Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:03 <inaudible>
Speaker 2 00:08 Welcome to the breakout growth podcast, where Sean Ellis interviews, leaders from the world's fastest growing companies to get to the heart of what's really driving their growth. And now here's your host, Sean Ellis,
Speaker 3 00:24 This episode of the breakout growth podcast. I'm speaking with Hugo Pereira, chief marketing officer of Evie box, a manufacturer of electric vehicle charging station solutions. They are on a mission to drive sustainable mobility and a zero emission world. During Hugo's tenure. The team has grown from around 10 employees to more than 600 and was acquired by a large energy corporation, but growth hasn't been linear all the way through some years far, outperforming others. And our discussion, you guys shares the story of this journey explains how the company has managed its explosive growth with a mission driven identity. Customer advocacy has been really a big part of the V box story as it has helped align and connect teams and keep them really one step ahead of the competition. Our conversation deconstructs, how this relationship building with customers has fueled the company's growth engine, but here goes also candid about the changing landscape caused by COVID-19 and explains that although the pandemic has tempered some of the growth expectations for this year, it's also created some amazing opportunities. So they have a mission of reducing carbon emissions to zero and not surprisingly some of the longterm systemic changes of society based on the COVID-19 learnings are really showing a lot of potential to reduce the carbon footprint because there's going to be a lot more opportunity for remote work going forward. And so for that, that UV boxes team is pretty excited. So let's jump in with you and go and learn more about E box and how the company's obsessive focus on delighting customers has been key to driving that sustainable breakout.
Speaker 3 02:08 Hi, welcome to the breakout growth podcast.
Speaker 4 02:11 Thanks. Happy to be here.
Speaker 3 02:13 Yeah, it's really exciting to have you on you're over in the Netherlands and, uh, I'm excited to hear about Evie box. Um, so how about
Speaker 4 02:22 You tell us a little bit about what Evie box is and the problem that it solves. Yeah, sure. So thanks for that. So Evie box is a leading electric vehicle charging solution provider. So we offer integrated and tailor charging solutions to businesses around the world. These being from shutting station manufacturing, that you can charge your electric car to the whole shutting management software that manage everything behind the scenes and all suit awning services like field services, like installation and commissioning training to the partners and resellers or lights companies, and the overall support also to, uh, on day to day basis to partners or order companies around the world. I see that there are two problems that we are solving. One of them is the fact that electric mobility is rising. The rise of electric cars is something that is, I would not say and stop of what is going really fast.
Speaker 4 03:12 There's already over 7 million electric vehicles on the road today, but there'll be probably probably nine by the end of 2020 and is expected to be over a hundred in total by 2030. So it is a booming market also because it's solving a problem of air quality. Yeah, we breathe, uh, 91% of the world, but it's in the air that is under the regulations of the world. Health organization is dangerous polluted air. So we build the infrastructure that allows that to become a reality electric mobility and improving the air quality, which hopefully will become a cleaner planet. So we are really on a mission to a zero emissions world. That's how we like to see it.
Speaker 3 03:50 That's fantastic. So, um, as you were going through that, it sounds like I know I've, I've looked at the website and it looks like there are some, some things like home charging solutions, but it looks like you're mostly focused on, on B2B then.
Speaker 4 04:02 Yeah, yeah. So, so despite that the biggest user, of course, the drivers of electric vehicles, our focus is really on the B2B sector. So a typical customer profile will be an automotive manufacturer. So the companies that deal with the electric cars could also be utility and energy companies or full retailers and like the shells and totals of these worlds could also be fleet operators being like large fleet companies that operate for, for businesses or even rentals. So the other thing is like large businesses, like workplace, lots of workplaces facilities, also companies that manage condominiums tenants, which is kind of a sort of home charging. And it goes into small businesses like hospitality's restaurants, hospitals, the beauty of it is that everywhere you park, it can be seen as a customer profile. So it can not only think about what are you biking and Google owns the parking, you know, in essence to build a charging infrastructure. But yeah, most of it is B to B, um, that we focus on and less on the driver directly.
Speaker 3 05:04 No, I definitely find, so I have an electric vehicle and I definitely find that, uh, I it's, a lot of times I'll, I'll pick a hotel based on if they have, if they have electric chargers or not. Um, so it would hotels be part of that as well? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 05:21 One of the fun stories, we, we were very keen and for, for some period of time, especially at the beginning when the industry was new, when we were empowering that we actually spend quite some time empowering booking.com to add a filter for electric vehicle charging stations so that people could have the benefit of it. So finally it is there, which is, which is helpful. And I hope it's going to duplicate even further, but yeah, hotels will be an example of, of, of a business that will benefit from it.
Speaker 3 05:48 That's great. And then how do you guys make money? Is that mostly on, on just sort of the project of building everything out or is there some recurring revenue on the software? Yeah,
Speaker 4 05:58 Of course there's a hardware sales, which is kind of the cost of buying the hardware and owning the hardware, the charging station being regular or a fast charger with the ones you see on the highway. And then there is a recurring revenue model, which is about the software yes, or a fee for the using the shushing management swaps software, which follows model traditional SaaS model. And then there is project and service fees, especially for businesses mostly, which might be about if they want to have heavy onboarding or training on how to handle and manage the charging network customization, if they want to white label with software or the hardware. And sometimes through partners, you know, they might want to have some kind of field services to connect with partners, to, to install the charging station, to handle the project, to ensure that everything is working fine. But most of the part of fulfillment, many times we work with partners around the world so that they can also have a business model for themselves. So in that case, we have the recurring revenue model, the hardware sales, and most of the times the services are also delivered by our partners. In many cases, some other cases we do directly everything, but normally we always work with partners to deliver large projects.
Speaker 3 07:04 Right. Okay. So, and then you have been with the company about five years. And how long has the company been around overall?
Speaker 4 07:11 It's been around for 10 years. So 2010, and I joined in 2015.
Speaker 3 07:18 And I think you had mentioned that you joined when some, uh, private equity firm had had come in and become part of it and they invited you in, is that right?
Speaker 4 07:29 Yeah. So, uh, so in the 2014, uh, the, there was a private equity firms. They became a majority shareholder from Ben and Luke's, uh, at the time a new CEO had just started Christo, very new. And I connected well with him from previous startup experiences. And he invited me to join, to have the overall expansion growth strategy of the organization and marketing and the, and the, I took on the challenge. It some very compelling at the time, despite that I didn't know much about charging stations and electric vehicles, it's very compelling. And I was the first known that's the joint. So it was about 10 people when, when I joined, uh, 10, 15 people in the Netherlands. And, uh, and it was funded right. When I joined everything was in that even the web, the main website was the bookstore, the nail. So I was very clear. The first thing I had to do is to switch to the box, the main one, but yeah, but it was quite an experience to be the first person that brings the diversity to the team and to the organization. And today, fast forward five years, we are 600 people in the organization, which is, uh, which is quite exciting.
Speaker 3 08:37 Yeah. So, I mean, that's, you've definitely seen a lot happen in those five years coming from 10 or 15 people to 600 people. Um, what, uh, what, what do you feel like is kind of the biggest difference now? I mean, I, I just imagine it's, it's, uh, it must have been a pretty, um, a tight team that everyone knows each other well, and now it's, now it's a big company where there's probably people you've never seen before.
Speaker 4 09:01 Exactly. I think, I think we're good on the 200, 300 Mark that I was like, Oh, I don't know if I can name everyone in the building anymore. And that's quite a strange feeling to have, especially if you join with 10, 15 people where they know each other, you have lunch together in one table. So the first couple of years, it's more of a community and a family. And that feeling is still there. There's still a very strong, passionate, and human element to the organization, even with 600 people. But of course at the beginning was also like everyone tries to solve everything. Everyone is involved in every topic, everything is a company conversation. And now, now we can not afford to have everything being tried to be solved by everyone. So of course we need to rely more on the people that we bring in to really make a difference. And of course, before it was the same case, but yeah, we just have to accept that it's more about the legation trust and having the empowerment. That's the team leaders, the leadership and people that join the organization, have the Liberty to, to help you to grow.
Speaker 3 10:01 Yeah, that's, that's super exciting. And then, um, one of the things I, and I want to get into the how on this, but one of the things I was excited about that you shared with me was the, was the, the annual growth rates through that period of time. And it was really interesting to see that there were some years where you growth growth was you always were growing, but there were some years where it's maybe 20 or 30% growth. And then, and then other years where it's a hundred percent normally, normally you see in a company where it's sort of like, maybe that's a, a few years of a hundred percent growth, and then it drops to 60%, then 30%, then 20%, the fact that a few years ago, you had a 20% year. And then in 2019, you were over a hundred percent annualized growth.
Speaker 3 10:50 Um, that's, that's going to be interesting when we dig into what were the, where were the challenges that were holding back growth and what was, what was, uh, what were the things that, that exploded growth. But before we get into that, I want to just take us to the, to the current time. And clearly COVID-19 has affected a lot of people. Like, I just look at myself, I mentioned I have an electric vehicle, but probably even more so with my family, with, with gas vehicles that, um, people aren't driving very much anymore. People aren't staying in hotels, people aren't going to restaurants. It's, it's starting to open back up a bit here in the United States, but, um, in a new Europe, I think there's a little bit probably closed down earlier and it's probably opening up as well. Um, but how has COVID-19 affected the business? What, what have you, what have you seen and what have you had to do differently?
Speaker 4 11:42 Yeah, it's really there's of course there's, there's downsides to it, but there's also amazing things that happen through it. Um, naturally COVID-19 that has impacted our business heavily. Uh, we are also, we had manufacturing, so of course, manufacturing slows down chickens get delayed. If the borders are closed, we cannot get the stations to the customers. The customers also feel a bit of the pain of everyone is affected economically. So customer requirements might decrease or orders can got delayed or certain decisions that were expected now move maybe over the summer. So there is an impact there, of course, and, and it's, it's heavily seen on, on, on our, on our way. Um, you know, up until the COVID-19, we, we, we actually started the year very strong compared to the year before we were on again, on a trajectory to do a hundred percent year on year to be even even more again, which was, which was quite exciting.
Speaker 4 12:32 Um, and of course now it's going to be a very different story. I think the main, the main thing, of course, that's that, especially from a hardware company, we see the importance and I think it's going to happen with a lot of manufacturing organizations, which is to decrease the dependency on a single region, like potentially like China, and to start having multiple, multiple sourcing around the world, just to be able to cope with different plan a, B and C. I think that will be one of the big effects that, that effects that will happen. And then the other one is it speaks to the value of the customer relationship, because if, if customers will trust us from before and if you were reliable and transparent to them and they stick with us because they know that they're only tough times and they also notice if you are also being kind and caring towards them.
Speaker 4 13:17 So if before the company was very much on the growth trajectory of figuring out, we have to increase the market, share the mind share. Now it's starting to gear up to the fact of being like, okay, we really have to work on advocacy and we have to work on retention and, and best-in-class experience delighting our customers. So it's switching a bit, the mindset of like, okay, well, we have to do some work here because we don't know how long this is going to be here, but you also have to just improve the business. And sometimes it grows, he focused so much on the, on the top part of the funnel, more leads, more, more businesses, more customers. And we are drained by that. And now, and I think we are in a situation where like, okay, we have to also balance the organization and the Corona situation, despite being very unfortunate and unprecedented allows us to start looking into it and then always just stay to school, you know, like, can an organization move completely online? And we're slicing native that in one week, 600 people go work from home and, and the, and then we start, have to start thinking, okay, how can we work from home? And, and how do our manufacturing plants can work in a safe way? So it becomes very interesting. And now we are in a situation where like, okay, how is the future of work going to look like, because it's clear that we can keep on working from home and you can do business working from home.
Speaker 4 14:36 And we changed a couple of things. We started doing a town hall on a weekly basis with everyone in the company. So suddenly 500 people, 600 people joining on the conference call giving updates on the company here's is where we are. You know, what can we do better? You know, providing trust to people. Uh, there was also unfortunate incidents. Like we had an annual mobility events that we call revolution, which is more of a thought leadership initiative for the industry. It was supposed to be end of March a thousand plus people of the industries coming over to Amsterdam. And we just said, okay, we cannot do this. We have to revamp the whole concept to be digital, not just doing a digital webinar, which we did and actually was pretty good. We had 1,200 people out of 1,700 resistor or something, which is pretty good attendance for the webinar, but now it goes beyond that. Now it's like, okay, what is the digital experience that we're going to offer? If events are never going to be the same?
Speaker 3 15:26 Right. Right. Especially for me personally, where I, I earned the majority of my money last year in live events around the world. So, um, clearly, clearly, uh, that those shutting down, hopefully not forever, but, uh, I think like with everything as you've talked about, you need to be flexible. And so I remember my kids saying to me, like, are we going to be okay, dad? Like, you know, clearly you're not going to be able to travel. And I said to them, um, I'm an information worker, you know, that, that, I just need to think about a different channel for delivering that information. It doesn't, you know, the information is still valuable. The information is still important to people. I just need to shift my focus to delivering the information and less of a face to face way of doing things. And hopefully, hopefully I'll get back on the road because I do enjoy the face to face side of things, but it's a, it is interesting.
Speaker 3 16:19 Another, another thing that you touched on this idea of, of really doubling down on the relationships that you have with customers and being kind and caring. And, and, uh, I, I had a head of a, of a pretty big company who, who reached out to me early on in the, in the pandemic. And he said to me that, uh, Hey, kind of just get your advice on something he was looking to to say, you know, maybe there's an opportunity here as everyone gets afraid that, that there's going to be some cheap advertising available. And he was in an industry that I knew was going to be affected for a long time with buy, buy this, even though it's tech it's like some of the tech industries are, are, um, have a, have a more physical attribute to them where it's, where it's, you know, the, the, the Uber's and the Airbnbs that, that, um, have been way more effected or the birds and all of these different types of companies.
Speaker 3 17:17 And, and so, you know, the first thing that I said to him was, um, one, I would not be looking to get aggressive on advertising, but to all of your customers are scared to death right now that their businesses are being affected by this. I would just double down on focusing on resources for those customers to help them navigate it, to help them change their businesses and use it as an opportunity to, to really strengthen that relationship. And it's very cool to hear you saying basically the same thing that, that, that was part of your strategy there that I, I think, um, you can't change the situation, but you can, you can try to make the most of the situation. And, uh, and ideally the more, the more mission driven you are the, I, I think that helps people adjust to the situation. How can, how can we pursue our mission in, in a different way now? And the fact that one of the important parts of your mission that you talked about is the, is the clean air side of things. Um, the good news is at least in Southern California, the air has never been cleaner. Suddenly 90% of the cars are off the road. And so, um, yeah, maybe that doesn't financially help you, but it definitely helps you in terms of your mission.
Speaker 4 18:32 Yeah. And, and, uh, and as he said, like the interesting thing is that when people look at the transition to electric mobility, I hope these not just replacing the car that currently on the road, we just electric cars, because that will not solve everything. That was just, yes, it will be a better solution, but they'll still be congestion and, and hope that
Speaker 3 18:52 Cleaner, but it'll still be a lot of times stuck on in a car on the road,
Speaker 4 18:56 Along the way. This also enables, um, the way I see it is I see electric vehicles has enable it for people to say, okay, if I have any electric vehicle, then I should demand renewable energy to power my car, that I should, I should demand the customers that we provide the energy to stop investing on the natural gas, but when solid energy, and that can actually power the current become cleaner that afterwards they say, okay, if I also have then an electric vehicle, does it need to be one car for every family member? Or can we think about, you know, like call the future of rights yet and he's going to happen or, or autonomous vehicles. So I hope that also the amount of vehicles on the road is going to decrease and that people start enjoying the fact of not only, I don't own a car in the Netherlands, of course, it's a small country.
Speaker 4 19:42 Amsterdam is a small city having a car for me, it's more of a pain than anything else. So I got an electric bike compensates, but I also see like, these it's incredible. I just rent a, uh, an electric car in the city and I can go almost everywhere in the country. And, and every time I need to go somewhere, I rent an electric car, if I can, and that's fine. I don't, I don't need to own the car, but I know that not everywhere in the world, that is a possibility today. I just hope that along the way, also to get into the direction
Speaker 3 20:13 As I touched on before, it's been a wild ride for you up to this point, you, you, and some of the early years when you were there, growth was not huge. It was still, it was still impressive. More recently, you had amazing growth for a company that's been around. That's the size of your company now. So maybe you can give us some insights into, into kind of what was the difference. Why, why did you have some years where you grew so slowly and, and other years where you've had just explosive growth?
Speaker 4 20:44 Yeah. That's, that's a, that is a really great, and I think it's, it's hard to try to summarize in a lot of ways, but I think one of the interesting things that might be a misconception is that when you're growing as a company and you start expanding to other countries and regions, that the effect of expanding, it doesn't necessarily multiply that you're going to grow at the same rate. So for example, when we start moving out of not moving out to the expanding beyond the Netherlands, initially we explored a lot of the that's model. Yeah. Okay. What works in the Netherlands in the way of the way of doing business here is what you going to try to implement in the other regions, because it was, and still today is one of the most developed countries in terms of electric mobility and infrastructure. And while that these are good entry points and a good balance to kick off is not necessarily how other regions work.
Speaker 4 21:33 So at the beginning in the Netherlands, we were very strong with the distribution channel. So we will sell to a larger wholesale company. And that works with a lot of like a distribution center that has a big network of electricians and these toddlers, and they will sell the solutions to small businesses to, uh, to people at home. So it's an only, I have a network of 600 or 700,000 installers that are basically selling for you. They are brand ambassadors. So Drake in the Netherlands, because suddenly, you know, one of our competitors was not as competitive. The box was completed immediately box, and then a thousand installers at around the way almost being a Salesforce, selling, you know, stations all over the place, but that same distribution model or that same way of finding resellers in other regions didn't work out so well because the culture was not the same or not the same with the market size.
Speaker 4 22:17 So, so that took awhile to quickly understand that was not, not, not going to work out the same way. Um, also one of the things that happen is that, of course, when you are expanding hardware, you know, you have to certify the hardware. And of course, with all the best intentions, sometimes you want to launch a specific new product in these region, but then you have to certify it. And for example, certifying in the U S can take one year or two years, depending on how it goes to be all energy certified, to be able to sell their, um, electronics, for example. So, and of course, like such a new industry also have so many different features and different ways of being, you know, in the Netherlands, majority of people are business drivers and lease drivers. So they all need to have all this complexity of, I want to re my employer to reimburse my, in my, uh, my energy that I spend on charging the car.
Speaker 4 23:10 I want that reimbursement to be automatic. I want to have a whole lot, so it's quite nice and advanced, but then you can go, I don't know, to, to the U S or to some other country that, you know, has a lot of private ownership of electric cars. You don't want to have all of these. I actually want to have something different. So that complexity and the time you took to understand the market in those years of 20, 30%, it was one of the reasons. And the other one, we moved from B2C to these B2B to C approach. And that's changed. I'll be honest, was more challenging than we anticipated to, uh, to start changing the whole messaging towards businesses, to focus the whole acquisition approach, experiments, websites, sales intake, and the organization to say, we're going to focus on business first to go after the large businesses build the right network of resellers.
Speaker 4 23:56 And then if they let Rick drivers want to come to us, we're going to pass them to the partners and let them take the lead there. That whole operation took quite a while for us to be able to change to the point that afterwards business recognizes as, Oh, yeah. Okay. If you box is really the, the main company for us to go to build a whole business charging solution, whereby at the beginning was more like electric vehicle drivers were like, well, I need a charging station. I go to Evie box and I searched online and we didn't even have a web shop compared to other organizations. So that transformation took all at the same time that we were expanding to seven countries to seven offices selling to 30, 40 countries with resellers, you know, sometimes expanding also can slow down the operations. And when we start, when he stopped and decided, okay, we understand where you want to go, how we want to go. Let's simplify things, you know, and clean up and start, you know, like this strategy from scratch, which was about 2017 when we were like, okay, now we know exactly how we want to go and how we want to build. And then, and then it leads to the last year, which was phenomenal.
Speaker 3 24:58 So it's interesting to me what it sounds like maybe what was going on there was kind of two, two situations of having to tune in the product market fit. So one is the, that, that kind of business model shift where you, where you went from B to C to B, to B, to B to C um, if I said that, right. And then, uh, and then the other is, as you, as you go through the, uh, regional expansion yeah. Everything from, what, what exactly are you offering in each region? That's going to be compelling to, how do I get the messaging right. To actually, you know, people, people have a different set of choices. So there's, there's a little bit of that product market fit. The market is different. So you have to, you have to think about how do we fit into that different market. And so in both cases, it takes time to dial it in, but it looks like, it looks like in recent years, like once you've dialed it in, boom, then you, then, then the growth really started to work. And it's not about working less or working harder. It's just, it's, it takes time to patiently figure out how, how do we make it work?
Speaker 4 26:07 That was one of the biggest learnings that, because I was coming from a very SAS background from before. So, so then, you know, if something goes wrong, it's a software, you know, heavier sprint to experiment. And they put out rollouts a month when we got to be weekly sprint. And when you get it done and put like an MVP out there, but then I realized with hardware, you cannot necessarily do an MVP of a hardware. You know, if there is, if there is a narrower, you might be backtrack by half a year, at one year back into the market. So that's quite a painful experience, but you've got to learn a lot that you also, sometimes you have to get it right. And not just to get it fast, but I got to learn, as he said, product market fit. One is not static and is not homogeneous, which was something that maybe I had the assumption before from the SAS companies.
Speaker 3 26:53 Yep. Yep. So what, what would you say, would you, would you say that that was some of the, some of the biggest challenges that you faced or has there been some other challenges that are also important?
Speaker 4 27:03 Well, that definitely, well, one of the challenges of course is when you start growing a lot rapidly with the people, it's the traditional challenge of how to keep the knowledge across the organization and keep everyone with a high level of knowledge, high level of training. And at a certain point in time, onboarding 30, 40, 50 people a month start to become, become quite something. So we had to really maybe heavily switch our mindset of maybe the Vbox organization started with becoming very profit products and then people kind of like priority oriented. And then through the transition, maybe it doesn't 15,016 became very much product profit people, or people like becoming more priority. And definitely as of like two thousand seventeen thousand eighteen, if we can clear that, okay, for these level of growth, we really have to, the foundation is people powered by purpose. And then we build the right products and then, you know, revenue, profit growth will follow.
Speaker 4 27:56 So I think that shift shifting mindset was, was something that was challenging to build from a cultural aspect, point of view, in your other one, I would say, you know, if I look more or less, how I like to think about the growth, which is like you build up the study, which is about that mission, vision, the team and the products, and then you have the niche, which is about the customers, departments, the market, and then you have the emails to the values of voice and the look. And I think on the image, one of the interesting insights that we tried to think about was not to strive to be a market leader, but to strive to be an industry leader, which drives different questions because the market believe that we are always asking, how can we gain more market share, or how can we beat competition, or how can we, you know, be more present in the market whereby when we start shifting no, let's focus on being an industry leader. Then we start thinking about developing the industry, the needs of the industry and the customers call to increase the mind share because there's space for everyone at this stage because it's such a fast growing industry. And then, you know, let's build that mindset and then let that right solution be out in the market and let the market evaluate. So that, that shifts, I think it helped a lot the organization also to be more than just a charging manufacturing for motor charging developer.
Speaker 3 29:07 So one of the things you mentioned to me before the call was that, um, the, the company was actually acquired by a, uh, an energy company in 2017. How, what role did that play in either accelerating or slowing down growth?
Speaker 4 29:24 No, it was definitely a turning point because, because we got acquired by NG one of the largest utility companies in the world, if not, if not the largest, and that allows us to have the robustness, the expertise of the utility sector and also the financial backing could to go faster. So then we could start doing investments in order to build specific products or solutions or to increase the teams and the footprint. So it played a big role of course, and the fact that it played a big role in a way that you could keep the culture and in an entrepreneurial spirit, that was quite something that, that helped us a lot. So, so definitely was a turning point when they joined, because that, that allows us to actually start investing more and to be able to get the right data, to support our growth, which before we couldn't do it, because we were playing very much on the job and with the financial business model we had.
Speaker 3 30:19 And so is it, is it more of a, um, a financial ownership situation there or, or have, have you been, and are you run pretty independently or have you been more integrated into their larger organization where, where you potentially run up against the natural bureaucracy that you're going to see in any bigger company?
Speaker 4 30:40 No, that's the beauty part of it. We we've run independently. Of course, a supervisory board. We report to them. It's still important to have a great relationship as a, as a shareholder and as a partner for us, they also allow us to tap into large projects because sometimes we have large organizations manage automotive manufacturers or large players at one to have a pen European service. And that will not necessarily possible if you don't have an organization like Angie, that can say, yeah, that's not a problem because we are all over the world. We have sort of a theme ready to be on the ground. And we also benefit from that as it evolves. So you can say, yeah, he wants to have a pan European projects with the services all over the place, installation, commissioning support, not a problem. We have the right partner for that. So that also allows us to become more mature as an organization. And of course the financial backing makes quite a difference. Of course.
Speaker 3 31:31 Yeah, absolutely. And, um, so how so let's, let's kind of, uh, you know, obviously it's not an exact science here, but, um, if we look at, if we look at the success in particular that you had in 2019, how much would you say that's that's market driven? How much would you say you kind of had to break it down, market driven sort of resource driven because of the acquisition, or kinda know how driven more about, okay, now, now we know what product market fit looks like in these different regions and how to, how to approach it. And we've got our product really dialed in now where we've, we've fully made the shift to, to this B to B, to B C. And, um, so if you kind of looked at those three things, would it, would it be like a third, a third, a third in terms of the impact or, um, is, is one maybe more impactful than others?
Speaker 4 32:22 No, I'll definitely say that, that the knowhow and having such a crystal clean year. So we started in 19 with very, every department had a very clear goal of like, these are going to go, these are our goals, our targets, and, you know, these are the projects going to launch. This is the value proposition we're going to build to these segments. We start working very segment driven, um, and started building up that, that idea that, okay, this is the value proposition for this segment, this segment, this segment, a, B and C. And we started tailoring very much our messaging to those segments and improving all our tooling as well. And so all of that definitely was, was, was a better, bigger piece, like maybe 50, 60% then of course, the market grew really a lot in 2019 was one of the best years for the market that helps no doubt. But those two things I would say are the main ones, but specially the knowhow being sharp and very clear on the year we had the hats that made a massive difference. I can, I can guarantee. Yeah.
Speaker 3 33:21 Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And obviously great knowhow, perfect execution in a market. That's not that exciting. Probably isn't going to get you there very far. So, so it makes sense that you, that you have to have really good market dynamics happening as well. So, so when you listed through what the, what the challenges were, one of the things that you talked about was sort of the, the organizational and team challenges, particularly if we go back to the, the growth that you talked about from when you joined being 10 to 15 people now 600 people. I generally try to jump ship before, before it gets kind of North of a hundred people just cause I know my, my, my ability to add value, um, starts, starts to incrementally drop quite a bit. Once it, once it gets bigger, there's people, who've got a lot more, a lot more experience in those types of companies.
Speaker 3 34:10 But, um, what, uh, one of the things that I found even from, from kind of, you know, start up to a hundred people, is that a lot of times you sort of have your, your team one, your team to your team, three, where some people who are really good in that kind of like sub 20, um, you know, it's super dynamic. They can do a lot of things. You, you start bringing in more and more specialists and those, those people then get marginalized and unhappy. Um, but I think what's great in looking at your history with the company is that you actually have been promoted as the company has grown, um, which, which is pretty unusual, usually like it's, it's the opposite you kind of get, you kind of get buried in the organization. So how has the organization evolved? What is it, what does it look like now in terms of, um, you know, like let's just take the kind of growth side of things. Is there, is there separate growth and marketing teams, um, how to sales fit into that? How does product fit into that? And, um, just, just how, how are you guys organized now?
Speaker 4 35:12 Yeah, so, so that there is a growth department, um, essentially it's composed by the Martin growth team policy, which is interesting and strategy, which is more focused on, on, on developing the industry. So within the market and growth, then of course we have a head of marketing role that is leading a team, which has then a brand experience team focused on, of course, on the, all the content studio advocacy brand experience PR comes in events, which is all the events, press social media, corporate communications. Then you have an acquisition team where all the designers, developers, experiments, advertising seats, product marketing teams is very much focused on product DNA, building a value propositions, value based pricing, competitive analysis. Then we have a channel marketing team, which is all focused on the partners and resellers. So partner marketing account based marketing training support. And then, because it's such a, you know, as you remember from the beginning, such a localized market, still with so many different flavors, but market, we have an international marketing team that has local marketeers more generally.
Speaker 4 36:16 So someone that's focused on the Netherlands, uh, someone focused on in Belgium, not a way U S U S has its own a small team. So that compose the marketing growth team, which has to be quite the high collaborative team with the departments, because at the stage of the company now is into an accountability. So a product marketing team has to heavily work with sales to ensure the value proposition fits what the customers are demanding has to work with product development and operations like supply chain to ensure that the product is launched on time with the right assets. So, you know, the acquisition team has to be very heavily connected with, with the sales teams, ensure that that data is all set up to learn from the data on the website and the experiments run makes sense. So, yeah, so all the teams are connected to each other because it's, it has to be an interconnected company. The interesting part for us is that policy, for example, is a different team, but it's undergrowth. So it's under, also is a team under the growth department because in such an industry policy can play quite a big role. If a lobbyists or policy makers make certain regulations can be really beneficial for us or not for me. So that's an interesting angle that maybe is not so often to seen SAS companies may because it doesn't feed the markets. But
Speaker 3 37:30 Yeah, it sounds more like what Airbnb and Uber like policy has gotta be a big part of their, of their growth initiatives.
Speaker 4 37:36 Exactly. Yeah. So it's part of the growth team. And then there is a team that is being composed now, which is strategy is very much focused, more on strategic initiatives that might be more longer term innovation. And how are we going to set up as a company, looking at the market trends, which also sits under growth. So that's kind of the composition of the team, which means that it's about maybe 45 people, um, from, uh, from me when I joined. So, so it's been a nice growth so far.
Speaker 3 38:05 Yeah. And then as a, as a company overall, like there's so many more moving parts now, how do you, how do you balance between that sort of need for bureaucratic controls? I mean, that's bureaucratic is kind of a pretty loaded word there, but just, just, you know, organization and rules and just ways of making sure that teams can kind of work together and not, not step on each other's toes the whole time too, that, you know, comparing to the scrappiness of the days when there was, you know, 10 or people when you were there. And, and, you know, it was rich really fast. Like you said, you could all sit around a table and eat lunch together and make decisions pretty quickly. What, what are sort of some of the things that you've been able to do to maintain the flexibility, but at the same time, you know, introduce some, some, uh, more guide rails to getting everybody working well together.
Speaker 4 38:55 No, that's, that's a great question and a tough one, to be honest, because balancing that is always a delicate art to do. Um, the way I see it is that in one way, if you want to maintain the startup mindset, entrepreneurial spirit, um, and get it right while doing it fast as well, uh, within the context of the industry, it has to connect back to the vision, mission, purpose values of the organization. We cannot let it, it has to be connected. This is why we are here. This is the problem we are solving. This is how we are trying to solve it. And this is the way we're going to do it and be talked about across the company. When we launched the new values, we w w w once a year, we do a whole gathering with the company. So we bring everyone together.
Speaker 4 39:40 So the last time was in January, brought everyone together, um, the 600 people, and one of the topics in the agenda of that one day of excitement, what is the plan where we are headed? What are our main strategies, one of the condoms like, okay, this is going to be our new values. And then we talked about the values. What do they mean? So that's the way to ensure that the mindset and the culture is there, because then people have permission to play and permission to challenge and say, okay, this process might help us out, but you know, what is the end goal of it? And do we need it now? And do you have to do it all in one goal? So that then that's phase one. And then a second one is that we do need certain process and controls. Of course, we need to structure the organization for a scalable growth, and you cannot do that without doing processes.
Speaker 4 40:24 So that, because the company's getting bigger, someone that joins now needs to know, okay, who does what? So I think it comes to clarity and to be honest and say, we are going to now implement this process, which is going to perhaps slow down a bit of the things, but if you do it well, it will help us scale up faster in six months from now in one year from now. And we'll have to understand that they're going to go through this change and why does it matter? And sometimes to understand that we are going to keep being a foster organization, but we have to start getting more often things right. And things fast. And I think that is a bit of a change with before where we're very much focused on let's get things fast with many times will not be getting things, right.
Speaker 4 41:06 So I think that has to be more of there. And then his experiment mindsets. Um, and it's not just beyond growth and marketing teams, different departments. Everyone has to be empowered to experiment something and to allow to have the scope, to suggest something, to, to be off the books or to be a bit off the process, just to see if he can work better. Yeah. We had all these processes on how to work or what to do work or how to work from home. That all changed because of the current. And no one could predict, so you can have all those processes, but if you don't have this agile way of thinking of saying, okay, I don't know he's going to work. If it's going to work out or not, let's put a scope and let's put an experiment, analyze it, monitor, does it work great. Let's scale it up. And hopefully it becomes its own process. So that's the way I see the balance. Yeah.
Speaker 3 41:54 I love it. No, that's great. I mean, it's definitely all the pieces that I, that I think about, of, of what you need to do to make it work. So, um, you know, definitely the one thing that I think one of the biggest risks when you get bigger is just having very different agendas across, across different, uh, organizational silos that you have, you know, almost separate cultures and a lot of businesses across those silos. And the, hopefully the one thing everyone can agree on is mission and vision and what we're trying to do. And the more people are focused on that, the less they're focused on, on their more narrow parts that they directly affect. And so being able to the fact that you said, you start with that and, and the fact that you realize you have to bring some process in, but you actually take the time to sort of sell that process and explain how that's going to help the company accelerate against the, the vision and the mission of the business. But that the scrappy part is really more of that experimentation mindset and trying to make sure that you can foster that. It seems like you've got kind of the trifecta there. The one thing I didn't hear you talk about with all of that is, um, is this idea of a North star metric? Is that, is that something you guys ever talk about?
Speaker 4 43:11 So in the other day I was thinking about death because I was listening to this, the other podcast. And I was like, we, we have a North star, but I think we never mentioned it is a North star. So when we do the onboarding, one of the main things we say is like, by 2025, we want to have 1 million charging points on the ground. And charging points is our North star. Not because one, one being the most starting points we have on the ground, the more we're going to learn from the behavior of the customers. And the more, the more we see that the industry is growing and we are expanding with it, which because yeah, having a, not start off gross revenue or something, it's a given shouldn't even be, well, my view at all,
Speaker 3 43:52 And revenue tends not to be that inspiring to people, but charging points would be. So that, that sounds like a great North star.
Speaker 4 43:57 Now it's changing because now you're thinking, well, is it enough? So I think now it is not a conversation we've had openly, but we're getting to a point where shouldn't it be connected, starting points because in the past, and there are still some customers that the complexity is a bit too much for now, and they want to have something offline. So you're not, can it be offline? We have to go online because I just want to charge, and I don't want to have all these thinking about, you know, creating the balance, the smart charging balance, or if I want to charge it in the morning or to slow down, if I put everything on in the house, I don't want to deal with that right now. So, so now we, I think, I think we're going to evolve towards not just charging points, being connected, charging points, because that also means that we'll be able to tap into potential new business models, you know, more recurring revenues yet that's where the magic lies. And so I think that will be the net, the North started to follow because it will also push us into entering these IOT data analytics, big data in the future. So I think that will be the next phase. And if you're going to go into that direction, definitely it has to be a conversation that everyone has to connect with.
Speaker 3 45:01 Yep. Well, what I love about that is that it's simple, you know, there's so many that, um, when someone starts thinking like that, they start coming up very big formulas of what the North star metric. It could be this, that, that do this six times a week. And the, you know, and then you ask anyone on the team and they have no idea what the heck the North star metric would be. So, um, it sounds to me like you're not using the word North star metric, but you're using the concept, which is way more important than the word. And, um, and I agree that if you can take charging points to saying, how can we make that even more powerful, connected charging points like that, that, that sounds like you are, it's a really good tool for you to keep people focused on a quantitative way of, of progress against the mission.
Speaker 3 45:46 So, um, that's, that's awesome. I th I think, uh, it's not surprising that growth has not been a, something that weighs you down. It sounds like to me, that, I mean, the fact that you have one of your record years in the last year, um, is it just shows that you're, you guys are finding a really good way of, of, you know, operationalizing the growth of the business to a point where you, where you can maintain a really strong growth trajectory or even accelerate one, which is, which is really rare as you get bigger. I
Speaker 4 46:16 Can hear that. I think one of the most beautiful parts of the journey is that that part of the growth is not even, yeah, I'm heading the department. And of course, like everyone else has an influence, but, but to be fairly honest, the growth at these stages, not even live by me by all the team leaders that were hired five years ago, 40 years ago, three years ago. And it's, that's a beautiful part of things. Things that I thought was an assumptions on my own. Now they are challenging me and proving me wrong. You know, being like, I don't know, in the, in the past, we started very much focused on the products. You will go to the website, you see the products. And there was a period of time, three years ago, we tried to go by segments. So you basically are pushed to say, I'm a workplace, or I'm a business or hospitality or I'm.
Speaker 4 46:59 And that didn't work out from the experiment, you know, people's products. And then I become in my assumption, and now for example, six months ago, the head of acquisition acquisition manager, you know, prove me wrong saying that time changed. People want to go to the segments now. And she proved, you know, with all the sorts of experiments and CTRs that blew my mind that say, now that the market's changed, it's a different world. Now they want to go by segments. So that's the beauty of it. And now, uh, you know, and that's, uh, and you need those fresh minds and team that evolve step up and make the right choices. And because your role becomes much more about coaching delegating and trusting that they will be ahead of the game and the way better at what we are doing, and then you,
Speaker 3 47:41 Right. Which I think is when I touched on that, my, uh, in my experience, I, I try to try to get out when the company hits a hundred employees, um, you know, or, or well, before that. And I think part of it is just as, as you just said, that, um, being able to be able to move beyond, like, being able to empower everyone to approach growth in the right way, as opposed to me being the kind of the puzzle solver. Um, I think I had maybe a hard time letting that go. And so, um, that's awesome that you've been able to, you collectively, the company has been able to create a, a situation and an understanding across that situation where, where everyone starts to, where that growth hat, that experimentation hat that we need to constantly understand the evolving market and adjust to that evolving market.
Speaker 3 48:31 That's a, that's a much more powerful organization longterm in terms of being able to sustain growth. So good for you guys. Um, so, so one, uh, one, uh, I think really good, um, podcasts, you should go back and listen to, if you, if you get a chance, is my conversation with, uh, nylon Paris from TransferWise. Um, I think they've, they've gone through a similar kind of growth rate as you have, and then they're probably a bit even bigger on the employee side. But one of the things that Nealon talks a lot about is, uh, sometimes they grow too quickly and when they grow too quickly, their ability to serve customers starts to go down that just like customer service takes a little longer to get back to people. And just kind of on the edges, the experience gets a little bit worse and their big driver of growth is just, you know, net, net promoter score, just having, having really good customer advocacy.
Speaker 3 49:25 And that customer advocacy of course, is directly dependent on the customer experience. And so, um, just realizing that, uh, you know, as, as you grow, being able to make sure that you grow at a rate where that customer experience can continue to be really strong or even get stronger, that that could be a powerful driver of growth. I'd recommend to, to go back and listen to that podcast if you get a chance. So last thing that I want to do before we wrap up here is just that go through the, the steps of, uh, you know, when you, how you get a new customer and, um, you know, everything from how you get on their radar in the first place to how they become a customer that gets really excited and, and refers to other customers. As I talked about kind of the, the, uh, transfer wise way and, um, sort of the steps in between there what's that typical journey look like. So do you want to take us through that?
Speaker 4 50:19 Yeah, so, so if we exclude these large companies that have tendering processes where you have to formal, you know, to follow this very formal pulses, so let's exclude that one because it's a specific transmitter. Additionally, you know, from an acquisition point of view, they will discover Evie box either through referral referral, word of mouth, um, and B to C here will be more like, I want to install charging stations at my place. You know, they might know all the facility managers or fleet managers or people that decide on the, on the mobility strategy and be like, what do you have on your parking lot? What do you recommend? And they go to, that will be one of the elements referral. The other one, the other one is actually search and pay that's. The search is still a very strong component. And so that's why content still plays an incredible role here for, for us.
Speaker 4 51:05 And, and the last one actually is a very powerful one for us events and trade shows. Funny enough, being offline to a certain extent, they still are incredible lead sources for us to find the right resellers or partners, especially because it's such a visual product, many people and many decision makers want to see it live and they want to experiencing it. And so that will be the most through the acquisition channels. And then if they get there, then they will go through the activation process, which means they ask for a quotation and it looks like an onboarding process of having a pre sales call, a sales call, explain and showcase a product that benefits a platform. It's hard for them to experience value before, before having the charging station, if they drive electric, they will have a bit more of a sense of what it means they experience, but many of the decision makers don't drive electric yet because they are buying into sort of other customers, their own drivers, like, uh, employees, staff, and guests, uh, but you know, they are, you know, we find ways of, for them experiencing it by either seeing the videos, the mood testimonials, inviting them to our offices to see a demo unit.
Speaker 4 52:11 Um, so that's, that's the way to go. And then, you know, when they purchase, they're committed to it and they experienced for the first time, the first charging session is always very exciting. So that's interesting that once there is that first charging session, it's, it's exciting to see all the caddies charging and everything works. Yeah. And afterwards, you know, the, the referral part is a bit hard to be honest, because one, we are not in this BTC. We had avoiding these B to C scheme, but it is important for our partners. So we try to equip and train and do sessions with our resellers to say, Hey, these are good best practices to maybe empower them to build your own marketing strategy. And this is all the collateral methods you can use from us. There were points in time that we say, Hey, we build these white paper.
Speaker 4 52:54 You want to pick up a continent, build your own, be my guests, take it so that we can really help them out white label, even our content that we created so that they can, you know, build that on the referral program from a leadership point of view, we try very much to success stories, you know, trying to build, you know, really good stories of saying, Hey, Unilever, as, you know, a hundred, 150 charging points within your box, this is how they use it. So other large like connect and be like, Oh, if Unilever trusted the box, then let's look into them. So I think that's best way of free photo for now. And then, you know, powered by brand campaigns, press partnerships. And we also create the mobility event, which was, we were the first one, similar to Salesforce with Dreamforce, you know, HubSpot with inbounds. We noticed that there was a gap in the market early on. And we said, okay, let's build something for the industry and really empower everyone to join competitors, partners, industry leaders. So I would say that that will be the last phase. And then the retention engagement is very much on day to day basis with, with reactivation and now very much focused on advocacy.
Speaker 3 53:58 Yeah. But I got to imagine that like, um, like I look up at, um, are you familiar with Peloton? The, I look at something like that where, yeah. I've had a Peloton for, for three or four years already. And, um, I actually got it as a, as a gift from a venture capitalist, but, um, I, even though I didn't make the investment in the hardware myself, I know how much the hardware costs and, and that there's something to a, I, I went months without using it paying, you know, 30, $40 a month. Of course. Now when, when COBIT hit, then I, uh, I was so excited that I still had it and use it much more often, but, um, I think there's something to being able to drive longterm retention when there's a, a hardware investment as well. You're just much more likely to keep paying that recurring software side. Do you see that as well?
Speaker 4 54:54 There's some thing is that, yeah, we, the shutting infrastructure that is in some cases, a very high investment for the business to do the installation and to build up once it's there, it's hard to replace it and you have to do you have a charging management fee. So that gets that this play a role today. Now that what, you know, talking at the beginning with gluten and what it's brought up, is that, okay, today, this is the situation, but the market is going to keep evolving and maybe in the future, this will not be the same situation that customers might be unhappy, might be like, you know what, I'm going to replace the whole infrastructure because I have to delight my customers. Yeah.
Speaker 3 55:29 That's the other thing is that hardware does does age at a certain point and that there becomes newer, more advanced stuff. And, and that maybe, you know, you take like a Tesla supercharger versus something else. Like it's, you can, you could charge really fast with, with some chargers and other chargers take a lot longer. And so, um, there, there, there is a time where maybe the, the upgrade on the hardware would make sense
Speaker 4 55:53 And technology keeps on evolving source so that the customers today might be in one way, but in a few years from now, I can see that some of them will be mannered. I actually want to connect my charging station to the energy management system of my house, my nest daughter, or what I'm using. I want to connect to the battery stores of Tesla, because I want to start the energy. And I want to connect with my solar panels so that I can retrieve the, uh, you know, store the energy of the solar panel and use it to actually the charging station, to be the connector, to the car, to use that power that I read that I, so the customer will become more and more demanding in that sense, which means we definitely have to pay attention to it. And we have to change. We have to keep evolving our way of thinking and, and go more into the direction of delighting and advocacy. And to ensure that we are also connected, not just with the requirements when purchasing, but specially with the requirements when using, because they'll, they'll just, you know, start demanding not to pay, or they'll be reluctant to pay more when new business models come. So, so I think that's something that definitely it is good to be a strong point of attention moving forward it's to ensure that we keep being on the leading front of the industry,
Speaker 3 57:03 Right? It's like the old Andy Grove book of only the paranoid survive that, uh, realizing that you, you know, that, that there is a scenario where turn happens. If you became too comfortable that, Oh, we're hardware, we're never going to need to worry about churn. Then, then things could slip. But if you think through those scenarios where okay, churn could happen, then you're much more likely to make sure that you're doing everything you can to keep customers happy and help them get more value from, from what you've given them. Um, so the last question I'd like to wrap up with is, um, what do you feel like you understand about growth now that you didn't understand, you know, maybe a couple of years ago or, or when you started five years ago, uh, is there one thing that really stands out to you?
Speaker 4 57:46 I could share one thing that will stand out to me and the biggest learning so far is that you cannot copy the strength of a customer relationship. And that was one of the interesting things that we can more and more realization to me, which is the fact that if you have a really strong customer relationship, your referral referrals will come. It will come, will come because then that string will be duplicated and multiplied. If I have a string of a customer relationship, all our competitors can copy the products, software features, but they cannot copy the way we interact with the customer. It's, it's, it's too unique, you know, it's too much outside of the organization. So that's what became clear to me in terms of the growth is that if you focus on continuously, how to strengthen the relationship with the customers, we have chances attitude, you're going to continue finding effective ways to grow and, and then move across the funnel.
Speaker 4 58:43 The editor will balance out between the whole awareness activation that specially start finding the magic in the, in the advocacy and the retention. This is why I'm still excited about, about Evie box and about the, the timer head. You know, I met many people that the draw have small short tenders afterwards because it was the excitement, the way I find excitement, I'm like, okay, I work so much on building the growth, building the whole ecosystem. I'm very excited about debts. There's not much more to do in that aspect, but suddenly you have these, I will not call it funny because it's not an epiphany, but you have this realization. Oh, wow. There's so much to learn on these, on this area of advocacy. And, uh, so, so then I get excited again, what can be done there that will just make us, uh, a delightful company to work with. That's as simple as that, I think there's only one question in my mind these days, it is how easy it is to work with us. And then netbook applies all sorts of thoughts. And that's it for me for the moment. And that's how I understand growth now. And five years ago, definitely not on my mind and even before, but at least not yet. Yeah.
Speaker 3 59:49 Sorry. Yeah. It's interesting. When you were going through that customer journey, you started by saying that, you know, the very first thing you mentioned was a referral is how people discover this product. And then when you kind of took it to the point where, okay, now I've, I've converted a customer to the point where, okay, now how do I get them to refer you? You were like, Oh, we can't really do that. You gave a couple of kind of tactical examples, but I think, I think what you just touched on there is that referral actually happens without you doing anything. If you do everything else, right? Like it's, it's, you know, if they, if, if it's a great solution and they, and they love it, then, then they, they can't help but tell other people about it. Or most of the time, I mean, maybe a few, few category exceptions, but, um, I found that every fast growing company that I've been a part of referral, just natural word of mouth on incentivized untracked.
Speaker 3 00:45 But, but when you actually go and survey customers, how they found out about it, found out about it from a friend or colleague, um, is, is always my number one source of new customers. And that, that loop is a function of doing everything super well in the business. And so that's great that you've honed in on that. And I'm not surprised that, uh, if that's what you're focused on the most, the one real benefit of that too, is that size as you get bigger, I was saying one of the things about, you know, most businesses, they slow down in growth every year, but your growth has, has, you know, obviously with the exception of COVID-19, which every business is going to be effected strangely with that, but taking through through 2019, and even at the beginning of 2020, that the fact that you've actually maintained growth rates or even accelerated growth rates, is I think a largely a function of a really satisfied, happy user base, which gives you two things.
Speaker 3 01:37 It gives you, it gives you this powerful word of mouth engine, but it also gives you feedback and market understanding. If you can tap into that, um, that that becomes another big advantage relative to any of the competitors out there who have, who maybe have much smaller, less engaged customer bases. You talked about people can copy you, but they can't copy what you're going to do. They can only copy what you did before. And what you're going to do is more of a function of how you respond to that feedback from customers. Right. Excellent. Can you put, um, awesome. Well, this has been great. Those were, those were really my key takeaways from this conversation. Um, I, uh, I think that the mission focus that you have is a really one. And I like before, before we jumped on this call, you had talked about being in India and seeing, seeing what really bad air quality can can do to just living less comfortable.
Speaker 3 02:31 And I saw the same thing in Beijing on some trips there, you actually lived in India. And so I'm not surprised that you continue to be motivated by that mission with this business and that you are, you wake up excited every day to, to come back and, and, and make progress on that mission. So that's an enviable position to be in, to have, uh, spent a lot of time to have a lot of success behind you, but have excitement for what you can still do. So I'm excited to see where you go with that. Um, so thank you again for everything that you shared and to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in
Speaker 1 03:02 <inaudible>.
Speaker 2 03:08 Thanks for listening to the breakout growth podcast. Please take a moment to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform, and while you're at it subscribe. So you never miss a show until next week.
