John Robison | Behind the Scenes of ELEVATE: KTGY’s Professional Development Program

When Chris asked me to present this, I said, sure, because we've never talked about our leadership development program publicly, so it's very cool. But then sometime later, I saw that I was following Ellen and I was like, should have said no. But so I just packed it with more slides because she's so engaging that, like. So anyway, so there is a lot to cover in a few minutes, and I want to save time for Q and A. So let's. Let's dig into it. But first, just sort of hold on to this question for a minute and we'll get there. And I don't mean, like, what's more important than, like, coming to Sundance and watching John talk, which is, you know, cool, but that's not. Well, just hold on to that thought for a second. Let's just. We'll get into it. So first, let me. Let me tell you who KTGY is. We are architecture, interior design, branded environments, and urban design and planning firm. And this is the, like, pat yourself on the back slide with the awards and stuff. But here's what I love about our mission, which is on the slide, is designed to all people because. And this has nothing to do with my talk. I just. I really like this because we do residential and hospitality work. So to me, this idea. And. And when I was a young architecture student, I loved the idea of residential. The idea that we're doing work, everybody needs a place to stay and a place to live. So I don't know, to me, that's just really. I love that, that we get to touch people's lives that way. 33 years in business, that's sort of important to the story, our longevity and our history. And then this is where we are. We're, you know, upwards of 400 people, and we have six locations right now. So you may be. I don't. You may be somewhat similar to us. You may be very different from us, but I'm going to venture to say that there is a similarity that we all have, I bet. And I bet it is in that we all believe that we need leadership, right? So, pulled a bunch of quotes, right? I don't need to tell you guys all this, I. I think. But we need leadership now, right? For the. For the functioning of the firm now. We always need more leaders. We need good leaders, and we need leaders going into the future to carry the firm forward, right? So I bet we all have that in common. And I bet we all think probably two things at the same time. One of those is I look around and I mean, I Do it all the time. I bet you look around, you see good leaders in your firm. Right? But I bet there's another thing that you think is true, which is we could also do more with that. I'm going to share with you what we did when we came to that realization. We developed a program, Elevate Leadership to address exactly that. Now, I'm not going to tell you how to develop a leadership development program. Actually, I don't need to because AI is so cool. Now that you can. I did it for you. I already did it. So, hey, chatgpt, create a high level outline for a business leadership development program. So that's what you're here for. Just take a picture of that real quick and we're good. Right? Because I'm not going to tell you how to build one. I really want to tell you about kind of a story, a journey. I am going to tell you. So I'm kind of kidding. I am going to tell you what our program is. This is Elevate leadership. This is sort of the verbiage of it. It's immersive, it's year long. We identify people who exhibit great potential and then we try to just elevate that a bit. Right. With strategic thinking skills. And we'll get into that. I'll kind of explain more of what that it really is. But high level, this is it. This is the program. Right? So this is the high level outline of Elevate Leadership. It's a full year long. We have virtual meetings, we have in person meetings and I'll get into some of that too. But we're doing a lot of reading assignments, we do personality profiles and we have a lot of mentoring going on. So all that. Hang on a sec. Was not. Is not really what we set out to do. We didn't say let's outline a leadership development program. Like what's, what, what's all going to be in there? What's it going to look like? We didn't do that. It was a bit of a journey to get here. So the way that worked is I want to take you through the journey. I want to kind of maybe lead you to where we got. So that if you're not doing this, maybe by the end you say I'm on board. Right. So let me tell you how we got there. Going back a long ways, 33 years ago, these are our six founders. They all share the last name, initials KTGY somehow and what they did, two of them share the same. So they had to kind of, they didn't get top billing. But anyway, not important. The name of the company actually isn't really that important because it's not about like a name on a door. This is what they were all about. They set out to create a firm that would outlive themselves. And this was intentional. It was very intentional. They wanted to create what they called generation to generation leadership. How can we create a firm that outlives us that other people can take into the future? Here's a picture of the of 12 of the original shareholders in the firm. So this is important because 10 of them have moved on. Joe Williams is currently our chairman of the board and leads our Oakland low density studio as well as managing principal for Oakland and D.C. office. And then the other one who is still here of those 12 is Tricia Esser. She's our CEO. And so I point these out for a couple reasons. One, I point out Tricia because I love the slide. And I think she'd chuckle if she saw. She doesn't know I have that slide in here, but she swears, by the way, she was about 12 in that because this elevate leadership. I'm the one standing up here talking about it and yes, I'm very involved in it. It was Trish's vision. So all credit to Tricia some 10 years ago for saying we need to do this thing. And I'll tell you how it started. Like I said, it wasn't that thing you just saw. But what's important is 10 people in this group have moved on and we've had other shareholders who have moved on. Right. So in order to be able to do that, you realize at some point, how are you going to, how are you going to do that? How are you going to pass that leadership along other than just sort of like, well, hopefully some people will sort of show up and like, oh, I guess I'm supposed to be a leader now. We couldn't do that. We couldn't do that. We couldn't take the chance of just hoping it's going to happen and these people are going to emerge and be the leaders. And again, I think we all have great leaders, but we wanted to be more purposeful about it because. So I like quotes. So here's a quote. Believe who you want, whatever the numbers are. I think a couple of things, right? If you hope that the leaders are going to show up, then you run the risk that they don't. And I'm willing to admit, and you don't have to raise your hand, but how many people have Looked around one day or another and said, do we have the leaders in place? Do we have them right now? And that's a little scary, but I don't think we do. I don't think we have this gap. And even if you don't, you have to ask yourself the next question. Do they think they are. Do they think they're ready to lead? Right. Prepared to take the firm into the future, which is in and of itself kind of a scary thing. So we wanted to be very purposeful about doing it. That was kind of the whole idea behind it. We knew that we had a lot of great leaders. And there are these people who I just have so much envy for, who are just out of the womb. They're just great leaders. I don't know how they do it, but they're good. Gallup says that's 1 in 10. I don't know where they get that number. But like genetic testing, I'm not. Honestly, I have no idea. But again, I don't care about the numbers. I just like quotes and things. So they say it's 1 in 10. And then if you look around, if you're like us, you look around the organization and you also see, yeah, we do have natural, gifted leaders. We also have a lot of people have tremendous potential, right? And Gallup says galloping and Gallop says that's two and 10. Two in 10 people have really good potential, right? And I don't know, I don't disagree with that necessarily, but it doesn't matter. Ostensibly, 30% of your firm is the future leaders of your firm or the currently whatever, right? The number really isn't as matter isn't what matters so much. I think what mattered is all of these people and the firm are going to benefit from something, right? Some development, some training. I think that's where we could all agree whether you agree with any of these numbers, those statistics, whatever. So you get to this point where you realize that better leaders and managers result in better outcomes. So why would you not be very purposeful about it? You have a generation to generation sort of ethos, right? You have people who are leaving the company. You have a bunch of terrific leaders around the company. Why would you not have a leadership development program if you're like me, Even if you're just a teeny bit like me, you're skeptical because I am super skeptical. That doesn't mean. I don't mean like, like I don't like poo poo. Every idea. It's not about that. I just. I need evidence Right. I'm the kind of person, like I'm just wired to need evidence until there's evidence. I'm like, I'm questioning it the whole whole way. So my thought on that, why not is, well, because it's going to take forever to do, right? So I look around and I don't see the evidence. Right. I look at other companies, I look at other companies who don't have leadership development and there's so many of them, I'm like, well, clearly it's not so easy, right? Or everybody would have just done it by now. So why haven't they? All these reasons I'm thinking of is why same reasons I'm thinking of, right? Because Ellen, you guys don't measure it, but we measure it, right? Like, like I can imagine, I can hear already principal saying you're going to take my people and they're going to do what? And then it's very daunting, right? But then again, if you're a little bit like me and Chris already revealed my big secret. I am super, super highly introverted. So you propose something like this to me and my first thought is that's going to be the biggest energy drain I can imagine. Like, it's just going to be so, so exhausting. So in fact what happens is like sort of instinctively, I don't really even start with let's create a leadership development program. I start with what else can we do? How else can we get people like trained up? Right. There are plenty of other options out there, right. So, and that's, so that's what I'm doing by the way. I am at this moment, this is some 10 years ago when Tricia, who I mentioned conceived of this idea. I'm looking at, and you guys probably, I bet a lot of you have looked at me at like Stanford and Cornell and Harvard, they have these continuing education programs. You have your Korn ferries, right. And your kind of third party things and then you have plenty of online options, Coursera, LinkedIn, learning. So I'm doing all that. But is anybody in here a vistage member? Yeah. So I am too. And, and at that time Tricia was a vistage member. I'm doing that and Tricia is reaching out into her network of VISTAGE people. And so she's doing a lot of interviewing, she's doing a lot of meeting with people, she's talking with leaders of companies, she's talking with Vistage chairs, speakers. I'm thinking about how can we, are we going to send people out? Are we going to bring somebody in. She's talking with people about, what did you guys do? Tricia comes back from one of these meetings and it's with a client. And this is. So the next time we're talking about leadership development, it's just the two of us. And I'm ready to tell her all about, you know, Korn, Ferry. Right. And I'm telling Stanford has a great, you know, executive this and that. And she instead she tells me the story that she had with one of the clients of ours that she took, went out to lunch with and. And the client had developed their own leadership development program. So was telling Trisha all about it, about how they conceived of it, they created it, they facilitate it. Right. They do it all. And Tricia said, this is what she's telling me. Tricia said during that conversation to the client, this sounds like a huge amount of time. And the client said, yeah, it is. And can you tell me something right now you're doing that is more important? So. And by. So now if you're a little bit like me, you also. You agree with Trisha, right? So I believe her. Right. I like, yes, this is important. This is important. We have to, like, we have to do this thing and everything that we learned over this. I don't know how long this was because I'm reflecting back, it could have been weeks, but I think it was months, this month's period of time where we're doing all this research and asking all these questions. As we're doing this, we're surfacing. What is it that we want? What is it that we want to convey in a leadership development program? But what we knew is everything that we'd surfaced was super, super important. And it was so important, we couldn't really trust it to a third party. We were just going to have to do it ourselves. I don't have to tell all of you in this room about urgent and important. You guys deal with it every day. But the number of times that urgent gets put on the front burner and important gets put on the back, and this time was different. This time was different because we had said all of these things that we had learned in the last few months about our ideas, which had now sort of evolved about leadership development, were just too important to want to just send people out to a third party. Two to not start on now. So just some of those things this is about, like, how do we conduct the business ourselves, Right? What is our. The legacy of the business and where is it going? We want people to get perspective of our leaders. I'm not bashing any third party, but. And we've used some, we've used like some of our industry ones, things like that, right? No shade there. It's just some of the things we wanted our people to get, they weren't going to get there, right? What is the culture of the company? What is the ethos of our design practice? Can we learn from our history? Can we continue that and move it forward? Right? So these things were so important that we said we just got to do this ourselves. So this was really like months ago. I didn't see this coming, right? Months ago, I'm like, we're going to outsource this, right? This is going to be great. To this point now, if we have all of these really important things to do and we're committed, right? We're all in, let's do this thing before we realize just how crazy it is to do it. So that's sort of, I wanted to get you here to this point of why did you decide to do it yourselves? Because if you're like me, you're thinking there were other options. And that's why. Now, having said that, I'm not going to not tell you about what the program actually is, because that wouldn't be cool. You guys all came here maybe not to see me, but you're sitting here anyway and not out having a coffee. So I'm going to tell you what the program is, right? Before I tell you like what's in the program, I want to set the stage a little bit for what it looks like. Because that did inform. When we were thinking about what does the program look like, it did sort of inform to some degree what is, what is actually in the program. So we knew we needed to create the right kind of learning environment. If you have 30. First of all, like, are you just going to like do this for 30% of the company? That's my made up, the made up number, right? The Gallup's made up number. Are you going to do this for 30% of the company? And then you start thinking about everything that you discuss over the last few years, how important it was, how is it going to best be conveyed? How are you going to create an environment of learning that really supports and facilitates that? So cohort based learning, and I'm sure you're familiar with it, if you're not, it's pretty. It speaks for itself, right? We knew that we couldn't just train everybody and train isn't even the right word, but we needed to Create this collaborative environment where engagement would be very high. And when you have a small group like say 10, 12 people, that's what we envision the cohort as. This group has a shared accountability when it's say 30 people, not the same. Right. So we needed these things. We needed to be very engaging, very real time. We needed there to be a lot of activities happening and, and very importantly, relationship building. And having been in a cohort myself, I understand the importance of that. And that doesn't happen sort of in, in a large environment. So with that knowing, okay, we're going to take all that important stuff and we're going to do it with 10 to 12 groups at a time, how's that going to, how's that going to happen? And we didn't really, we didn't have a time frame. Right. I already revealed that it's a year. But we didn't know that at the time. We knew these four topic areas. We knew we needed to get them to dive deeper into the business of ktgy. We knew that we wanted them to develop their own personal and professional self in a way that they're not going to get at, you know, Stanford or something. We also wanted to give them like toolkits for team leadership. Right. More effective team management. And at this time, we didn't have like people skills training or anything like that. So we just want to make them feel really, really confident about managing a team of people. And then finally we wanted them to elevate their, their communication skills. So when we put that all together, it was, it sort of became what it is. So I do want to show you what this is like, examples of each one of them. So the, like I said, continuous reading, they're never not reading. And some of the stuff we wanted them to learn, we weren't going to do like in a session or in a virtual meeting. They just need to be reading books. So I'm thinking like the first one is what got you here won't get you there. There's like fierce conversations is along the way, or maybe that's that we kind of have moved things around. But reading and not just reading, like, read this book. We're going to discuss this book in depth too. And that happens in these monthly virtual meetings because remember, we have six offices, right? So we're pulling people together, but we can't, like, we, we can't not have them together frequently. So we're going to do monthly meetings. They're going to be an hour and a half long. Big commitment for Them and we're going to go in the book, right? We give them assignments, go into the book in detail. We're going to have conversations about things that are on their mind, issues that they're having, stuff like that. And then we also have, we pull them together three times a year, one week each time all together in person for full day sessions. Now I want to point something out about this. I didn't conceive of it at the time, but Tricia and I are very, very immersed in these things. One, like I write the homework assignments, but that's not all of it. It's. We're in all the virtual meetings, we're leading the discussions on the reading assignments and those week long immersives, the intensives that happen three times a year. We're in that and in fact we're leading some of those sessions. And this is pivotal for me. This is pivotal because I didn't, I couldn't have imagined what a difference this was going to make for me. It was easy to say, yeah, sure, you know, I'll lead a session, yeah, I'll do this like telling Chris, yeah, I'll do a presentation, yeah, I'll do. And then it happens. And then it happens repeatedly. And it, it completely changes my perception on it. And I think, I think Trisha's too. This was huge. This was again like the choice to not outsource this. Somewhere else here is. Don't, no, you're not supposed to read that slide. I didn't make the PowerPoint error of too much on screen. I intended to. Each of these is the week long. It's day by day, hour by hour. What I want to do is sort of give you a sense of everything that we pack into these, the week long intensives. And they're, they're intense. There's hardly any breaks. We just go. And each of those color blocks is one of those four topic areas that I mentioned. So we're just making sure each week they're getting a good bit of all that stuff. What I will give you is I'll give you some examples, right? I'm not going to build the program for you. This, some of these may not be the, even the thing you're thinking about. I'm just going to give you a couple of examples of what those learning objectives were for each of those four topic areas. So in the business, for example, we do a session on strategic planning and it's very much about how we do our strategic plan. But of course there's just some fundamentals of Strategic planning that are included in there. We also do a session on risk management. This is two. For any of these four, there's going to be like five to 10 sessions throughout that entire year. Just giving you guys examples, personal development. They each get an executive. This is. We do go third party for this, right? They get executive coaching. That's. We use Brainerd. But, you know, there are plenty of others out there. It's really super helpful in their own. Evolving in their professional self. And then we do a session on what makes a leader a leader. Right. Again, just examples. We have five to 10 of each of these. Team management goal setting is super important for us. Making sure that this was. This was a language. We didn't all speak the same before this. Now we do. Productive confrontation is what we used to call difficult conversations. Right? And then the communication one. Everybody's almost everybody's least favorite one because they have to do public speaking. And pretty much 1% of them like that. They don't like that part. And then we go over, like, effective meeting leadership, leading meetings. But there's something else. There's more than just the subject matter. There's more than just what we want them to learn. There's also what I, for lack of anything better, I call these, instead of learning objectives, experience objectives. What do we want them to experience when they're in the program? And these things, I'm going to argue, are as important, sometimes more important than the actual subject that they're learning. The experience of the program is a big, big deal. And again, I'm just going to kind of relate that back to. You're not going to get this outside. So we had to do this, right? We needed them to connect with each other. And again, I have four of these, and they all have plenty of examples. I'm just going to give you one. But one of the best things we do for connecting with each other is we assign projects in small groups, right? So you don't get to work by yourself. You don't get to work with all 12. You're going to work in a small group. We need them to learn the important importance of being vulnerable and transparent as a leader. And some people are naturally. Not everybody is. It's a hard thing to do and. But it's crucial, right? So we do a lot of. Well, I mean, sort of being in the program for a year, you kind of come out like sort of embracing vulnerability or die. And. But one way we do it is. I don't know if you guys know the term issue processing Maybe those of you in Vistage do, but it's, it's just we get really deep into issues. The whole group gets into a person's issue and that person is the center of attention and they got it. Embrace vulnerability. That concept right there is something that starts in the outset, the very first day orientation. These words are spoken usually from me. Get okay with being uncomfortable. You're never going to get comfortable with it. You're always going to be, this is going to be a tough year. You're going to be uncomfortable. Embrace that. Be okay with it. We need them to connect with leaders across the company so they all get assigned one of KTGY shareholders as a mentor for the year. And then we just need them to show up with their full self. This isn't about I'm at work now, I'm at home now. I'm compartmental. No, we need you to show up as your full self. This is a year long program and you're with 10, you know, 10 other people. So one of the ways we do that is in they have to write a monthly update and that monthly update is what happened in the last month and it could be what happened in your studio. That's fine, right? What's going on with the business? That's fine. One lost a job, all that. You must also tell us what's happening in your life personally. And if you're not willing to share like that, you're not going to enjoy the program as much. It's hard at first, but after a while, like we're here for you, right? It's pretty neat. So you learn, I think that in business we don't bring our work self to work. Right? Which the way I grew up is kind of, that's kind of what you did. I have my, my home life and I have my work life and now I got to balance those. You just show up, right? And you, and you are who you are. And it's really important that for them to understand. Look, you have people on your team who are dealing with things too. They're showing up with that, right? So always be cognizant of people are bringing that to work just like you do. I like quotes, as you can see. I'm not sure that this one could be really a quote because who knows who said it, but it's my last one. I like quotes because by the way, I think if this wasn't memorable, someday in the future you go like, I don't remember exactly what. But he had a lot of clever things to say. Forgetting that they were all said by famous people. This was said by everybody. But this is important. I have this in here because it's really, really, really important to this program is putting everything you have into it. Because I've already mentioned how intense it was. So you're going to have to commit to that. But if you do, if you go all in, you'll get something in return. And we set the stage with the invitation letter to the program if. Do not apply. If you can't commit this year, right, Maybe it's not the year for you, right? You got a lot going on in your life. Whatever it is, it's going to be super intense, and you need to be in it with us, and we're going to be in it with you. So the expectation is if you do, if you go all in and you commit to this and you give everything you have and you put everything you have into it, you're gonna grow as a leader. You're gonna evolve in your understanding of the business of your team, of yourself. If you go all in, you're gonna do that, right? So that's kind of how we got to that point. And I'm gonna start winding down now. And I think it's fair now to say if that was the intent, right? You saw the program, you saw how we got here, if that was the intent, right? What did you get in return? Did you get everything in return that you were hoping to get? So some. Some reflections, right? And. And remember, again, I've been in. Immersed in this, so I've been. I've been witness to it, right? It's not sort of like, we sent them to summer camp and they came back and you're like, oh, like, they're so smart now. Here's what I'm seeing. Being involved in it with them, the questions that they're asking and challenging me with, like, I'm blown away, right? These are deep and insightful, and it may not start out, like, right out of the gate that way, right? There may be a little trepidation, but it gets there and it. And it doesn't take long to get there. The conversations they're having with each other, I didn't know that they. I was skeptical about all of this going into it, right? I was skeptical that they. They would engage the way we needed them to, wanted them to, expected them to. And then you see, like, these moments, like, man, that's it, right? You see them building the bonds with each other, which probably, I think was the most skeptical part for me. And it still is. Anytime we put a cohort together, I'm looking at it and I don't know, are they going to gel, Are they going to bond? And they do, and they really do. So we see that coming out of it too. And then we're also just hearing from other leadership around the company that, you know, the. This has elevated things, right? They have their, one of their studio directors, after a year is having a different conversation with them now and then. For me, the person who at the start wanted to send them all the Korn ferry or whatever after having done a few of these things. And it took me, it took me a little while too. I'm 100 into this thing. I just can't imagine that it could be done any other way. And I'll tell you also what we did because of that on top of that. But yeah, it absolutely turned me around in thinking like, like when I asked earlier, why would you not do it now? I'm serious. Like you there have a good reason because I can't come up with anymore. So here's where we are. So the first class in the upper left is 2016. So that's when we kicked it off, I think. I'm going to guess we started talking about it in 1415, maybe, I don't know. And so you have 2016, 17, 2019 and 2022. You may recognize a face hiding in the back there. You'll see him soon. With 38 total people who have gone through the program since then, other things we've seen. Now, I'm not going to say if you go through the program, these things are going to happen. I'm not even going to say that because they went through the program. These things happen. But we have had, since they participated in the program, two people sat on the board. We've had 11 shareholders added to the group since they completed the program. Six associate principal promotions. I do bet this, I bet a sack of money. That's nebulous. It could be a very small sack, but whatever. Ask any of those 38, ask any of those people on this screen right now what part elevate leadership played in that. And I bet you 2001 they would say pivotal, huge, right? It got me where I am. And here then I don't have, like, I don't have a before and after. Like this person came in as a dud and now they're a superstar. And hang on, is this recorded? We don't have duds. We don't even. We wouldn't. That wouldn't have even happened because we don't have duds. What. But what I mean is like everybody who was selected for this program was already high potential, a standout in their practice, right? Superstars. So I don't have like a before and after. But what I can say is here's what we see, here's what we hear around the organization. We do one on ones. We've been doing them for a while with team members. The feedback we're getting from staff, from team members about one on ones is our one on ones are more meaningful, they're better conversations, they're helping grow my career better. And we go over all that stuff in Elevate leadership. We do annual reviews, surveys and things. We, we do management manager effectiveness surveys. If you have a team of people, they give us feedback on how you're doing. Those scores have gone up again. Can I attribute it directly to the program? We pull a lot of levers, right? We all do that. We're like. And so I can't tell you for sure which lever had the most impact, but I'm going to say this one did have a big impact. Our employee engagement scores are up now. And that's like staff across the field, they're not all participating in this program. But I do believe, right, if we believe that employees are engaged and motivated and stay because of managers, I believe it has a big role to play in that. And those scores have gone. Those scores have gone up. I mentioned this before. Like leaders speaking the same language, using the same language around goals. We didn't. And that sounds like silly, right? Like goals, whatever. That's a really big thing for us. And we need to make sure that the expectations you set for yourself and the expectations you set for your team, you're all speaking the same language. Right around problem solving. Because we do case studies and things like that. So are we all speaking the same language? So that when we all show up, we're all talking about the same thing? Right? If we're, you know how like people can bring a problem, not a solution. Right. You can't do that in one of our leadership meetings. And that doesn't happen now. Right. People are showing up. Speaking the same language is really an important thing for us. And then these long term relationships, which is a super cool thing, people get together. We have an annual meeting for all of our group of leaders, which is 60. 60. Yeah, ish. Something like that. And to see them come together and this is only once a year. But because so many of them went through Elevate leadership Together. And even if they weren't in the same cohort, like, I know where you've been. Right. I know what you went through. To see them come together every year, it's amazing. Right. Those relationships still exist. And what's cool about it is now they can reach out across the company to whomever they need to reach out to. Right. Which didn't really happen a lot. People kind of worked in silos, and we put a lot of things in place to say, connect with other people. You need help on a project, you need information. Right. Donovan put a lot of that in place. Didn't happen a lot now because I have this relationship. Right. Right. I may be in Irvine, but I have a really strong relationship with somebody in D.C. hey, Brian. Nobody does that anymore. But anyway, hey, Brian. I'm trying to solve this problem with such and such project that wouldn't have happened before. So these relationships are crucial. Right. The cohorts still connect as a group. They get together as a group. And having been through. I went through a similar cohort program, a little bit larger, but we kept that relationship going. It's a really strong thing. And then some of them, I mentioned that they all are assigned a mentor who is a shareholder at kdgy. Some of them keep that mentoring relationship going as well. You don't have to. You only have to keep it for the year. But many of them do because it was so, so helpful, so effective for them. And now they have that connection to a firm leader who sits around the shareholder table. Right. So that's really cool. So there's a little bit more. This one sort of surprised me. Not that there was evolution, growth, but so originally, like when we conceived of this program, I'm thinking of a group of people. What I didn't see coming was who else grew from this? The company grew from this. We now, I think, have a much better understanding of what professional development and training is. And we. And I'll tell you, we continue to move that forward. I'll tell you that in a sec. And it's just part of who we are. I can't imagine, like us talking about not doing it. It's just part of who we are. And I think it absolutely has matured us as a business. Not just because of the evolution, the growth of those leaders who went through the program. Because the businesses embraced the idea of professional development and leadership development. Yeah. It was about the participants. Right. And they evolved. And you'd hope and expect they would. But I do have an anecdote. This happened just A few weeks ago, so. So it's fresh in my mind. I was sitting at dinner next to one of our last cohorts participants, and this is somebody who I already had a tremendous amount of admiration for. I thought they were just amazing person. And she says to me, you know, John, I. I wasn't totally sure. I didn't really understand the program and to be honest, I didn't know if it was for me. And she says, I look back at it now, it completely changed me. I'm so glad I did it. I'm a different person for it. So, yeah, it is about them, of course. And those are really great stories to hear. Here's the one I didn't see coming. It changed. It changed. I'm going to say us, because I think Trisha would agree. But I'm telling you, it changed me. I didn't see. I. If you told me that 10 years ago, I said, what are you talking about? This is for them. I'm a different person. It absolutely changed me in how I show up now, in how I see professional development, how I see these people. I'm a better leader from it. You all know Donovan. So I'm taking a huge risk in saying that. Just trust me. I'm a better leader because of it. I really am. It's changed how I lead my team and people just having gone through this program, and here's the one that I'd have said, I'd have called BS on, I'm totally fulfilled in doing it. I just said, no, I'll do it. Sure, I'll do it. Right? So having said all that, let me just give you a couple takeaways and kind of a little bit of maybe where we are now, maybe. And then we can maybe do some Q and A over it. Here's what I've learned. We can actually do even more. That wasn't my last quote, was it? We can do even more. I was amazed, amazed by what we were able to do. So much so that now when we have another idea, we go, yeah, we could do that. And we have. So Elevate now doesn't just have leadership. Elevate has two more programs for other levels in the organization within it. Because we could and we proved it and we did. So here's what I would say. Just go full Nike, right? Like, just do it. Right. If you're thinking about it, if, if I've convinced you or if you're some even close to being convinced that we should do leadership development ourselves, just do it. Don't so if you get paralyzed like I did, because it's daunting, right? All those why nots, like, it's hard to get out of the, off the starting blocks, just do. Because it's not going to be perfect. Ten years later, we still tweak it. It's not going to be perfect. So just start and work it out as you go. Just put pen to paper and, and yeah, so. And I'm not going to B.S. you. It's, it's, it's a lot, it's a lot of work and it's really, really super exhausting. All that stuff that I said and I wouldn't change, I wouldn't change a bit of it because if you're even a little bit like me, you'll do it and it'll exhaust you and you'll look back and say, there is nothing I've done that's been more rewarding than doing this. It.