"The idea was a slightly outrageous and somewhat counter-cultural one. New Zealand was known for great wines, and we’d increased our clout when it came to craft beers, but until SKYY emerged on the scene, other regions – namely Eastern Europe – had dominion over top-shelf spirits. Geoff figured that wine had already opened doors around the world as far as the market for Kiwi-made beverages went. Maybe he could piggyback on that with vodka? He also sensed that cocktail culture – which had thrived in the 1960s – was, by now, due a comeback. Some friends in Wellington had been making a tasty drink with vodka, cranberry, and grapefruit called a ‘Sea Breeze’; they, and many others in their crowd, were less content to just slum it with a pint. The rise of design and fashion was signalling a shift, and vodka could mix easily with almost any flavour, making it the ideal accessory. New Zealand was catching up with the rest of the world. When I met Geoff, he was lacking capital. He’d put a lot into his start-up already, but he needed investment to grow. After his explosive start, he’d found a guy with a chemistry degree and the right gear to make the vodka for him, but he still couldn’t do that to any sort of scale. He was selling just a few cases here and there to friends and the odd local bar. His move to Auckland was an attempt to increase the reach of 42 Below beyond Wellington. He wanted to be able to increase what he was making and improve his margins, but he didn’t yet have really grandiose dreams. ‘I think we could do five hundred cases a year,’ he told me with enthusiasm. It was then that I uttered a response that didn’t seem super significant at the time but would come to be a cornerstone sentiment of my journey from then on. I simply looked at him, a bit disdainfully, and said, ‘Why don’t you get a real goal?’ After most of my career had been spent surrounded by audacious thinkers, who both asked for and expected to see somewhat outrageous outcomes, I had started thinking much bigger too. While for Geoff it started as a passion project, for me it had to make a hell of a lot of money to be worth doing. ‘Are you serious?’ I went on to ask Geoff, not unkindly. ‘Why would we invest in something based on those numbers?’ It might have…"
New Zealand serial entrepreneur who built and exited businesses across office products, telecommunications, electricity retail, and spirits — from Blue Star ($1B turnover) to Empower (150,000 customers, $26M exit) to 42 Below vodka (NZX-listed, sold to Bacardi) — through relentless sales instinct and audacious goal-setting.
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"Until that point, people would go to a third-party financier, like Fisher & Paykel Finance or someone similar, to rent this equipment. I understood, though, from my previous experience at General Finance, and at Xerox where everything was done on finance, just how much profit there was in the finance game. We were keen to retain that profit ourselves, instead of passing it on to third parties. In starting our own finance book, we were able to increase the value of our receivables considerably. So, instead of putting a customer on a casual contract that paid $80 a month for a piece of equipment, as an example, we could put them on a three-year contract paying just $50 a month. It was a win for them, and the guaranteed term made that item worth $1,800 to us. Our asset had just become much, much more valuable. Such was the power of what someone had agreed to pay for it over time. It gave us leverage that we could borrow against. Not only that, but we also had thousands of newly acquired pieces of equipment we could do this with, and because we owned all of the equipment now, too, we could do this almost indefinitely. We grew that finance book to $100 million in receivables. This was the making of the Blue Star business, in many ways. It was the genius in the deal that no one else had thought of. The others who were bidding for the Telecom business against us had been thinking in basic and more linear terms. We were thinking in leveraged terms – about the ability we would have to turn the assets we were buying into something worth much more. Fundamentally, we were thinking bigger and doing things better."
"But equally, successful people say no often too. At least, that’s according to Warren Buffet. Just because an idea is interesting doesn’t mean it’ll be successful, especially if the odds – contracted or otherwise – aren’t in your favour. Sometimes it’s better to walk away. But fast-forward six months, and the power guys came back. They’d been making a further go at things in the meantime but hadn’t secured another investor, so the lawyer member of the pair called up to ask whether there was any chance at all that I was still interested. ‘I suppose there’s always a deal,’ I answered, before adding, ‘I’d do it if you’d give us half of it for nothing.’ The guy was silent for a minute, thinking, before he simply said, ‘Keep talking.’ So, I did – all the while thinking, Oh hello, we’re on here, with surprise. I outlined what I thought would be good terms: They would hand 50 percent of the company over to us, and we would fund it from there – putting in the working capital required to run the business. Plus, we would retain the option to buy another 26 percent of the company later, if things went well. I was futureproofing with that last clause. I knew that if we had more than 75 percent of the company, we had a stronger position and more control. We wouldn’t then need to ask minor shareholders to vote on special…"
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“This was a huge deal. The government believed that going private would introduce market competition and therefore reduce costs and improve quality for Kiwis. It would also encourage foreign investment, the theory went, and free up some of the government’s cash flow. But it would also lead to job losses and loss of government control over a massive asset. The controversy had sparked debate for months.”
“So, despite the fact that we were about to bring a baby into the world, I resigned from Telecom; sold our townhouse in Takapuna, a block of flats in Hamilton, and my Jag; and invested all we had into this new move. Blue Star was turning over $12 million at that point, and my investment bought me seven percent of the company. It took me a while to realise my misstep. Eric had put it on a hugely inflated valuation, which meant I had massively overpaid. That was my fault, not his. In my naivety, I didn’t know better, nor did I do enough due diligence. Now it was too late. I was properly invested. You might have heard this old story about Julius Caesar. Having arrived on the island of what is now England, he and his men were confronted by an army of the local Celts. He told his men to burn their own boats. It meant that they had no chance to retreat. Make it work, or die. Those were the options. Selling my Jag and our home was very much burning my boats. I was committed now. I had to make the money back, because there was no fallback.”
“When the guy saw me, he was understandably grumpy. ‘What are you doing back here? I’ve already told you to bugger off,’ he barked at me, before turning his back and returning to what he was doing. I had no commercial nous, but I thought back to that photocopied and crumpled ‘15 ways’ sheet. Dumb and desperate, I reached for every tool in the toolkit and tried them all, and with no sophistication in sight. There was the ‘Ben Franklin close’, where you list out the pros and cons for your prospect. There was the ‘puppy dog close’ that car dealers try with their offer to take the vehicle away and bring it back on Monday, by which time you’re attached and want to keep it. There was the ‘assumptive close’ (‘How would you like to pay?’). There was the ‘choice close’ (‘Would you like the ad to run this weekend or next?’). I blindly and blithely tried them all. Barry had said that the best salespeople ask for an order seven times before they give up – yet I feel like I was met with many more painstaking rebuffs than that on this torturous afternoon. But still, I kept getting back up. I even tried a transparently weak empathy close – with the age-old ‘feel, felt, found’ trifecta: ‘I know how you feel. Just last month I was talking to your opposition, and they felt the same way. But after they ran an ad, they found their sales increased by 10 percent …’”
“Eric’s influence definitely made me more audacious. It’s amazing what people can do that they think they can’t. Most people don’t test themselves, especially in a business sense. Sure, we might challenge ourselves physically, but rarely do we push ourselves intellectually or commercially in the way we ought to. Failure is somewhat expected in the gym, for example, but not really accepted in business or when you put a big idea out there. It doesn’t help that business culture in New Zealand is pretty unforgiving. If you make a mess of something, you’re often written off. And everyone seems to know everyone, so negative opinions tend to travel fast and far. In the US, if you haven’t gone broke at least once, you’re not seen as trying hard enough. The difference in attitude is stark. Here, if you fail, you’re a failure forever. And even if you succeed, they’ll hate you anyway. That mindset is something I had to overcome to keep pushing forward over the years. I was largely subscribing to the saying that I had grown up with, some variation of, ‘If you believe you can, you’re right – and if you believe you can’t, you’re also right.’ Belief was a big part of what kept me going. But in that moment, the threat of permanent damage from failure was very real. Our strategy revolved around acquisitions and consolidating the office supply area. Until that time, corner stores had been the model across the world, until OfficeMax had gone out across the States and hoovered up the smaller players into its megastores. That was the idea that we were trying to emulate here in New Zealand.”
“Not long after I met Grant Baker he invited me and my wife Jussie to his house for a party. We weren’t exactly fellow guests – we were there to make and serve cocktails. Grant and Donna had successfully exited their business, Empower, and wanted to put on a party for their friends. They are not big party people and nor are they drinkers. However, as Grant was considering investing in a vodka business we had started, he thought a little due diligence on the vodka and cocktails – and, I guess, my wife and I – was required.”
“We made a selection of cocktails and served their friends in their huge house. It was a really nice evening with good people. Driving home that night to our small cottage on my parents’ farm – all we could afford at the time – I asked Jussie if we should accept Grant’s offer. After a pause she said something like: ‘His friends are from way back – from his early Hamilton days. They are great people, people who were his friends when he had nothing, people who are still his friends now. That says something. It says he is a good person. I think we should say yes.’”
“His tense Monday morning sales meetings with our small team – where each person outlined their target for the week, before reporting back on Friday afternoon (by which time you sure as hell better have hit your numbers) – were working. Grant and his investment partner, Steve Sinclair, had pushed for a better margin by being harder on costs and also putting up the price. This was building a respectable margin.”
“Grant then bought me the concept that we should list 42 Below on the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX). This was a crazy, audacious idea for such a small, loss-making business. But it was also something neither of us had done before and, in many ways, it was that process that brought us together. We outlined the vision for this little challenger brand from New Zealand so that people would back it. That created much-needed growth capital and the ability to enter offshore markets. There was no better example of ‘brand’ creating value. And there was certainly no better example of the bold vision Grant brings to business, which also creates value.”
“when I first outlined my future for 42 Below to Grant, he said I should get a ‘proper goal’. It was this proper goal in listing that took us to a successful exit for all investors, in just under three years from that point.”
“Grant and I were very different personalities but, by this time, his bold vision had taken hold of me and we just got on with it and worked to our strengths. We came to respect what each other did. This included Steve, who had worked with Grant previously and was the financial backbone to many of his businesses. Post-42 Below, the three of us would go on to found The Business Bakery – investing in and building businesses such as The Hyperfactory, Ecoya, and Trilogy.”
“Today I often get asked for advice for entrepreneurs and, often, one of the first things I say is: ‘Get a proper goal.’ The many lessons I learnt from Grant I try to pass on to others.”
“It was him who brought the idea of listing 42 Below, him who had the outrageous idea of buying a finance company in the global financial crisis (GFC) – a move I went along with but now wish I had put as much into as Grant did.”
“While talent, hard work, and good connections are necessary, over my five decades in business, I’ve come to see that financial success is more about mindset and opportunity than sheer effort. If you’ve got the will, then you can find the way, and you can ultimately do anything.”
“There’s no one industry that’s better or worse than another. Success is about having the mindset to spot opportunities and leverage them to get where you want to go. Anyone who’s been in business knows that it’s not a game of certainty. But it is a game of decisions, persistence, and drive, and zigging when others zag. I’ve learnt that the hard way. Sometimes the very hard way. I’ve grown, lost, and re-earned my wealth.”
“I’ve turned struggling companies around. And I’ve been able to live the kind of life I want.”
“I learnt about high-pressure sales and measurable goals with Xerox. I moved to Papua New Guinea to try to overcome dire financial straits. I took the leap into entrepreneurship with Blue Star and Empower. Then we head towards the iconic 42 Below, and my dealings with cancer that happened around the same time. And as we get to more recent years, I focus on The Business Bakery, Trilogy, Turners, and more recent adventures, such as sponsoring Liam Lawson in motorsport.”
“If there’s one other thing that ties these stories together, it’s dreaming big and doing crazy. We don’t always think as ambitiously or as out-of-the-gate as we could. And even if we do think big, we don’t always follow through. A great, mad, brilliant What if? isn’t always followed by a driven, excited And what will we have to do differently to get there? But what if it were?”
“let’s all start dreaming impossible dreams and going after them.”
“Before I turned five, my parents had bought their second property – an old, rundown place in Parnell that they set to work renovating while we rented out what had been our home in Māngere. They didn’t stop there either; this was just the first step towards a property portfolio that saw them ending up with 50 houses some decades on.”
“That’s what work became for me: earning to fuel my lifestyle. I didn’t want to work, but anything I could do, and do well, that would set me up for the next adventure would suit me. So, I doubled down, and worked hard. My after-school cleaning job paid just $20 a week, so it wasn’t quick, but in the holidays, I would work on the dairy farm next door to where we lived, milking and haymaking.”
“I hated hard work but was resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to get anywhere without it. So, there was that, and the fact that I was always motivated by the potential of something better to drive. That followed me into the last few years of my teens and into my early twenties, when I was still figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.”
“Work, and later, business, was the enabler of doing more of what I loved.”
“Barry understood sales, and he laid it out for me in training. The basic premise of our approach started with a cold call, during which I effectively had to convince someone to let me come and see them, without saying where I was from or what I was coming for. ‘It’s something I can’t talk about, but it could be incredibly advantageous to you’ was the party line. If I said I was ringing from the paper, nobody wanted to talk to me. Being vague didn’t fare much better, but amazingly this approach did get past some people. Once we’d secured an appointment, we would set to work mocking up an ad for the business we were visiting – a dummy visual designed to tempt them. Then we’d take that along and deliver our pitch. I accompanied Barry on many of his sales calls in the early days, and he gave an absolute masterclass in getting a deal done. People were often none too pleased when they discovered where we were from and what we were trying to sell them, but Barry was completely unemotional about it; he took it all in his stride. One day we’d gone to a meeting at a garden centre in Te Awamutu, and the guy who owned the place was blunt. We’d done up a big mock ad for him, but he wasn’t pleased. ‘Why would I want that?’ he practically spat back at us. I quickly got the sense that we amounted – in his eyes – to not much more than nobodies trying to extract some money from him. At that time, The Waikato Weekender was the new kid on the block, so I could make some sense of his reaction, but this guy’s disdain for us was palpable. Yet, still, Barry did not back down. He was poised to handle all of this guy’s objections and more – and he did, like a champion. Incredibly, we left that meeting with not just one ad sold but a contract for six of those full-page ads to appear over the coming months for a sizeable sum of money. I was amazed; the guy had very clearly and directly said no, yet here we were walking away with a significant order.”
“what was even more valuable was what I had learnt that day: I had learnt to hang in there. That if I wanted to be good at something, or even simply succeed at it, I couldn’t give up. I’d learnt that persistence pays off and that I could get a positive outcome. I’ll admit that the idea of not giving up was hardly a lesson that I hadn’t heard before. The virtues of ‘not giving up’ are virtually baked into the advice we receive as we grow – whether that be while we’re trying to master a new skill, learn a sport, or make our way through a particularly curly maths problem. As with much of the well-meaning lessons we get as we grow, though, it’s a lot easier to say – and to know – than it is to do. What I learnt that day, at Barry’s insistence, was the very large helping of gumption it takes to actually keep going. It is far, far easier to give up. Especially when persisting feels so uncomfortable. Yet here I was able to see the seeds of the success that was possible if I stuck it out. Being able to walk into a place, meet with someone who I hadn’t known previously, and walk back out with $1,000 of their money and a signed contract was a useful skill to have, I recognised. And my eyes were beginning to open to a new sense of possibility. I often say that I hadn’t really done anything useful until I started work – that my story of success starts there and that everything before it felt fairly mundane and boring. This is why. It’s where I started to see a whole new world. And I couldn’t help but wonder: What else might be possible if only I could hang in there? How else might I be able to succeed if I truly didn’t give up?”
“Then I saw an ad for the job at Xerox. It was a sales rep role, paying twice what the other jobs I’d been applying for had. And there was a company car included. Bingo. I set my sights on getting the role, interviewing first with a hard-edged guy called Harry Morgan, who strung me along for weeks. I would ring him and ring him – keen to demonstrate my persistence – but it got to the point of me harassing him. He told me that if I kept ringing, I wouldn’t get the job. But with my experience with Marine Services and what I’d learnt from Barry still fresh in my mind, I kept asking anyway.”
“That’s why, several years later, Paul and I found ourselves glued to the phone on Christmas Eve, trying to close a sale. Most of our colleagues, and frankly most of the country, were winding down, tidying up the last items on their to-do lists and hoping to knock off early for the holidays. But we were hunched over the desk, eagerly waiting for a call that could make or break our month’s figures. It was a far cry from my spelling spotter days, but the stakes still felt high. Paul had been working on a deal with the Hamilton City Council, and we were down to the wire, with plenty of red tape to navigate (as is typical with public departments). We were deeply entrenched in this team of go-getters though, and hellbent on making it happen. We were so determined, in fact, that we’d had the technicians on standby and the copier (worth $100,000 in 1990 and the size of a small car) already loaded into one of our huge Mitsubishi delivery trucks, circling the block until we got the green light. The council didn’t know that its new machine was orbiting the nearby streets for the entirety of that day while their team were gearing up to clock off for the holidays. Finally, just after lunchtime, the phone rang. We must have been one of the final things on that guy’s to-do list, but we no longer cared. The deal was confirmed. ‘When can we expect the install?’ the client asked. ‘In about ten minutes,’ I replied, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. The council was probably expecting sometime in the weeks following our summer shut-down. It certainly couldn’t have anticipated just how prepared we were. Before we closed for business that day, the copier was in the council’s office, and we were heading home on the high of another deal in that year’s books.”
“And so it went. We got used to achieving the outcomes we wanted. We worked hard for it, we sweated, but we made things happen. We worked long hours, took calls late, and gave up weekends when needed. Once, we needed to install a machine at the IRD offices down the street. We were so close to our sales window closing that waiting for the delivery guys wasn’t an option. So, a few of us propped the machine on some pallets, threw on some castors, and rolled it the few hundred metres down the street ourselves. That was the kind of team we were – relentless, resourceful, and always ready to make it happen. However, I was still struggling to keep the wolves from the door. I was earning four times the average person’s wage, but it still wasn’t enough. I was too highly leveraged and too far in the red. I needed a new plan.”
“Sometimes it wasn’t even safe inside your home. Some friends we made over there were sitting in their living room watching television. Their house was up on stilts – as was typical – and was situated close enough to Guam to access a few of the American shows with a satellite. Next minute they hear a chainsaw, and someone is cutting a hole in their floor. Such was the sort of thing that went on. Even riots aside, it certainly wasn’t safe to go out at night. If we did, it was only by car, and we were sure to go straight to our destination. There was no stopping for petrol, and if you got a flat tyre, you drove the rest of the way home on it. The chance of being mugged was too high to risk.”
“Sometimes, you don’t find what you expect when you take a leap. But if you’re willing to muddle through, you might just find something better than you ever imagined.”
“It was 1987. Footrot Flats was the biggest film. Māori had just been made an official language. Telecom, NZ Post, and Postbank had just been split into three separate profit-driven state-owned enterprises, and Telecom had just launched the first mobile phone network in the country. This”
“I reported to the sales director, along with half a dozen or so other guys with the same job as me, but with responsibility for the other regions. When the sales director role then became available, I applied, convinced that I’d be a shoo-in. Very few other people in the organisation at the time had the sort of sales experience that I had.”
“Each interview would take about half an hour, and we’d get right down to it – we had a lot of them to complete. We’d start with some soft questions, and then work our way through a checklist of questions to size up whether a candidate was really worth keeping on or should be let go. We met some awesome people, and a lot of duds. That’s the hiring process, though: For every 10 people you talk to, two are the right fit, and there’s only one space to fill. We were looking for the best. But we also learnt how to see through bullshit.”
“‘What do you mean you don’t need twenty million?’ We both had next to no money – certainly nothing worth singing about – at that point. That’s what I was busy lamenting when I’d started the conversation in the first place by saying that I wanted to be a multimillionaire. I wanted to be worth $100 million. Paul conceded that ‘a hundred million dollars might be a bit hard’, but I guess that’s where his $20 million came from. He had no specific scheme in mind to get him there; he just thought it was a more attainable number. ‘A bit of money would be good,’ I mused. And I somehow got Paul to agree with that notion too. From there, we latched onto it. I’ve always liked a big goal and here we were daring to dream big. It’s funny, because when you put something out there like that as a possibility, it starts you thinking: How would we actually do that? It forces you to think differently, and to act differently, too, because you can’t keep doing the same thing you’re already doing to get you to somewhere so vastly different.”
“No one really knew what was coming when they first met Paul. He was gentle but also direct. I recall one time that I’d showed up unannounced to visit him at home. He came outside to meet my car (he’d probably heard it approaching) and said that I’d caught him just as he was about to go out into the back paddock to shoot a foal. I was caught completely off-guard; I liked animals way too much and couldn’t remotely conceive of why he would want to kill one.”
“meaningful. We worked incredibly well together. Over time, we acquired over 50 companies (and while this tended to be on my watch, he did most of the work to make those acquisitions happen). Later, too, he sat on my family trust.”
“I have enough stories about Paul to fill another book. Even from the Telecom days alone. Once, we were due to catch a flight and had been held up, so we were running late to the airport. We weren’t going to make it in time. Paul gets the wild idea of phoning up Air New Zealand and seeing if he can get them to hold the plane for us. I tell him he must be joking; there is no way they’d do that. But sure enough, he gets on the phone to Air New Zealand and says, ‘It’s Paul Smithies here, I’m a director of Telecom and I’m supposed to be on this plane. I need it to wait for us.’ Whatever magical charm he managed to lay on them, it worked because they did it. The plane was still there when we arrived at the airport, and we were the last ones on it. Paul was the right kind of bold.”
“I’d needed investment money. A large part of my role at Telecom – which had seen us relocate to Auckland from the Waikato – was looking after Telecom dealers. One of the companies looking to become a dealer was Blue Star, which is what put me back in contact with my old boss from Xerox days, Eric Watson. When I had been regional manager at Xerox, looking after the Bombay Hills through to Palmerston North territory, Eric had been my general manager. We had got on well before Eric left Xerox to buy Blue Star Office Automation in Auckland. When he discovered that I was looking after his Telecom dealer licence, he called me up. ‘What the hell are you doing there?’ he asked me. ‘I need you to come and see me.’ When we spoke, he had a $100 million promise. I was ‘messing around’ with the Telecom stuff, he told me; I needed to become his business partner instead. ‘I’m going to be a billionaire,’ Eric assured me, adding, ‘and you can come along for the ride.’”
“We were in our early thirties, so why not? Eric suggested I buy into Blue Star and that we’d make bank in no time. Naively, I didn’t question what he was putting forward when he offered that I could buy in at seven-times forecast earnings before interest and taxes. However, his plan was not without a couple of snags.”
“we were living in half of a grotty rental property in Herne Bay – an old place that had been split into two flats. I was driving a Ford Telstar in the meantime. It was a bit of a disappointment, and I certainly no longer felt like a winner. Not only that, but there was also an urgency to the situation that sharpened my focus and drove me harder, because failure meant losing everything.”
“Together, alongside Eric, we built that company. Blue Star went from virtually nothing to a billion dollars in turnover in a few short years. As was his spirit when he broached the idea of me buying in during that first meeting, Eric continued to be a big thinker, a brazenly ‘big goal’ guy. He would arrive unannounced at meetings where we were setting budgets. There we were, discussing how we could get up to $5 million turnover out of a particular branch, and he’d goad us for thinking too small. ‘Think about how we get $20 million out of that branch instead,’ he’d add. And they would, because they were now thinking bigger, more ambitiously, more commercially. Luckily, Paul and I were an excellent team when it came to getting things done. The deal that turned things around for Blue Star came via Telecom. Following Telecom’s desire to get out of hardware and instead focus just on network connectivity, Telecom was selling its customer premises equipment business. Virtually no one else at the time was selling that sort of equipment, but these guys had all the stuff that was installed and required in businesses. From physical phones and PABX (private automatic branch exchange) systems to alarms, wiring and plugs – you name it, this portion of the Telecom business had it and was renting it to its business customers, with very little competition. When Telecom made it known it wanted out of that business, we saw an opportunity. Having worked there previously, Paul and I knew the hardware business at Telecom well and could see its potential. Telecom hadn’t really ever fully understood it well as a business and, as a consequence, had mismanaged it. Now, the company was motivated to sell, so I believed we could get a good deal. The reason we’d wanted the business was that Telecom had all the customers as casual rentals. It had never had to put them on a contract because it’d had such a monopoly. The customers couldn’t rent this stuff from anywhere else. But we had the idea to put the customers on a contract that committed them to renting the equipment – that their business needed by this stage – for three years. It was a win for them because we could bring the monthly rental amount down, and there was vast potential in it for us to increase the value of the business. We convinced Eric to enter the tender process. The first challenge was that this portion of the Telecom business didn’t have a proper profit and loss, or a set of books with it, so everyone was unsure as to how to value it. All we knew was that there was a bunch of physical assets that got rented to customers, and this is how much the equipment was currently rented for. People were all making wild stabs at a figure on that basis. Eric, Paul, and I got together in a room to discuss what we thought we should bid for it. Paul and I were still busy trying to convince Eric it was a good idea, but none of us could come up with any really solid rationale for the price we should offer. So, we came up…”