My name is Shep Hickey. We're at Fab Tech 2025 here in Chicago at McCormick Place. I'm here with Evan Uyetake. And Evan, tell me what you do. Yeah. I'm with lead line marketing. So we're not necessarily in the fabrication business, but we actually work directly with manufacturers and oil and gas companies, financial companies. And typically what we find is there's a very specialized product, a very... marketing that could be website. It could be creating a new logo. It could be strategy on the front end, identifying your ideal customer profile, and then implementing strategies, campaigns, and tactics to help you grow the business that way. So we want to get an outcome. We market ourselves as a performance marketing company, so we're very outcomes focused. So what we would do is kind of borrow a term from the legal industry. We do a discovery call, which is digging in a little bit deeper, identifying what your goals are, and then we'll back into the strategy, we'll back into the outcomes from there, and then make recommendations for the kind of campaigns that you should do so that you can reach more customers and get in front of the right kinds of people. Because not everybody has like a Super Bowl budget. They can't spend all that money to get in front of everybody, but they do have some sort of budget that they can allocate towards being everywhere that their ideal customer is. And if you can do that with the right marketing tactics as they are more educated as they climb that education ladder they're that much closer to a sale and so that whole marketing ecosystem that whole strategy is a big part of what we do we're at a big trade show right so there's a lot of people here that are in a specific industry they're specialized the decision -makers are here you can only do that so many times a year and so digital marketing and everything else can help fill in those gaps instead of having those peaks and values with your responses. We want to get you a real consistent growth pattern. Make it predictable. And once we fine -tune it and optimize it throughout the entire campaign, once that campaign ends, hopefully we've earned your business to do another one, and we keep that moving on and build on the learnings that we've gained over those campaigns that we've done. And it just just repeats itself, and we get to grow with you. So it's really fun. We get to help engineers and very technical people take their product and convert it into something that a non -technical person can understand. We really want to push on some of those hot buttons, some of the discomfort that a customer may have and help them say, okay, this product's gonna solve my problem. This product's gonna save me time, it's gonna save me money. And an engineer's gonna be really great at telling you the specs and how great it is, but they're not necessarily good at telling you some of the value that it provides. Exactly. So you want to find that balance, but you need to be able to speak both languages. Okay, I've got like, I'll cap it at 1 ,000 questions here. So it's gonna take a while. Well, but I think about what you're telling me, I've got a lot of questions about marketing, especially as it pertains to B2B. And then if we drill down, you know, I've come up with a concept I'm going to say I coined it, which is this isn't B2B. This is what I'm calling I -to -I, industrial to industrial, which I think is a different beast than B -to -B. It may be a subset segment or perhaps its own segment of supply chains. But where I'm going with that is how'd you get here? Like, how'd you get to, like, okay, we want to be in what I'm calling eye to eye helping these very sort of traditionally sales focused and traditionally product focused businesses pull out like what got them to start in first place yeah what's that what's the origin story why do these people care so but like how did you get there i mean you presumably you were you were a boy at one time and you grew up i'm still a boy that's still working out for me for me. And so did you always have in mind marketing? How'd you get to, how do we get on to marketing and advertise? I think it's more of a finding solutions to problems, being a problem solver, right? That's where you can add value. I started in sales. Sales was just always something that I've done. And then out of college, I got a sales job that I was actually selling marketing. And so the marketing and sales side, I wasn't as passionate about the marketing side, but I was more passionate about like, when you say eye to eye, I was thinking like relational, right? And it's people, right? So first of all, that's really what's going to be like the most important part specifically with business to business or industry to industry is having a relational business because people like to work with people. They like to work with people. They know like and trust. And so I just kind of had a little bit of an act for that. But the marketing side of it was cool because it allowed me to be creative. And so. right yes big risk big rewards and I'd love to get to that point I think someday I will but the whole marketing side of it was coming along the side of business and and showing them a way that they can grow and giving them the tools to do it because a lot of times they've they've found a solution to a problem and it's a problem that they've dealt with and so they figured out how to solve it and then now they go okay I've solved this problem there's probably other people that have this same problem and so now how do we replicate that and part of it is is the Fab Tech side of it, is what's happening is there's an expectation that has shifted. So before you just had to be in business, right, had to be in the yellow pages, had to advertise maybe in the newspaper, put the billboard up, be a part of a trade association, do business on a handshake, right? So that's like probably first generation business. Second generation business is that next generation is coming in and they're saying, okay, if I'm going to do business with this company, they should have a website and I should see them active on social media. They should be a thought leader. They should be educating me on their products. They should be talking about it. They should be relevant in the industry. Well, that expectation was what got us here to Fab Tech because now second and third generation businesses are getting taken over by that next generation. And there's an expectation that you have a website, that you have educational resources, that you have all the tools to explain what it is, they're going to meet you in person, but they're going to say, okay, now I'm going to go do some research on you, and if the research checks out, I'm going to do business to you. If they go to your website and your website hasn't been updated since 2009, and it says it's unsecured and it doesn't work, and there's pictures in there that you can tell were taken, you know, back in the 1950s, well, yeah, it shows that you've had a history, which is important but that might not directly address the problem that they're trying to solve and so they're going to go okay maybe you've done it for a long time but you're not a relevant business to what I'm trying to do now and so what we want to do is we want to help fill those gaps and the other side of it is is there are some companies that have marketing departments now it could be a single person it could be an engineer a senior engineer who's good a problem solving so they've absorbed that role the challenge with that is is I've yet to me a marketing department that's not overloaded or behind on work. So there's always some sort of thing that they need to address first, so they're triaging. They're attacking whatever thing needs to happen next. So hey, we got a trade show in two months, that date's not moving, we're focused on the trade show. Meanwhile, the sales team's like, our brochures have been out of date for the last three years and it's not really connecting with the audience that we're going after. Or we have new products and we're not even talking about them yet. And I got a sales number that I got to hit and I got no tools to go into the marketplace with. And so they're kind of throwing their hands up going, all right, I got to be a squeaky wheel. I got to constantly demand that we get some updated content. So in those different cases, when we come to a show like this, we're talking to business owners or engineers or marketing people that go, yeah, I need a plug -and -play marketing department to where I can handle social media. Like we got that on lock. We're really good at communicating that, but we really need help on SEO. We're not like Google changes all the time, the algorithm's always looking for the rightest, fastest answer. Right. So if we can make sure that we stay relevant with that, that's where the performance marketing comes into play, is constantly fine -tuning that to stay relevant within Google. And now, I don't know if you paid attention to it. If you do a Google search, do you know what's at the top of Google? What's The AI response? The AI response. It's the AI response, right? So now you need to make sure that your website and the content is ranking on the authority score for AI because I know a lot of people that actually will go to chat GPT or GROC to say, tell me everything I need to know about this company, and it'll go search the internet, it'll give you the answer back and it never touches your website. If you're not going to control that or if somebody's like, give me the top three companies that I can buy steel from, right? If you're not talking about those things, chat GPT is not going to even deliver you as a result. We want to make sure that you're a part of that, and that's where the AI is going to start coming into the marketing. So all those different pieces right now, the expectations rising, the more that AI becomes prevalent in everybody's industry, you need to make sure that you're checking all those boxes Because what's going to happen is you're going to start to fall further and further down, and they're never going to come across you. So let me ask you this, which is supply chain dynamics are interesting, like the relationship that exists between buyers and sellers. Right. And it's an old relationship. And I don't mean like, like, you know, old ways now, I just mean these are old relationships. Yeah. And that dynamic of how a buyer is going to behave and how a seller is going to behave. And what I'm seeing right now is that the buyers are increasingly having a voice because of way information is being served up and that sellers are increasingly have to make sure that they're there. And so when you go to a seller, or maybe when a seller is contracted, say, hey, we feel like we have an optimized on a marketing or advertising side of things. that I think's really going to resonate. And so if you've had this, I mean, and that's happy news, you know, when you're in marketing to say, hey, there's this whole other piece. We're not even doing yet. Are you finding the distributors or whomever are receptive to this idea of like, we've been saying this for a long time. And you're kind of wanting us to either add, bolt this on with that message or come over to this message because there's a risk in doing those because we got our steady Freddie business and you're saying so what what's their reception sort of like once you've done have you ever read the book who moved my cheese are you familiar with that no it's uh it's like a real short book i can't remember the name of the author um but it's called who moved my cheese and basically it's the exact situation you're describing these these mice human eyed mice they mice, they go to the same spot over and over, there's always cheese there. Well, one day they go to that spot and the cheese's not there anymore. So they start searching around and start trying to figure out where it is and they completely have to change everything. And eventually they find the cheese again, but they find that the cheese keeps moving. And so that's kind of a picture of what you're talking about where it's like, hey, we have a tried and true way that we've done business. And this is exactly what's worked. We don't need to change anything, because it's worked for the last 50 years. And I totally respect that. And if that continues to work for you, it's great. But what happens is you start to see attrition, right? So maybe whoever the buyer was at the previous company, he's moved to someplace else. So the new buyer's coming, he's got more comfort with another company. And he goes to see who you are as a company. He's like, well, you know, they seem great or whatever, but this other company over here has more enhanced tools and I got a better relationship with him or they're doing a lot of educational stuff or they come visit me in person or whatever that may be well eventually what's going to happen is you're just going to see a natural decline in your business and really as a business leader you need to pretty much stay in tune with what's going on and if you're seeing that your numbers are starting to dwindle you got to start asking yourself why and if you're not willing to take a look at the tried and true this is the thing way we've always done business kind kind of deal, the challenge what's going to happen is that business will go away. I think it was Will Rogers that said, even if you're on the right track, you can get hit by a train if you're not going anywhere. And so you constantly have to be moving with that business. You caught it. If you're not growing, you're dying. And so in some cases, that expectation is changing. The industry is changing. Everything's growing with it. And up until, you know, probably five, ten years ago, you could have a website that you built one time and you never touched it again. Right. But with paid search, SEO, you know, everything's changing. And there's an expectation that you're relevant with all those different things. I mean, the fact that you have a podcast is probably a little bit considered cutting edge right now. But in the grand scheme of things, it's education, it's networking it's expanding your reach all across different platforms you're going to be a part of you know my audience I'm a part of your audience now and so that network and that net's going to get a lot wider and so when you have that in your toolbox you're going to see yourself grow as a business as opposed to if you didn't do that now you're trying true business you might have that steady growth right you're growing 5 10 % every single year you're happy with that that's great but Every time, I've been in sales a long time, nobody wants to have steady growth. Everyone wants that hockey steak. It's like, hey, whatever we did last year, that's not good enough for this year. So we gotta, we gotta figure out a way to grow it. And just doing the bare minimum is not gonna hit that number. You can have a really good salesperson. Like, I like to think of myself as a really good salesperson, but I can be a great salesperson if I have really good, effective marketing that's just going over the top, it's selling while I'm sleeping. Have you ever heard of the term of marketing ladder? Tell me about that. So marketing ladder is, think of it as education, right? So every rung of that letter, every point of contact that you have with somebody, they're climbing closer and closer to a sale. So the most educated customer is gonna come to you and say, I wanna buy your system. You didn't have to sell them anything. It's because your marketing did all of that work. Okay. Now in some cases, the salespeople get a lot of credit for it, right? Because if the marketing's doing its job, all of a sudden, sales is closing a lot more and sales go, well, it's because we're great salespeople. If you're happy with where you're at, my message isn't gonna resonate with you, but whenever your discontent gets to the point where you're like, you know, I'm not happy that our business keeps shrinking and it's a slow state of decline, it's probably because it's time to change. It's time to expand what you're currently doing and go a little bit bigger than you've currently done in the past, but that's the expectation now. My times of greatest worry is when things are going well. Yeah, good is the me agree you know and is I'm always waiting for that other shoe to drop right and you know the paranoid survive and that or all that sort of stuff but I find it and this is I think common knowledge but sometimes contextually speaking it can be hard to yeah to say it to yourself or to oneself which is you know I don't want to wait till there's a them to react to my problem, you know, and that's, I think that's a lot of the job. And one thing I've commented on is, you know, over the years, people, as we've done Brizos, you know, we've talked to all kinds of people that are outside the industry, that it will be like, you know, metals industry does not adopt technology. Yeah. And I think this ties into marketing as well, which is when you're in this industry, I say they do adopt technology, but they're highly discerning about which technologies are adopted. - That's a great word. And what I mean is, is that when I was in distribution, we had vendors of various things, like software, like ERP systems or, you know, saws or profiling machines, all sorts of things that we had an opportunity to invest in. Yeah. And what it comes down to is dollar for dollar. So if you have a machine, like if you think about your business, it's like, I've got a dollar and I can make an investment. When I put that dollar in, how many can come out the other side? Exactly. And that's, you're trying to set up these operational machines that can just create return for your business. And I think one of the hurdles for marketing in the industry is that that line between their investment and the return on that investment has not been drawn as brightly as the line that gets drawn between buying a new saw to increase capacity and more revenue or higher profitability. So I think that it's a of discernment of like what was the highest and best use of this dollar and you know I've you know I believe in marketing and you know and I think there's a right and wrong way to do it in different places yeah in my experience was you know we do Google things and all that stuff and you I think you can almost say in certain contexts those are necessary evils and that's not the fun part of marketing yeah that's like you got to have those boxes checked part of marketing yeah so do you are Do you find? describing is a good problem to have because if you have the ability to add capacity and increase your sales with that then yeah keep you know obviously invest that marketing dollar because that means people already know about you you've already got a demand that's really limited limited by your capacity as opposed to the reach or the amount of customers you have the only thing that I would say to that is depending on how specialized you get or how limited the amount of customers you have, you also become very dependent on those customers. And so the challenge with that is, is if that customer goes away at some point, now you've heavily invested in equipment, now you've heavily invested in capacity, and you don't have a buyer in you. So diversification is a big part of that. And so I think that's where the discernment would come in. It's like, okay, how great of a relationship do we have with our current business and I mean take COVID as an example right when COVID hit there's industries that were drastically impacted by it that maybe survived because of diversification or they had to diversify because of COVID and but they're behind the eight ball and so yes if you have that capacity you have that ability by all means yeah invest those those market those not what I guess would be marketing dollars in that but I would still always allocate some form of your budget towards marketing because that's where your next sales is going to come from that's where your diversification is going to come from so marketing doesn't need to be like a massive spend in terms of what you do especially if you have a very strategic use of that and you're discerning in what's going to be the best use of your marketing funds if you have a good VP of marketing marketing director or somebody has that kind of experience, they can really help you guide you through that. And then the beautiful thing about us is we're like a plug and play marketing department. So instead of you going and hiring somebody who's really good at SEO and paying them salary, paying taxes, paying benefits, all they do is social media marketing or all they do is SEO, you could essentially use a third party company, kind of like what, I'm sure you've heard of like fractional roles, like fractional CMO or fractional COO, use us as something like that where it's like, hey, we have a campaign that we need to do, we have a new product that we're launching, let's get that marketing out for that specific thing, and maybe you can take it over from there. Like if we redo your website, we can redo your website in such a way that you can maintain your website instead of me having to do every single thing for you. And so if you - So that, okay, So that's really important stuff. And I think it's super relevant because I'm talking about the idea of we just bought a new soft. Great. How are people going to know? Nobody's going to know about it. So then it brings me to another question, which is, you know, cost of our customer acquisition cost. Yeah. And then the lifetime value of that customer. And it comes down to also with these companies that are thinking capacity and utilization capacity, are they seeking increased wallet share from existing customers? And they aren't necessarily talking about bringing on new customers. Because that is, for many businesses, there's nothing worse than making one sale to one customer. Right, yeah. Filling the leaking bucket. Yeah, yeah. And so is the capacity being brought on for these other value -ad services, And just to get more wallet share, in which case that salesperson could very easily just say, hey, I just want you to know we can also cut up to 24 -inch OD or whatever like that. So I think that there's a lot in there as far as the discovery to me is so important. Because with all things, if you don't really understand understand that I'm gonna say problem I don't know if it's a problem but the impetus for you being there if you can't really uncover that and say it in a sentence yeah then you shouldn't begin whatever is next yeah you know what I mean but what you're talking about I think is really a great model for the industry which is we want to flex up for a bit on marketing. We want to flex up and get our website. We want to get Google analytics working correctly so we can target correctly and all that sort of stuff. So I love the model of what you guys happens. I think it's really, and I think most times it'll lead to, hey, that was a good experience. How do we keep going? Exactly. And, and, you know, what's the maintenance program look like? And that's when you say, that is not really, We're always have to be advancing. It's not maybe necessary maintenance program. So what do you do as your group when you guys have done your job well and they're like, hey, we want to keep rolling. Is there the option of like, hey, we're going to set you up, we can help you find basically headhunt, get you some people that you need? Or you can kind of, we're just going to stay in touch and keep going. Yeah, so typically what happens, We'll do that pre -quote discovery on the front end, which is trying to uncover those objectives that you're trying to reach. And then we'll make recommendations on how we'll do that. Historically speaking, we're going to first solve whatever your biggest need is. Because that's going to get you the opportunity to work with us. That's going to get you in the door to where you're familiar with who we are or what we do. If I come in with everything, you're going to be like, all right, this is way more than I thought I wanted. I'm overwhelmed. I don't want to touch it now. So we don't want to necessarily do that, even though it's helpful to give you that full picture. And we'll do that if you want. But what we'll typically do is we'll basically say, all right, based on our conversation, based on the audience that you're trying to reach, the industries, all those different things, here's our recommendation, what you should do. And then usually at the end of the quote, we'll make one or two additional future recommendations. And those are going to be like, hey, all right, This is phase one. Let's get all the way through. And then phase two, you should start considering these things. Typically, once we've gone all the way through the campaign, that's what the phase two conversation will happen. It's like, all right, do you want to keep doing this or do you want to maybe add an additional piece to that? And that's going to help you take that next step to a full -blown marketing ecosystem. When you get that marketing ecosystem in place, the beautiful thing about that is it becomes You go, I'm spending this amount of money, that dollar in, and what's the output? And CFOs love us, because once we have that whole piece in place, through our analytics, through our performance optimization, and our reporting back to you, we actually hold ourselves accountable to your results. We'll actually go, okay, based on what we're seeing right now, you're at, you know, X in, Y out, but we're seeing a couple of different channels that are responding really well and you're in control of your ad spend so that that could be your paid search your paid keywords your paid social whatever if we're seeing a trend that is responding well people that are listening when you're saying ad spend you're talking about if a company wants to rank or come up as a first page result on a Google search or how they so you guys put a plan in action and it is a channel test yeah which is you know okay we're gonna cast these five things out into the world right and we'll be on we're going to hired marketing yeah one of the things can be difficult is to get that company to carve out the time to make the marketing more and for example you said something like earlier like thought leader yeah so you could do at beginning somebody who is a lot of companies are probably maybe understaff versus over staff right and like hey I really need you to like even proofread what our ghost rider wrote or we need you to so how how do you get that done because that's that's a tough part and I think it's really worth it to push that company through like I know it's a new thing for you but yeah how do you work with that yeah so I feel like we're maybe touching a little close to home right now so the the the important part about that is and you you totally are I mean this is something that that we've that we've hired marketing companies in the past, and much of it's driving our marketing right now is we've integrated into our business, meaning that we have, like, our work environment is a marketing system. So I was like, we can't carve out time to explicitly market. So we, like our office is cameras. It is like a set. And so we can constantly be creating content Because I was being asked to, like, hey, will you write this or we do that? And I'm just like, I would love to. But competing priorities, this isn't, in marketing, it's the shaft a lot. It just does. And it's too bad because you can, you know, talk about like real estate, something where everyone understands. You can build the most kick -ass house you want. But if nobody knows about it, exactly, you know so how do you work like how how might somebody like me who who is doing what is really the right thing for my business but doesn't how do you get me to carve out the time well part of your vetting process i charge you a lot of money now you feel like you have to spend the time to do it no i'm just kidding fair enough some of some of that is is like you basically identified right off the bat hey this is a priority so i brought on a third point it's kind of like hiring a trainer at the gym right you can go work out at the gym but when you're paying somebody to do it you're taking a little bit more seriously the other thing I would do say is that this is kind of like a you know a little bit of a hack but you know if you if you got paid AI through chat gpti like you can actually teach chat gpt to create content for you you can say hey like this is my voice and this is what we talk about this are our products and everything else you got to be smart like don't use the pre version because now you're essentially feeding AI But if you have the ability to really contain it within your system, you can say, hey, I need to create a short, two -minute video about this, and here's what I want to talk about, knowing what you know about me, write that script. And so that can create some of the content, and then you basically spend a little bit of time tweaking it, personalizing, making your own. And so you can, in some capacity, accelerate that process so you're not spending as much time in the creative part. The other side of that is hiring technical writers or hiring a creative director. And what they're going to do is they're going to specialize in that specific kind of industry, the knowledge base and whatever else. What I really like about us having an in -house creative director is I've been in situations where I'm like, we need to update our photos or we want to do like a two -minute brain video and we just want to talk about our company. Well, if I just hire a videographer, he's going to come in and expect you to know what to say right so he's going to say hey you're the owner of the company rolling tape yeah we're going to we're going to start recording and just just do your thing we'll edit it all together well the creative director is going to approach that a little differently the creative director is going to dig in they're going to do the research they're going to identify with you and uncover what are the hot points what are the hot buttons like what's the message that you really want to communicate what's the parts of your system you want to highlight, what are the things that you want to show? And they're going to help craft that narrative. So they're going to tell you, all right, we're going to storyboard this out. This is what we're going to do. Before we even start recording, we're going to know exactly what we're going to capture. And we're going to say, I want you to talk about this. And you'll go, okay, no problem. As opposed to start talking. And so the post -production on that, it's a nightmare, by the way. Exactly. Exactly. So if you go in there with a plan and you have that creative director and that team on the front end that does a lot of that work for you, it doesn't become such a time suck for you because you can basically say, all right, I'm just going to talk about these things. I already know what I'm going to talk about because we've already, you know, prioritize that. And so you're not dreading the interview. You just go in and go, okay, now I'm going to start talking about how my system's going to save you time. Now I'm going to start talking about, you know, how beautiful our system is and how easy it is to navigate. You're going to go into all those different things and they're going to merge it all together and make it really flow and capture that within two minutes because you get 45 minutes of content i'm sure but then how do you know what part to trim out and what to really you know hit hit on the high so for those who who are listening to this like what would be like a litmus test for them to be like yeah we're probably good candidates for that like okay go look at your website yeah you know, go look you're going to, like, what are things they can evaluate themselves to be like, or is that just something they probably know it? You know, they're probably, they probably already have people that know the answer to that, and they're the guys in the field. The guys in the field are the ones that are doing the actual interactions with the customer. They're the ones that know what the hot buttons are for the customer. They know what the needs are for the customer. And so a lot of times, when I see like a sales and marketing team that works really well together, the marketing resonates with the customer. When you have marketing over here and you have sales over here, marketing's doing what the brand wants, sales is doing what's going to get them the actual sale. So they're going to talk about this and they're going to say, don't go to our website because our website's not going to tell you what you need to know and call me and stay, right? And so when you have that what's happening is your marketing is not helping your sales team and your sales team doesn't want to use your marketing because your marketing is not speaking to the problem that's actually resonating with the customer can i fairly say that you need to have your air support supporting where the ground support where the ground is absolutely right if you do an air support your team's over here that's not doing any good right so it that's that's sort of like you know people love selling you know from st louis people love selling anheiser bush because i know that during the football game. job one. Like you can't have a fancy car that doesn't start. Right. You know, but you walked up, it immediately started commenting on the styling of that. And I wanted to know what caught you about it. Oh, okay. Well, I think part of it is in marketing specifically. And this is, these are just things that I notice. I'll see really technical company, when it comes to a website, really, or applications, really technical applications that actually work really, really well, but they're not intuitive. And I'll see the other side, applications that are designed really well, but they don't work. And so when you find somebody specifically for me, it was I built an internal system at one of my old companies, and my designer was actually good at both. And what I found was over time that that is a rarity. That's not somebody who's creative and technical. And so anytime I see something like that where it merges together and there's, it's intuitive. The litmus test for me is if my mom could use it, then I believe anybody can use it. So you really have it to where they're naturally going. Like Apple does a great job of it, right? Like natural motions and natural things are the gestures that they integrate to the technology. And it's a design, it's a forethought, it's digging a little deeper. You told me that your website or your application is built around like an email browser because that's what people are used to. So when I saw that, I was like, oh, that makes perfect sense because it has a natural flow out of stair steps in terms of where the menus are and where you're getting your information, where your eye naturally goes. And so once somebody gets that and they're able to use it easily and quickly, Well, guess what? Implementation and acceptance of that application is going to go through the roof and instead of them doing a trial with you, that's going to become the predominant technology in their actual company, as opposed to, well, it's a nice technology. It looks great, but it doesn't really work. So let's just go back to our old system because I know that our old system works, and I really don't have a ton of time. I used to work with some other companies in the past, and they would recognize that my product was better, but they wouldn't implement it because it was gonna take too much time. So if you can shorten that gap, and specifically for the decision maker, they can see that it's intuitive and implementation will take that long, they're more likely to say yes. Instead of, I might be losing business because I'm not able to quote jobs because I gotta train everybody to use your system. And so if you can really demonstrate that through the education through the actual demos that you do here then a business decision maker will go that's an easy switch for us yeah let's go ahead and do that with it the goal the intent was a demo list app yeah right which is that anybody who spends any time in any sort of email email client yeah like should so like oh left or right Got it. It's not a big deal. And what you just said about, oh, we're losing sales because of the system we've integrated. You know, I've been a party to ERP implementations in the past, but you said it's absolutely real. Right. Because the ERPs of the past, you know, whenever you've created these systems, you've got to walk the fence line between rigid and flexible. How easily can you overwrite a part number or do you have to go have a new one put in the library? So a sales. And part of also what our goal has been is this idea that the metals industry supply chains are kind of rusty, dusty, as I say. And there's this real issue, which is the retainment of talent or just attracting talent into these industries. And I remember I said, I was like, I want to create a piece of software software that's so kick -ass that people are leaving their current industry because they just heard about what was being created over the metals industry because if you pair that up with okay we're in this hall i see robotic arms i see shit everywhere that's like highly technical yeah but what's the interface to the industry look like yeah and it's on like dot matrix printers and you're just sitting there going I can't believe they're still running their business on there, but for them, it works, right? But then they got all these patches and cables, and they're like, at some point, our technology because so antiquated that we actually might go out of business. So there will be a point where it does naturally shift, but if you can create an environment where they go, okay, I can see where I can implement this quickly, they're more quickly to adopt, and then you add value on top of that, right? I'm saving you money. I'm saving you time, doing all those You just, it's that marketing ladder. You get that much closer to it, yes. All right, so let me ask you in closing a couple of questions. And just as best as you can, which is repeat for us again, kind of the buffet or menu items for your company. I want you to say your company name again. And I'd like to know how people can find you. Yeah, so leadline marketing. It's just leadlinemarketing .com. Think of us as a full -service ad agency, but that's website design, paid search, SEO, video, you know, photography, content creation, business analytics on the front end, business analysis. What I really want you to walk away with is performance marketing. You want marketing that's going to perform for you. It's going to get you to the objectives that you want, and you want a company that's going to partner with you that's going to optimize that along the way, and it's going to be in such a way that your decision makers all the way to your sales team understand the who the why the what what's happening where those marketing dollars are going and the return that's happening from that so that's what we do it's it ties into everything that we're talking about here today because again it's business people talking to business people they need to understand the marketing that's out there the opportunity that they have and the lifetime value of that customer because I'll say to some people, like, hey, I'm not going to be the cheapest guy. I'm not going to be the most expensive guy. But I will ask you to spend a decent amount of money. But if that decent amount of money, if you know that the return is going to be much greater than the amount that you put in, a CFO is going to go, yeah, let's do that. Because I've seen the marketing ecosystem work. I understand how it goes. And as we're able to build that with you, you're going to get to the point where it's like, all right, we can really set the pace of what we want to grow and as a direct or indirect result of that I get to grow as a company too and I get to see their success with you we get to be more successful I get to hire more people we get to create more jobs man it's it's all the different pieces that makes me great it wouldn't be great to not to think about marketing it would be fantastic yeah let us do that for you like the idea of you if you might think we're expensive way to add up the cost of using someone else yeah it's the opportunity cost for sure yeah so oh Anyway, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today. I really appreciate it. It's good catching up. Yeah, thank you.