Episode 36: Tyler Watson • Dan O's Seasoning

The Month End provides emerging inventory-based brands real life knowledge in the accounting, finance, and operational world. Our guests are not only similar brand founders and owners, but key stakeholders and contributors to the industry. Each episode provides a glimpse into the vast experience and insight from its guest’s unique backgrounds in a casual, conversational tone.

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In episode thirty-six, Accountfully's CEO and Partner, Brad Ebenhoeh, talks with Tyler Watson of  Dan O's Seasoning .  As Senior VP, he leads the business development team.  In the conversation, he shares a glimpse into the unconventional, yet wildly successful methods he employed to grow the seasoning company across distribution channels since its inception in 2017.  For CPG businesses seeking some innovative and fresh ideas for growing their business, this is a must-watch. 

For more small business and CPG- focused resources, visit Accountfully's resources page, where you will find helpful articles, guides, eBooks and more. 
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Transcript

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Brad Ebenhoeh: 0:00

Welcome to The Month End CPG community chat, The Month End will provide emerging CPG brands real life knowledge into the accounting, finance and operational worlds. Our guests will be key stakeholders from those same brands as well as other key contributors in the industry. Welcome to Episode 36 of The Month End podcast today we have Tyler Watson from Dan O's Seasoning. How're you doing today? Tyler?

Tyler Watson: 0:24

I'm doing Dan-tastic. How about you Brad?

Brad Ebenhoeh: 0:27

Dan-tastic Love it. Love the start to this conversation. I'm doing great man. Tyler's the the SVP of Sales that Dan O's and has been there since 2018. And I'm looking forward to this chat on the aspect from a sales side but how it integrates on the operations finance side of of a CPG brand. So before we get started, why don't we start with kind of your personal background, Tyler as well as then was integrate it with what Dan O's does and what you do at Dan O's. So just the floor is yours.

Tyler Watson: 0:57

Thanks man. Yeah, so I always like to kind of start this introduction for myself because that's my favorite topic is me. But not me and I eighth grade education. I don't have a high school diploma, no college experience whatsoever. I was basically born on a retail sales floor love people sold shoes. You know, it was my kind of first go at sales, couldn't make it as a sandwich artist at Panera Bread. So my wife, who then was my shift lead had no idea she was going to become my wife. She said, 'Listen, man, I said working out you need to go apply for the shoe store in the mall over here'. And I'm like, 'okay, cool'. So anyway, learned shoe sales. And it wasn't just your bring a box out and set it in front of the customer. It was like, 'Hey, you're gonna sit and fit this customer, you're going to try to sell them, you know, arch support, you're going to talk to them about their ailments and all these things'. So that's where I really learned that I love people. You know, as a kid, I spent a lot of time getting booted out of schools and spent some time behind bars and things like that and learn that I didn't want to be there for long. And so I started to understand that my diverse kind of exposure at a young age was really applicable to being able to learn all walks of life and how I can, you know, converse and help those people through product satisfaction. Love being able to hand somebody a tangible product and tell them about it, educate them about it, get them excited about it, and then bring them along on the on the journey, right? Because that's what we do. We build brands. So yeah, that's That's me in a nutshell, retail dyed in the wool sales guy has started with Dan O's basically, Dan himself was a bartender. And so my neighbor actually worked at the bar with them. And this was years ago back in 2017. And my neighbor's cooking with this, we're grilling out in the neighborhood, and my neighbors whips out this baggie of seasoning. And I'm like, 'Woah, wait a minute do that looks like weed, dude. What you got to put on put on my chicken?! And I'm like, and he's like, 'it's Dan O's man', and like, 'I don't know what Dan O's is'. And so anyway, I loved it. I enjoyed it, tried to kids loved it, wife loved it. And I'm like, where do I find this stuff? And lo and behold, he calls down that night. And Dan's like, 'Hey, I know you've already eaten but like, I'm cooking up some fish like, like, bring Tyler over. If he just wants the original. Like, 'I want to tell them why you should try my spicy and I want him to try spicy on the salmon I'm cooking'. And I've never met the dude before but went over to his house and quickly learned and when I talk about Dan, the first thing I talk about is his love language. And that is cooking for people. He's just so passionate about, you know, getting his flavor on somebody's taste but and then watching their reaction. And so that's kind of like the you know, my introduction to Dan I was was literally this dude cooking for me in his kitchen. And, and I just I loved it so much that I just wanted to be a part of the brand and made that happen just a few months later.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 3:49

Awesome. That's a great, great background and everything here. Um, quick question, have you only been like in sales from an employee relationship? Have you had your own business? Have you tried any side hustles or anything like that?

Tyler Watson: 4:03

Yeah, I sold some insurance. You know, that wasn't for me. Great question. I've done franchise sales, so sold and supported retail franchise stores for UPS. But ya know, really never went into business for myself. I mean, other than, you know, dabbling in pharmaceuticals at an early age. I told you man, you're gonna have to edit me.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 4:29

I can see why your sales guy and not just a traditional accountant here. I love it. So anyways, this is great. So when you went to Dan O's and you started there were you like, what was your role, then? And then how have you kind of changed that, you know, five years later in terms of almost us heading into 2024 here? Yeah,

Unknown: 4:48

Yeah, it's funny, man. I took a demotion. The last time I came back to Dan O's is when I first started with Dan back when I was telling you, you know, he was he was kind of a one man band. And so when he brought me on, he brought me on as President of sales and business development. So you introduced me as SVP, I have taken a demotion since those days but, but totally fine. So yeah. So when I came back to tantos, so there was an interim right. So like, I couldn't, it wasn't sustainable when we were just doing state fairs, flea markets, things like that. I had, I had two kids at the time, a mortgage and it just that wasn't vibing. So I took the job with UPS to kind of sustain for two and a half, three years. And then dinos came back around to me and said, man, we're, you know, we're really trying to build this thing. We've got a new marketing team here that's helped an agency that was helping build something special, and they were selling a lot on Amazon, Dan was, like, recently taken off on Tik Tok and social media and stuff. So I was like, okay, cool. So I came back as regional vice president of sales. So I had kind of the majority of the country, not the East Coast, but the rest of it, and started to develop accounts out from there, and then quickly just absorbed the other salespersons job at the time, basically, and became the vice president of sales within probably three to four months of being back on Dan O's. Staff, and, and have been that pretty much sense. And then recently, they're like, listen, we, you know, we've kind of created more of like a board, if you will, internal board of folks who are really, you know, high level decision makers driving strategy for the company. And then they invited me into that and gave me the senior vice president role. So I was very appreciative of that.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 6:24

That's awesome. From an aspect of kind of what you've learned selling actual, you know, consumer packaged goods within this kind of food and drink CPG space, what didn't you know, when you came in? And now what do you know or that that then helps you sell the product? Clearly, there's a lot of intangible sales things that are just general across everything but specific within this industry. What have you learned what has really helped you guys Excel and had a ton of growth the last couple of years?,

Tyler Watson: 6:49

Yeah, I knew absolutely nothing coming into this industry, man, like I said, as I was from a whole different world of sales. And so when you come into the grocery and you sell into mass and the likes of Walmart and Kroger, Albertsons, Publix, all the all the awesome folks, I've had the opportunity to work with over the last two and a half years building this brand with with the company. I ask a lot of questions, man, I mean, if I don't know what an abbreviation or acronym or whatever it is, I'm not going to sit there and look it up on Google, I'm just going to ask the person point blank, what's that mean? Like, I don't know, we're all new, none of us are from CPG. We're just, we're trying to build this thing together. And I think that's really led to the a lot of the great relationship building I've been able to have with our buyers and key decision makers is like, they've helped me grow into this role, you know, 100%, I didn't, I couldn't have done it without our retail partners kind of helping me along the way and understanding some of these things. So yeah, I think buying data has been really helpful. So you know, getting to know Nielsen IQ. And those folks buying spins data, getting to know some of those folks working with their teams, has taught me a lot about like retail metrics and key performance indicators that, you know, are very important to our business. So yeah, I mean, I think it's really just been, you know, learning trial by fire, and working with our retail partners, and just being very transparent, just like what you see with Dan and our brand and the authenticity that lends to, you know, his recipe content and things like that on social media, I try to really bring that same element of authenticity to the sales process and the selling process with our buyers, and just let them know that they're helping us build this brand. They're innovating with us, and they're not on the sidelines watching.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 8:30

So, you know, Rewinding back to buying data, this is a great kind of jumping off point here. So a lot of data exists out there. So like, what was kind of the exact data you bought in relation to what you're looking at? And then what are kind of the top two or three metrics or KPIs that you kind of focus on? Maybe at the store level? Or whatever it is?

Tyler Watson: 8:50

Yeah, yeah. So first, first set of data, you know, we looked at by and we were only in like 300 stores, but I knew we were killing it. In those stores. I just didn't know how much and how well we were doing. And so I started, I started a conversation off with a dear friend of mine, man, I don't typically meet a stranger but Chris Hamley, is his name and he was a Nielsen, sales guy for emerging brands with their platform called visor. And so we bought visor, data. And what was so compelling, you know, for me as a salesperson to see is they have this this metric called Brand ranking. And it's not a sales ranking metric. It's more of like a, it takes into account like your distribution metrics. It takes into account velocity, you know, average selling price, just all the cool metrics that make up a brand and their success or not, and retail, that brand ranking takes into account for. And so when we were when he was demoing the product for us, he's like, I've never actually met with a brand that was number one on the brand ranking report. And he's like, You guys are in 300 stores and you guys are number one on this. You're the fastest basically the fastest growing brand in the category. So I knew that we had a really compelling selling story to tell. And so I was like, Dude, you gotta walk me through what all these things was mean, I don't know what velocity is, I don't know what a total distribution point is. I don't I don't know if this was two and a half years ago, we were in, you know, we had some early adopter stores that brought our product in, and we were very green. So yeah, visor was was a huge help. And now we, you know, spend quite a bit of money to, you know, obtain that data from all aggregated data from all sorts of sources and, and make sense of it.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 10:23

Very cool. Very cool. So what has been your biggest kind of challenge or frustration with kind of distribution with working with retail aspect from your position?

Tyler Watson: 10:33

I'd say? That's a it's a tough question. I mean, I think, you know, sometimes we face certain partners have supply chain constraints, and it causes for our shelf price to be a lot more than what we believe it should be. And it's no fault of our own, right? Like if we if if that retail partner doesn't have distribution and a certain area or region of the country, then we have to go through a third party distributor in order to get it to those shelves, and you know, that person might have a, you know, 28 to 35% markup, or whatever it is, and then the retailer's got to make their markup, and then all of a sudden, our bottle that should be, you know, seven, eight bucks on shelf is 10 bucks, and that, you know, really does kill our velocities. And so I think that's a huge obstacle for us that we're still, you know, actively trying to overcome and figure out and other than that, I mean, I can't think of anything offhand. I mean, this is it's a it's a tough, scrappy business to be in, but that would probably be my biggest tip right now is just getting that getting our price, right. So how do you–The spice is right? The price is not.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 11:37

When you go to sell the product, what do you say, Hey, we're Dan-tastic, dominant and disruptive. Is that right?

Tyler Watson: 11:43

Dan-tastic, Dan-o-mite; might be the best Dan seasoning you've ever had. Because it's Daaan good.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 11:49

Love it.

Tyler Watson: 11:50

So since we're talking about Dan-O-lytics.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 11:53

There we go. So since we're talking about the

D's: 11:55

deduction management, can I trace Yeah, management? Let's get into that. How to? How do you manage that? How does Dan O's handle that and ensuring you're kind of set up for success, but also kind of review auditing, kind of ensuring you're you know, what you're getting charged and kickback is what you guys have agreed upon?

Tyler Watson: 12:12

Ya man, that was new to us, right? I mean, that's something you go into business with somebody, you're like, oh, man, this is great. We just got on shelf, and then you get a$90,000, invoice back, right? And you're like, What the hell's this for? So ya know, we have a rockstar financial team here. You know, we've got a retail ops coordinator on my team, who is just awesome at kind of being one of those people who spots that from a mile away and says something doesn't look right here. Or, you know, what is this? You know, what, what code is this? What does that applying to? You know, and oftentimes, the first question is Tyler, what the hell did you do, you know, during negotiations. But, but no, man, I think that's one thing that it's, it's, we don't have a fluid process for quite as of yet. Because I think what the constraints are there is that retail partners just have so many different platforms to log into, and try to manage that. And so, you know, we've seen an evolution in that particular area of like aI coming in, and, you know, chat bots, being able to bring in all of those platforms, and integrate all those platforms is probably something you're way more familiar with, than I am, of being able to make sense of those things, track those things. You know, audit, you know, create audits, self audits for you guys to do monthly and things like that. So I don't get too too far into the weeds. I just kind of, you know, if they asked me a question, you know, our team finance team says, hey, you know, what, what is this about this bill back or whatever it is, you know, I can usually kind of give a good idea of what I know. But yeah, we wish I can tell you a little bit more about that. That's probably about the gist of my expertise on that.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 13:42

Yeah, it's definitely a very kind of nuanced situation specific kind of circumstance you have to deal with in the in the CPG. Space. But on the sales side, so clearly, from our conversation, I'm assuming you could probably sell anything on the side of the road, and you want to sell a lot of things, right? So how does how do you handle the sales planning? The sales? Hey, I want to sell here and I want to go to infinity. But how does that then reconcile to two things? Let's start first on the inventory side from your supply chain, your inventory, the purchasing team that come in, or the manufacturing whatever your processes, how do you guys handle that process?

Tyler Watson: 14:22

Yeah, awesome. Um, so we brought on the demand planner, because it all was living in my head before that on what I had in the pipeline. And, you know, we brought in, you know, I've got a business development guy on my team who brought HubSpot to the table who could help kind of create a pipeline there, right. And so we kind of created some processes and, you know, and so forth. But, yeah, I mean, inventory management was huge for us, because you know, when you start to ramp up for a 4,000, store rollout, right, or 3,000, or whatever it is, and you're trying to start to take into account not just the opening order, but what are going to be the anticipated velocities in that channel, you know, why are we you know, going to? Why are we going after them, you know, what products are going to be in there, you know, now that we don't have just to SKUs anymore, it's it's a lot to manage. And, you know, as a sales guy, it's easy for me to say, Oh, I'm just supposed to sell right, but then you don't have if you don't have a team to be able to support that, or an infrastructure to be able to support that. And more importantly, if they don't understand what's going on, if they don't understand what you were doing and what you were selling. It's not going to work. So yeah, I think it's it's as a, as a as a new emerging brand, it's very new to us. That whole process of organizing, and making sense of an opening order versus a replenishment order. And so we've, we've been very in tune with each other from department to department to kind of bridge the gap on that process so far. So I'm not saying we perfected it by any means. But we're not we're not out of stock anywhere, are on time and full percentages are solid, we report, you know, to each other. I think one thing that, you know, between our sales and operations department we've created is kind of these KPIs that we live and die by that sales actually reports to operations and operations reports back as though they're our customer that we're their customer. And I think that mindset has really created a good cohesion between the two departments.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 16:15

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. You're in the business together and the team together. So ensuring that there's some accountability between each other helps out and then how do you handle reconcile that to kind of the finance the cash, the accounting team of paying for your, excuse me paying for your inventory, supply chain and raw materials, as well as then getting paid from your retailers? Like, what what is your integration with that look like?

Tyler Watson: 16:36

Yeah, same? It's a very similar process, man. I mean, we got a pretty small crew. I mean, we're not. I mean, I say that relevant to the size of business where we'll probably in the year between 35 and 40 million, we got about 30 employees, maybe a little bit more than that. But our accounting team is three guys, three cats, and then, you know, sales is three or four people so tight, man, just we keep it tight, keep it running lean. Make sure we're talking to each other all the time. But I think, you know, we have, we try to make sure their meetings in place that, you know, we kind of go over high level, you know, what, where's the business at where we ended last quarter? How are we, you know, reconciling these things, but we got an ERP system recently Brightpearl is is what we've been using. So we're starting to try to bring in a lot of, you know, integration and connectivity with different things that we're using different platforms we're using, and trying to bring it all into that one kind of umbrella system for everybody to kind of, you know, live in and report to.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 17:32

Yep. All of that makes sense in relation to kind of the various sales channels you sell in and how do you two things like understand the success of the specific sales channels, distribution, direct consumer, Amazon, whatever, as well as how have you guys decided which sales channels to kind of go into and to spend your kind of time and energy on?

Tyler Watson: 17:56

Yeah, I wish I had an awesome strategized answer for you. I mean, truly, we've gone after every single account, we could so you know, hardware, I went after Lowe's hardware became the number one selling brand in their stores, you know, going into Bucees, you know, the travel destination stop out of you know, familiar with those beaver guy, but, you know, we went into Bucees and became their number one selling brand, and we're not even Texas born brand. And that's, that's a that was a huge accomplishment for us. So, yeah, I mean, you know, going after everything, and I think right now we're to a point now to where we really do need and intend to spend a lot of time on channel strategy and differentiation between the channels, you know, club being one that I feel like we, you know, may not have approached properly to begin with, but, you know, how do we go back to the drawing board and kind of look at the big, you know, competitors inside a club and what we did with and what didn't work, what did work, you know, was the was the pack size, right? Was the price per ounce, right? All those different things that, you know, an early, you know, company probably kind of screws up and it's like, when I talk to other brands who have been down this path before, it's like, yeah, we did that too. And it makes me feel a lot better man. Because, you know, it's one of those things you really are hard on yourselves internally when things don't work out exactly like you want them to. But yeah, I mean, I think we've we've learned a lot from from those exploratory kind of, you know, first two years in business in a, in retail. So, yeah, I think now what we're looking at is what makes the most sense based off of the consumer research that we have, what do we know about our shopper? You know, now we can kind of get a little bit more tactical on what type of flavors we want to put into certain channels. You know, are there offshoot product lines that we want to toy around with? what channel is good for that? is there you know, need for differentiation inside of a channel to create less competition and less price? You know, competition within that channel. Those are the types of questions we're really starting to ask ourselves now that we've gotten a good foothold and retail.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 19:56

Oh, that makes sense. And the kind of the last question before we get to our own final questions on the podcast like, what are some best practices are really good kind of ways that that Dano and you and the sales and I'm sure the marketing folks have created a brand awareness. What are some kind of cool tools or things you guys have done? And you know, the last kind of, you know, maybe 2023. To, to do that.

Tyler Watson: 20:20

Yeah, I think probably one of my favorite things we've done, you know, as of late is, we created this campaign together on our social media called hashtag #inthewild. So we were looking at a page, we have this group on Facebook, it's called Dan O's fan O's. And, and we built this page, it was, I think we had 200 members when I joined back in 2018, maybe less than that, actually. And now we've got over 200, and almost 240,000 members right now. And so it's grown exponentially. And, you know, we look at that channel, and I was looking at the channel, and I'm like, noticing that a lot of people get really excited about finding our product in a retail store near them. And I'm like, What can we do with that, because we've always been really worried about kind of poking the algorithm on our social channels and feeling too salesy, you know, in our content. And so I started thinking, like, where could that type of content live? And so we kind of put our heads together, and realized quickly that we weren't utilizing stories. And so at the top of, you know, Facebook, Instagram Stories, it's just a snapshot in time, 24 hours, and it goes away. I'm like, man, what if we started putting that customers engagement that picture them finding and at retail, holding up a bottle in front of the store, with the logo in the background, that sort of thing? What if we put that on stories and got people excited about sharing that, and then sharing it to our facebook page, or Instagram, who's, you know, we got millions of followers. So it's like, exciting, if you see some huge brand, you know, on social post your content. And so we started this in the wild campaign, and it was gaining, you know, 10, 20, 30,000 impressions a day, you know, just doing that alone and showing customers in the wild finding our product. And so we were, you know, looking at, you know, basically a couple million impressions more every single month. And those impressions were important, because they were showing retail availability, right? Like, we had never really figured out a good campaign to do that without coming across, like we were trying to sell where our recipe videos or where we kind of started and have a good foothold on social media. So this was a great way for us to kind of dip our toe in the water on that, and utilize a particular tool on social media that we've not used before, which was and not that we didn't use the stories, it was just that we didn't have a real strategy to using the stories. And now I feel like we can do that with with this in the wild campaign. And it can be kind of an evergreen campaign that runs forever, and people can continue sharing their excitement about finding dinos in the wild.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 22:41

Yeah, I love, love stories like that. I just love kind of learning like that as a kind of a fellow, you know, entrepreneur, myself and a businessman and just kind of always kind of conscious and aware of marketing, brand, strategy, awareness, all that type of stuff, especially in terms of how social media and society kind of keeps changing and how they absorb content. Right. So it's always interesting to see where that exists. So as we're wrapping this up, it's been an awesome conversation. You know, for all the CPG kind of founders out there, we always end with two questions. And then the first one, I want to kind of say, what does one do? From your perspective?

Tyler Watson: 23:19

Yeah, so I had to really mull this over, you know, you and I talked about this before. And I was like, and by the way, I feel like I hadn't gotten to know you, we got to do a second episode, at some point in time, I got to interview you, because you seem like an awesome guy, man. But yeah, so do form a brand strategy. And, you know, really to ensure that your messaging is clear, it's relevant. You know, I believe that recently, we did a lot more consumer, dove into a lot more consumer research and it led us to find that a very different consumer was shopping and engaging with our brand on E comm than the one buying at retail. And you would think that, you know, the Ecom customer was actually younger, but it was the opposite. It was the the customer that was buying on E commerce was actually older, and the customer buying and store was was younger. So that was a really interesting, you know, kind of factoid to learn about that. And then, you know, pivoting the marketing plan to accommodate that where the bulk of your business is when your strategy was so you know, tailored to that ECom customer, you know that that's just not an easy task. So yeah, brand strategy man, form one note, you know, even though we knew kind of we had a gut feeling of who we were and who our customer was, you know, getting that data to support a gut based decision really helped, you know, craft our strategy.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 24:37

Awesome. And then what is one Don't

Tyler Watson: 24:41

you I mean, this is this is a, you know, for me as a sales guy, this was tough because like all sales guys just kind of want to let their customer dictate things but like, I feel like because our success is due to our disruption. Like you said earlier, we dominate and disrupt is kind of like our mantra here as a leadership team. And so you know, we've I've had partner feedback come back, like we had a massive, massive customer that I was in buying talks with. This was about a year ago. And they said, Listen, you know, we want to bring in your brand looks like it looks, you know, it's a great product branding is awesome, but like, we got to take that little guy off the front of your bottle, right like little Danny you got to see him right there little little redneck dude walking, walking away. Not a redneck at all. But that's what that was the perception, right? It was a, you know, Pacific Northwest, you know, kind of consumer shop or whatever. They're like, I just don't know that that's going to resonate with them. And I'm like, Well, that's the case. And I don't think we should do business together. Because that's just not that's not what we're going to do to accommodate this account. We'll just build elsewhere and you know, you'll be left behind but yeah, I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction are for a sales guys to go back to the team and say, Listen, we, you know, I've got this huge opportunity, we should we should change everything about what we're doing. Because this opportunity is massive. It's the biggest one we've ever had. But you know, I took that time to really kind of look inside and say, you know, if this customer doesn't like us for who we are, then we shouldn't be doing business with them.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 26:03

I couldn't agree more. You can't say yes. And vendor need out of everybody. It's just It doesn't work that way in business, so Well, all right. This was an awesome chat. It was great to get to know you, Tyler. And you're so you're good. Dude. I'm looking forward to your interview with me here at some point in the future. All right, well, this is episode 36 of The Month End podcast before we go, where can people find Dan O's? And what should they buy?

Tyler Watson: 26:28

Everywhere you if you haven't tried Dan O's because you don't know till you Dan-O; you gotta go find that original green cap. You can find it at all your Walmart stores, Kroger, Albertsons, Sam's clubs got the OG and the 20 ounce bottles so I mean just look around and if you want to just try Dan O's and you don't want to go in big with a big bottle, you can go to your local Dollar General Store and get $1 pouch of dollar of Dan O's original seasoning to try us out and then you can go to the Walmart when you get hooked. Awesome.

Brad Ebenhoeh: 26:57

Awesome, Well thanks for your time, Tyler. Really appreciate it and congrats on everything so far.

Tyler Watson: 27:02

Fantastic to be with you today, Brad