. And then the guy see that and they go, they take it out and celebrate this. It's about making people feel important. We learn everybody's names prior we put them on the welcome screen. The guides use everybody's names the entire journey. So we try to make people feel important. But the idea is we take them into the forest, we get them out of their comfort zone, they connect with each other and they connect with nature and the theories that become better people. And when they can, when they're out of comfort zone, we tell them our story about the conservation and we sort of highlight the biodiversity challenges in New Zealand has and what we've done about it. And people just get so connected to the story and they get connected to each other that, that's where so much more like you kind of, it's much more of an emotional delivery than. And what you, you know, and what you described is, although, you know, although you said a joke on this, it's in some ways it's relatively true. It's so cliche, right? But we want to make, we try to make people feel really important, that they've actually left something. We're really special. So we char, you know, we're a premium price product particularly for road to do it and people think we're expensive and, and people come here mostly through word of mouth because they think we're expensive and then you know, like, but they meet, they get told by somebody that they trust that is really good and really like it's an incredible product. And when they come here begrudgingly, they leave completely like incredibly emphatic and as, as massive fans.

But you know, so the visitor experience is, is really cool. And then the conservation work, like, you know, James was Gerald the founder, like his thing he wanted to do actually just off the conservation work in terms of the engagement element. James, when he, he was a founder, the co founder, he Went to a bunch of zip lines and just realized all about the zip lines and then like and I know that too Canada, the zipline business we ran like it was a zipline business. So really long and fast and fun but it's unengaging, like so unengaging. The guides would get, they would burn out after working for two months where we've got out, you know our ones work for three, four, five, six, seven years because it's so much more than just supplies. But he wanted to make the most engaging supply and experience in the world. And that was always the code pupper of the business. And we've kind of morphed that a little bit to in a mantra scent. But we say the best experience on the planet, you know, best experience on the planet. Yeah, sure. You know, so, so we, we kind of deliver it in essence. But the idea, the, the co prop of the business has never changed and we were growing, we've grown, you know, culture centric. You know, James didn't do the emotional values. Like he's, he's oh, I'm not a hugger. But he definitely wasn't a hugger. But you know we've evolved in that way probably to suit the needs of the employee as well as the needs of the business. But when he got the. Because we operate on Department of Conservation land and you know it's the and lands of Mara Whenua, Tuga Tanaka, Kin Nangataha, so respect to Mara Whenua. But we got the commercial, the concession off Doc and James said I want to remove every pest and predator out of that forest. I want to return it to pre human existence. And the guy, this guy Ron Kaiser, that's amazing. Let's go do it. And, and he's instrumental in getting the concession and running the zip lines. So but over the last 12 years, because we opened in 2012 so the last 12 years conservation took a year to pick up. But we've essentially removed every pest and predator from a 200 hectare section and the forest has come back incredibly so like to the point where you can physically see it in before and after photos like it's mind blowing. There wasn't a bird. Now we feed birds on our hands like. And so because of the biodiversity success we picked up a bit of momentum. We partnered with like scientific organizations, we partnered with universities and we did a lot of studies and they were found invertebrate species, new science mushroom.

Spiders which are invertebrates, neither science. We found rare species, we're shrubs, rare moth. So it's this hotness hotbed of incredible biodiversity. And in a time when the biodiversity in New Zealand is getting absolutely smashed, we've kind of got this piece where we're trying to recreate what New Zealand once was. And so we deliver this on the visitor experience. And that's what really blows people away because not many people in New Zealand know that we're in a biodiversity crisis. Right, sure they know there's a, you know, there's a few possums and a few rats eating a bit of stuff, but they don't, they don't realize that New Zealand was an isolated land Mass for 70 million years. So all of our species developed with no ability to retract from predators. So you know, a bird can't fly, so they don't comply because they're lazy or boring. They just generally never had to. So within the last 150 years when possums have destroyed the environment and destroyed all this bird life, they've essentially they turning the biodiversity back like 70 million years. Like I, I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but with New Zealand has so many endemic species, I've got 50 of the birds, endemic species, bugs, trees. Like we have the highest number of endemic species in the world that are only ever seen here and then because of these pathetic animals and they're not pathetics. We love animals. We love all animals. I love animals. But they're not, you know, the rats and the possums are and the feral cats. Feral cats to a much lesser extent. But the rats are impossible. They're at the top of the food chain in New Zealand, right? You go to North America and the food chains like Cougar Bear, you know, like carrots is bloody rat and, and at 150 years they're winding back 70 million years of, of biodiversity and people don't know that. And so Academy tours, we tell them that and it just blows their mind because they're just like they don't. For kiwis I don't realize the problem is exactly what it is. And for internationals it's so interesting because it's just highlights the uniqueness of New Zealand because you know, New Zealand doesn't have, you know, you don't come to New Zealand for the architecture, right? You don't come. Ancient history doesn't exist in pyramids. I know you laugh because you're, you're thinking the same thing I am, right? Like there's only so many one bedroom bungalows you can see in your life before you get a bit over There.

But you come to New Zealand like New Zealand's history, our natural history, our pyramids are these forests. They're unique on a world scale and that's what like people need to see like tourism, New Zealand market this country and they, they, you know, they encourage New Zealand to come to see nature. People come to New Zealand to connect with nature. Like that's, that's what we're famous for. But to let them intimately connect with nature and actually see the uniqueness of the forest. Forest. And then there's climate crisis, not climb. Sorry. This biodiversity price we're in is remarkable. Like possums for example, right. Like we show, you know, we removed, we did this right at the start. We did a blitz where we removed all the Pearson predators. We took. Sorry, not all we took. We took a 50 hectare area. We baited this area with 800 traps every week over three or four weeks and then we set them over seven days and within seven days we removed 800 animals. There's a bloodbath, right? It was, you know, if you're not used to that stuff, stuff in some ways it's revolting but it just showed you how intense this possum and rat problem is. There's a few stoats in there too, but starts the superheroes. They're a different kilo fish. So we're like holy smokes. So there's this huge problem. We didn't know what to do about it but we just knew it was a lot bigger than we thought. So over time we then we spread our trapping it where we got support from government, sorry, Department of Conservation through our concession fees because we pay 6% of our top line to operate that forest which goes to Wellington.

But so, so we, so we got a bit of four. We part of this company, this, this automated trap company in Wellington called Good Nature. They sold us a bunch of traps. We use them, they work great. You know, now we, we remove 200 rats. We still remove 200 rats a year from our 200 hectare section of forest and we still remove over 100 possums a year off in this forest which is essentially pest free. But we're still, it's just a vacuum, right?

So it's awful. So it just means New Zealand is absolutely smashed by these species and unless we do anything about it, the biodiversity over time is just going to get absolutely destroyed. But so anyway, so that's the co puffer of caterpillar. We run zipline businesses. We've got this conservation program run alongside. Everybody engages in it all of our staff partake in it. And you know, we've got really big aspirations to grow it. We want to actually make a national sanctuary part of the Mona Whenua. We're going to attract the whole, the whole thousand hectares, make it predator free. They're going to translocate species plants, geckos, birds, make it thriving, you know, like thousand year old hectare. For a thousand hectare forest. It's thousands of years old, 15 minutes from a major town center. Like we want people to come all around the world to connect with nature. We want to do it with a community focus and we deal with this all over our own backup with a trust that we essentially created to deliver it. Once we've done that thousand hectares, then we're going to do a suppression area.

A stoked suppression area around the farmland, around the outside, about 10,000 hectares. And then once we do that, we'll get kiwi, we'll start throwing kiwi back in there. So it's going to be incredible. Right. And we just do this on our own back and, and ironically, you know, I've spent a lot of time talking about this and we're here to talk about, well, B Corp and your medieval games used to play as a kid. But we didn't even use any of this for our B Corp application. We got through with that, you know, so we got through the way we look after the people and what we do with our community. Yeah. So this is where I think B Corp is so cool. Right? Like because Cannot Be tours is famous for conservation. We've always led the industry. We started leading with biodiversity and conservation. First people thought it was strange. Now everybody does it. Everybody in New Zealand tourism traps pissed plaster tree. And so we've risen the tide. So with B Corp, which is the same thing, we want to be recognized for all the other stuff we do with our, our people, the community. Because we, you know, we donate $100,000 of product every year to the community. We do cleanups, we initiate lots of cool stuff which nobody knows about because we are not very good at telling the story. But we don't do it to tell the story, do it because we generally care. And so for me, B Corp actually tells that story for us.

Yeah. Which is really cool. And the thing with B, we're the first business in road to do a region who become a B Corp. So leading the way, we're the fifth. We were the fifth. So there's now six New Zealand B Corps in tourism. Three essentially, you know, they operate solely from here. And so I don't know. I just think, how else do we raise the bar? We raise the bar by getting people, you know, we get. We align. We align ourselves with accreditation. We. We raise a bar by embarking on what will probably be a 3, $400,000 conservation project annually that we want the community, the tourist, tourism industry to be a part of. We've got these cool plans of carbon, but we'll probably have to talk about that another day, but, you know, really leading the way and, and before. It's just a. Not a tick box, but it's just a perfect stepping stone for us to keep raising the tide and forcing the whole tourism industry to come up.

Nice.

I love that comment. You don't come to New Zealand for the architecture unless you're coming from Eastern Europe, in which case some of the Stalinistic style of concrete building that we're pretty good at putting up. That's. That would be the only. Yeah. People who come here. That's. No, that's so cool. Yeah, you're just doing so much above and beyond, you know, what you're required to do and you just think.

You talked earlier on about, you know, profit and, and purpose, you know, ruthlessly aggressive and efficient on, you know, making the money so that you can do more good. And you're a great example of, you know, you're doing well and you're doing good and you can do both. They're not mutually exclusive. And as you've, as you've mentioned, you know, you get better customer engagement, you get better team engagement because of the good that you're doing. Whereas if you were just another zipline tour.

Like, great, yeah, you might, you know, treat the stuff well, but it's that depth to it. And this is just what we're seeing. Like more people want to see the, the meaning and the purpose in what they're doing and be connected to something way bigger than, you know, just here's the job. So kudos to you guys.

Well, my mindset for this people element, like in this project, and we call it the pop up of Titipen because the Titi Panama is the rifle and the smallest bird, like that's. That's our Goldberg to translocate. They live in the. They this, they live in the mid canopy layer they where you translocate 40 at a time. They really interact with humans. So there'll be this ent. Incredible inspiring bird to tell a story. But, but to align that with what you just said, the reason why we're doing this is not for canopy tours. It's not for me. It's to give our staff a legacy for them to be part of something that when they, when they're putting their kids to bed in 30 years, when they're old and trusty like us and driving their kids, you know, they've just driven the kids to dance 17 times over. And they're showing photos of this national century and these species and they're like, hey, I, I was part of that. We were there when we translocated that first bird. You know, like I want to give them the legacy that they can attach to something and, and I guess, you know, the leadership, it's a mindset that I don't work for, they don't work for me, I work for them. Like everything I do needs to help them and make their lives better. But like Canada was classic. Like this zip lines were amazing. Like 1.4 kilometers, 1.2 kilometers mountain to mountain. Like you know, two and a half thousand meter mountain. Incredible. But our guys would burn out after, after four to six weeks. They couldn't even do two months of work. Where you know that thing was, that mine is quite static, right? You clip on, you clip off. Like you can't, you don't deviate off the journey. So all of it is about human engagement. Right. And, and here. But you know, we, our employees, two, three, four, five, six, seven years, same age, same age people. Right. Like, but just because the story is there, the co pupper is better that they take people in, inspire, change every day they show you they change the way people see a forest every single day. They take 10 people in there and inspire them like completely different killer fish. Like we don't pay 10 times. Yeah, we pay well and all that carry on but we don't pay, you know, we're not paying our doctor's wages people because they're fine guys. We're just paying what, you know, what the job's worth, plus a little bit. But it's all about that other stuff.

No, that's where it's at, man. Purpose is where it's at is my catch on.

So where did you, when did you first hear about B Corp?

There's a gentleman named Ben Mail who's got this business called Empathy and he's a SEO company, search engine optimization. And he, he, the old co founder, the co founder started, he, he had a gift giving business he started whilst he was running cannabis. Well once he was not running but once he, you know, he's still, he was still an owner. He's originally sold but this guy Ben Mail has a Japanese partner or had, I don't know. So Ben, sorry if I'm assuming it's all worked out, but he asked James for this gift and he wanted a Japanese.

He wanted Japanese. Japanese writing on it. And so he sent it through and then James really remembered it. So he saw him and then he googled what he did. And then I, I needed a new SEO company and James was actually like, oh, hey, you should try this guy. And James hadn't actually used them, but he's just so intrigued by the way that this guy connected with humans. So anyway, we use Ben for, for about a year and. But when we first meeting, hanging out, he said, you should be a B corp, you know, because, you know, you talk about all this stuff. He's like, oh, you should be a big. Oh, it's just this. I can't remember exactly what he said, but he just said it's a international sort of accreditation of businesses that do better. Oh, cool. And then.

And I don't know how he connected me with you, but maybe it was through LinkedIn or something, but he said maybe he just talked to this guy. And I was super intrigued because I'm always looking because in tourism and probably every other business, but I just know tourism well. But you're always having to attach yourself to these various brands like Tiaki Tia. You know, there's all this stuff. You pay your money and you get your thing and you don't do anything for it. You just pay money and then you put in the bottom of your website and you look like a NASCAR race with these 10 things on your body website. It's, you know, I think it's a bit old school nowadays, but. But you get value through lobby lobbying and advocacy and all that. But I was just like something voluntarily. Voluntary, sorry, that's international. That takes you a cut above the rest. I was like, eyes all in. So he connected with me. You, I found you on LinkedIn and then you ran us through the process. I think we got a bit of support from the Chamber of Commerce actually to pay your help pay your bill. Not that your bill was big, it was very as modest, but at the time it was Miller cover. So we were pretty tight on excessive cash. So sorry, Chamber of Commerce didn't pay the bill. If you're listening, Charlie Wendell, you paid us for some training to help facilitate the B corp through the training lounge.

No, but then we connected with you and it was, it was a cool journey because, you know, you got us really excited. You Met our team and I was just like, this is us. I took it to the board and the board were like. They didn't understand it, but they were like, but you've got to get it. You want to be first, you don't want to be last. And then we went through the process and it was super exciting and we really pushed you hard to make it. You know, we did as quick as we could. We had a great score and then. And then we just, you know, we just chilled on it after that. It was. We pushed the map and then we just waited, you know. So, yes, I wasn't. I'm an early adopter in terms of somebody that. That I trust told me and then we just ran with it because we know we need it.

Nice. Yeah. In terms of your. The rest of your journey, you hit submit at like the peak time of the queue. So I think, yeah, you were in the queue for like 18 months or something. Absolutely ridiculous. I think when you.

Yeah, I think it was April. April 2020 or May start May 2021. 22. Yeah.

Which was. I mean, yeah, it was. It was not great. That was just. And then literally that was just due to demand in the system. So many people in the post Covid world wanted to do B corp that they just got slammed. So, yeah, it was. It was tough. And then. Yeah, I know when we got verification time, it was even. I was kind of like, I can't remember what you wrote. You know, normally I've got a pretty good handle on each client and kind of. I remember why you said that. But yeah, even I was like struggling as to why we put that one down. And what does this one mean? Because, yeah, it was such a long time, but it has got better. It has got better.

It was very fortuitous for us too. Right. Because we actually went through an ownership change and we consulted with you and you sort of.

You.

You confirmed that you could only be a big corporate. If you've had a business that's been alive for a year through the ownership change. They were going to, you know, they weren't buying the business, they weren't buying the business name, they were just buying the. They were buying the business, but not the actual entity. So they're creating a new entity. So if we had been any faster, we actually wouldn't have qualified.

It's so good it worked out.

We would have to do a full new application. So we're perfectly. Yes, it's that 21 months. We were sold in December 2022 and then we were accredited. December. Well, January, officially December 20th. December 23rd, 2023. So it was 13 months afterwards. Oh, sorry. 12 months afterwards. It was 12 months and 20 days or whatever. 30 days.

Nice. So, yeah, serendipity once again.

Oh, yeah, it was amazing. Yeah, I was really excited for before, but I was really annoyed about that because I guess, you know, we do some cool things. I don't really get excited about that much. And I definitely, through some podcasting, some listening podcasts, like, I've learned that when you get really excited, you know, you can really get these highs and lows. So I'm quite lucky, I think, that I don't get stoked on the highs and also don't get stoked on those. I don't listen to the compliments, but I don't listen to the negative, but the vehicle was definitely something that I really was excited for. Like, I was really excited then. I wanted to be first. I want cannabis be first and all that stuff. Hey. So.

Yep.

But after a while I was just like, whatever. And then when they start asking the questions, it's a bit like.

Bit extra workload that I probably didn't have the capacity for through that time. But yeah, that was good. It was pretty low key really. I thought that that auditing process, you know, we had that one call and.

They'Ve kind of already done the hard work. Well, we. We submitted with a massive score. Right. Like, we got so excited, we went truffle hunting and then what we qualified was just fairly overpassed, but whatever.

Yeah, I think, yeah, there was a couple of bits there where I think, yeah, we miss. We just misinterpreted. I think the key thing was like a lot of the tree planting, because it's not revenue generating that, you know, we were kind of hoping that that might qualify all that work that you do. But because it was all voluntary work and not paid work. Yeah, that's where we lost. Yeah, lost a bunch of points through the trust.

And the other thing that we didn't chase was. Yeah, because the. We run alongside the trust of the trust. We do all the work, but the trust pays for the work. Yeah, but that trust just pays our way. Not what my wages, but the staff's wages. It costs. But. But we, I guess we could have chased over. We just didn't want it. And I made a mistake actually, when at one point I submitted because we have a. We have a formal donation. Everybody that comes to the business, we donate to the trust. It's formal. But I. One of the questions we Then when we give away products to, you know, we give away $120,000 a year with the product to community groups. That's not formal. That's just like, oh, you're sweet. Go hard. And so one of the questions when she. We've been ordered. I misinterpreted that and I forgot about the formal relationship. We have this. That's contracted to the trust. And I just. So I said, we don't actually have formal relationships with so donating. So she was just. The lady was just like, oh, you don't get into that. But it's going to make our recertification process very easy.

Yeah.

Because what do you have to do? You have to be. Just be 10 hire or something in three.

No, there's no mandate that you have to be at a higher school. Most people just want to be at a better score.

So, yeah, we could smash it next time easy. Just by actually. Well, we care, but by the 21 months, it's just like, just get us. That's. We just want that. That's all we want. We don't care about anything. We just want the B Corp logo for those that are listening. But the.

Just get it. Just get going.

Oh, my God. Yeah.

Yeah.

And then. And because we. This is the other thing is this Big Corp's amazing. Right. Like, obviously people's amazing anyway, but in a business sense, we just, you know, being first, we got to smash the back doors down on PR. So we got, you know, five to $8,000 worth of PR, I would say through my PR experience, tons of LinkedIn activity, lost support from the destination. Like, it was awesome. Right. We're the first zipline company in the Southern hemisphere to get a big fault cert. First business in regional and rotator region. There's a couple of them in the Bay, like in Toyota, but we're the first one to do it, which is cool. But. But we, we also have, you know, we've got a group that's part of the certification. We've just taken a loan out for another business and we got a green line from ASB. We got two. Whatever percent less. We say $26,000 already for the first year. Like, it's not bad for $3,000 fee.

Yeah, the, the ROI.

It's like people who are sitting on the fence like, oh, this sounds expensive and, oh, it's going to be an extra cost. It's like, no, like literally in what, the first two months of certifying, you know, you've almost got. You've probably got Your money back on. On year one. And that's, you know, but then there's the compounding effect of the, the cost of that loan over time. And maybe you get a better rate next year because you can show that you've done some more good with it. Yeah, it's so good.

And you know that LinkedIn awareness, like everyone's really supportive of those channels. Like, I follow Lake Harwer.

Whatever. Their farm station just got certified. I follow them now. So, you know, like, I'm talking about them. I know they are, but I don't know because they're a Bitcoin. Like when we think B Corp, I guess people kind of troll the B Corp list. They email just to say hi. But essentially soliciting the services. Like. No, I think it's. I think in that sense it's going to be really. Yeah, yeah. Outside is not measurable. You know, that line is clearly measurable. Right. But outside of that, I think it's going to be really, really powerful.

100.

Oh, sorry, you go.

No, you go, you go.

I was just gonna say I went to a brewery because they're a big.

Oh, was that sawmill?

Yeah, love it. Yeah, they have a zero percent alcohol.

The Bear beer. Yep.

Yeah, the beer beer.

Yeah.

Yeah, the Bear beer.

The.

Yeah, that's us Kiwis. That's the big thing about being Canadian as well. Like Kiwis can't differentiate.

My other one is, is Kiwis with fairy and fairy and very, so very fairy. Fairy. It's like I take the piss out my wife on that all the time. Yeah.

Chicken. The other, when you Kiwi say check and check. Chicken. Chicken. Yeah, like if you always say. You always say chicken because people check in for their experience. Yeah. Like chicken. Yeah.

You know, I thought, I thought we're coming for a zip line tour, not a chicken.

Yeah. I guess things free range now. You're never, you're never too careful. You wouldn't be surprised if you came here. There's 20 chickens just laying eggs. But you know. But the. Yeah, Silver Brewery is awesome. Right? They proudly rip the beer on the back of the can. Like.

Yep.

And I guess we become aware, like we use picks. Peanut butter at home, we use fix and fogs. I've seen the jars. You know, I don't know what the kids eat out, but yeah, like my wife wouldn't be buying intentionally, but it's pretty cool to see all those things floating around. Yeah.

The. So you can go and check out. So Kirsty from Sawmill was our previous guests on the podcast. It's in the Facebook group, mate. So go get amongst it. You get early access to it because you're in the group.

Beautiful, beautiful. And I actually, I went to the. Because, you know, I was. It was, it was just after Christmas, we'd just been certified and I just went to the car, we had a beer and then we left, right. And I went to the counter and just on my way out said, hey, does anybody come here because you're a vehicle? And this young fella, he was, he's really nice, he just said, I don't think people ever come here because we're a vehicle, but people come here and ask about our processes because we're a vehicle. Because people think they get a bit. He said, they get a bit nervous or they get suspicious because we're such a high waist industry because of the. I guess because of the MASH or whatever. I didn't think of that, but I. But he knew all about people because he only worked in the summers. Only he knew all about the B corp. He talked about how it comes from top down. Like he didn't say that word. Like, he didn't say. Like it was so clear. It came from the owners down and he was pumped how well he gets looked after there. And that was. That kind of made me really start to be a vehicle because I was like, while I want my, my staff that they get hit up, they would actually have that same genuine enthusiasm for the badge. Yeah, I was surprised that people go there and grind them on their processes.

I was like, yeah, we should check out the podcast because their processes are shit hot, I would imagine. And so if I remember this correctly, they. They have less waste production than the average household.

Really?

Yep. So they've got circular economy, they've got waste going to, you know, reuse. So they're all over it.

I'd imagine they'd be turning all those old. The old hots into fairy dust or something. Right. More.

All that kind of stuff. Yeah. So no, that's. They're really big on waste minimization. Waste waste management. So, yeah, check out the beautiful bureau.

Like you should all go there. It's beautiful. Are they nice music? Like they just. It was just on point. I could just. Yeah, good people.

Yeah. Well, mate, I feel like we've chewed up enough of your time.

Well, not nice to see you again.

You've got some stuff to do. So just, just to finish off real quick. What. Where do you see improvement happening for you guys? Like you're doing such a lot of good already. Is there one area of the business that you sort of think you're going to be looking to focus on? In particular.

I think you know the last year has really been about refining health, not refining sorry like continue to refine health and safety. It's new legislation coming out which we're aligned to, you know so we're going to fully retrofit our zip lines with a continuous belay system which will be the first of its kind on this style of zipline in the country. We kind of, we kind of retro. We're not retrofitting, we kind of. What do you call it? Manufacturing new system. So I guess in that sense and then, and then that conservation. I think there's two things like conservation really blowing that apart and working with Bonafino to do it like making this thing on a national scale but then also just, just, just more data so you know like in terms of an annual impact report so we can capture all this more in depth studies. You know we're doing this carbon study that we're, we're leading, we're leading like to give you a little snippet like from what I understand and I'm not a scientist my human geography background but my, sorry my two semesters in geography there's people measure the carbon sequestration in a tree because you apply with LIDAR technology it's relatively easy. You've got to measure the tree density and whatever they are, et cetera. But nobody measures the carbon density in the earth and in New Zealand's got the best. New Zealand's forests are the, some of the best carbon sinks in the world for forests and the majority of carbon is sequestered in this world either in ice, wetlands, forest floors. So because we have an ancient old growth forest with intact forest floor and the forest right beside us hasn't had any pest control work we're actually doing carbon sample studies to see how much forest is questioned in a sequestered in a restored forest versus unrestored forest. But if we can prove that that is a game changer for New Zealand conservation because you could then get the carbon credits put equated value to them and show people the value on, on a forest that is actually Peter to press free see if we get the way we just sell them to pulpits or sell them to the sg. But anyway that's so that one's taking a long background anyway. But that's like mind shattering like landscape changing. You know that's creating value out of nothing.

I have, I have no doubt Based on what seems to be a series of firsts that you personally and the company are all about.

That.

That'll all be done by probably next Tuesday. So.

Yeah. Yes. So I guess we've got fever going on in the background. You know, we've got a, you know, great, great board. They believe in the. They trust us. You know, like they. They trust what we do. They trust, they believe the code popper, you know, it was new to them, but they're really into it. So.

It better never stops is one of our main values. It's kind of about being better tomorrow.

Than you were today.

You know, a little bit cliche, but we really, you know, owning it's another one of our values. We really live that. We just take it on.

That's why we call our client group the Be better group. You know, use B Corp to become a better business. If everyone just was slight, you know, it is the cliche, but it's true. If you're 1% at 1% better each day, the compound effect of that by the end of the year is you're transformed. So, you know, I think it's a cliche, but actually so few people actually go do it. So, you know, call it a cliche, but show me the proof. I think, you know, you guys are the proof.

So, yeah, I love it. I, you know, and I guess from the outside looking in, the business is getting busier with 23% output, 20% up on last year. We had pretty consistent business for a few years. Like, strong attraction for employees into the business. Like it. And I don't know what it looks. The business looks like now. So I look at it, I'm sure.

It looks okay, man, I say it looks pretty cool. Yeah.

Hopefully it's work. Yeah.

So if people want to come and do a zipline tour with you and the crew, where do they go to?

Canopy tours dot com. Oh, sorry dot Whatever. Just. Just jump online, have a look. The website's good. With new websites are getting launched on hopefully Tuesday, Wednesday.

Nice.

Lots of data. The Canopy Trust website will be revised here in the next couple of weeks too. So, yeah, just jump online, have a look. We're in Rotador.

Yeah, that's good.

Love it.

Hey, Tim, before you go, I'm gonna ask. I just, I'm yearning to ask you a question. So with your medieval history degree.

Yeah.

Would you. Would you on the weekends dress up and get your thoughts and run around?

No, no, I never, never went into that. What do they call that?

Well, that sort of stuff's popular.

Isn't it larp, Isn't it Live Action replay. There's. There are people that do that. They do the whole reenactment stuff. Yeah, never got into that. No, I never went that far. Wasn't that. Wasn't that serious about the degree? Possibly. I mean, I enjoyed studying it, but yeah, no, never, never went that far. Although, to be honest, if one of the lecturers had gone, hey, here's some big swords, we're gonna go out of the car park and smash the. Out of each other. Probably would have made some of the lectures more engaging because some of them were a little bit. There was one.

One lecturer Bill aired, you know, he's the only one that I remember and he always gave his.

Lecture titles like a really obscure title like Blessed be the Cheesemakers and you sort of go, what's all that about? And he turned up and it would. It's like, it's nothing about cheesemakers, but there was some subtle joke about. Related to cheese makers to the topic that he was talking about. It was just one of those lectures. I think he probably would have been able to get away with it because. Because he was quite a stacked bloke as well. So we called him Bill Hard because he was like, he was, he was a bit younger and, you know, a bit more like. I think he must have played sport. Whereas a lot of the other professors were all, you know, dusty white, cobwebbed hair, just, yeah. Frail. Just in the corners like.

Yeah.

And then in 1191, you know, with their pipe and it's like, yeah, really not that engaging. So, yeah, Bill, I reckon he could have got away with probably having some broadswords in his cupboard and say, right, let's get out of the car park and smash each other up some. Some big helmets on and go, go Viking. Yeah, probably be banned. Banned with health and safety these days. But mate, no, it's been really, really cool. Been great seeing you twice in two days. I just love your energy, love your vibe, love what you and the crew are up to. You were a B corp from day one. Yeah. Keep up the amazing work and no doubt more amazing things coming your way. Thanks. And thanks for the. Thanks for the hat. You should give shout out as well. You sent me very early on in the piece, you were like, hey, here's a cap. And I was like, cool. So this is my dog walking cap that I wear every day when I'm out and about taking. We juggle the Westy for a spin. So representing Rotoru Academy Tours in the South Island. So I don't know whether you've had any bookings specifically because of my hat, but, you know, I'll claim one.

No, that could be the 23 increase.

I mean, I think that's a stat. Which is worth. We should track. Yeah.

All right, mate, you have a great day. Catch up.

Hey, it's Tim here, that B Corp bloke from Grow Good. If you want more content on purpose, B Corp. How to do more good in the world as a individual or a business, then you know the drill. Hit the like and subscribe. Check out some of our other videos. They're probably floating around here somewhere. You know how it works. Thank you so much. See you next time.