EP 8: The DNA of Danos - Hank and Mark Danos

Hank and Mark Danos discuss how their family business has maintained its core values throughout 78 years of growth, sharing powerful stories that illustrate the company's commitment to people, generosity, and purpose-driven leadership. They explore how the DNA of Danos—from its founders' sacrifice and problem-solving approach to its modern philanthropic initiatives—has shaped a sustainable business model that balances profit with community impact.

Transcript

Samantha: 0:28

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Samantha McGee with the Danos Marketing Team, and today we've got owner Hank Danos, who is chairman of the board, and owner Mark Danos, who is CEO of Danos Family Investments. Did I get that right? You got it. Go t it. Good. So today we're going to talk about the DNA of Danos and what makes up Danos, what makes it different, and what makes it truly special. And I guess when I say the DNA of Danos, what does that look like to you? I'll start with you, Mr. Hank.

Hank: 0:56

Yeah. Well, obviously we're a little prejudiced. We think we're special. But when I think about DNA, I think about, from a human standpoint, it's molecular, genetic, and it goes back generations. And we can trace who we are, or scientists can trace who we are, by looking at our DNA. So if you apply that to a company, it may not be as scientific, but the way I think about it, when I think about DNA of Danos, I think about the early origins, the founders of our company, the things that they valued, the things that were important to them, the things that drove them to start a company. And when that is firmly entrenched in the founders, the early, the beginners of the company, in our case, of the company, it tends to follow generations of leadership, ownership, management. So, for example, I think about the early days when our company was just a few years old when I was barely a toddler, for instance, and I looked out a window one day and I saw my dad sitting walking out the door with a suitcase, getting in the car and driving off. So, you know, naturally, as a kid, I ran to the door and asked my mother, where is he going? What's happening? You know, my dad was leaving. And she said, well, he's going to work on the boat. And I said, well, how long is he going to be gone? She says he's going to be gone seven days because he and his co-founder, my uncle, had a boat and they worked together. seven days on seven days off of the boat so i got upset my dad's gone for seven days and my mother sat me down and she says okay your dad is building a business and part of building a business means we work hard sometimes we make sacrifices sometimes we have to leave home and so on so that planted a seed i didn't say okay i connected all the dots but I think about our DNA of sacrifice, of working hard, of being ambitious. These two men who started the company were Cajun men. They weren't formally educated. They lived in a rural area. And they made a decision, rather than going to work in the fishing industry, which is what their background was, they decided they wanted to start a business. So something was driving them. So part of our DNA was that. And then I think forward to... you know, I don't know if it was a few months or a few years, probably not a few years, but a short time after that, my dad was home and he was leaving. And again, I asked my mother, I said, where's he going? She said, he's going to work. And I said, well, I thought my uncle was on the boat and he was off. And my mother again said, it doesn't work that way. When you're building a business, he's got to call on customers. He's got to look for jobs, and he's got to do things. So, you know, those seeds were planted early on that the DNA of our company was sacrifice, hard work, being different in a sense, being gone sometimes. And, you know, I think that just continued to follow us for the generations that... continue to follow. I think one more example that I'll talk about our DNA, I guess, if you will, is Danos was a boat company in the early days, and there were opportunities. Eventually, we became a labor supplier providing labor offshore. And I didn't witness this, but this was a story that my dad was happy to share with with me, I either asked him, or let's say I asked him, how did we ever go to work offshore and evolve into the labor business? And there was something interesting that he said. One day, he was calling on Golf All, our primary customer, in Cut-Off, at their work site, and he was walking back to his car, and All of a sudden the window opened and somebody yelled out of the window, Alan, who's my father's name, said, can I talk to you for a minute? And the guy who called him was Vic Jones. I remember that name well. He was the manager, the boss, the guy who managed all of Gulf Oil's activity in Louisiana. It wasn't a substantial amount of activity. Anyway, my dad walked in and Vic Jones says, Alan, we have this offshore platform in South Marsh Island and we're having trouble finding people who can help us produce the oil. And he said, can you help us? And my dad obviously said, well, yeah, what do you need? He says, well, you know, there's a lot of mechanical stuff offshore. People, they're having trouble fixing it. They have to live offshore and they're having trouble adjusting to the lifestyle. And he named a few things. And as my dad related the story to me sometimes later, he says, as I thought about that, he said, I thought, wow. He says, my people, our people, the people I live and work with are fishermen. And my mother's people, he says, your mama's people are farmers. He says, these people, when something breaks, they have to fix it. He said, we don't call mechanics. We fix things. And he says, if they're out in the middle of the field or in a bay fishing, something like that, and the weather gets bad, we work in bad weather. We work in tough conditions. So essentially, he said, I started to recruit the guys that I worked with, the guys that I knew, the guys that would be problem solvers. Again, that was just an example of the DNA. What built Danos was sacrifice, service, problem-solving people. And I made the comment somewhere along the line, like only a kid would do. I said, boy, I was lucky that you were at that place at that time. And my dad says, well, maybe it was lucky. He said, but sometimes you have to work for your luck. He says, I was calling on customers. I was at this location. I was trying to provide service. They knew I wanted some more work. So a hunger for solving problems, growing our business, I think that's all part of our DNA. And that, hopefully, was passed on from our founders, my uncle was very similar to my dad in that regard, to the next generation of owners and managers, and so it goes to the third and fourth generation. Our DNA is very important in our heritage.

Samantha: 8:42

Absolutely. I love how you talk about the sacrifice they made and just the way that they did things in the way they prioritize things. And one of those things that you mentioned was the values that they had. Can you talk a little bit more about the values that the founders maybe had that stayed with through the DNA of the company?

Mark: 9:04

Can I add something? Yeah, of course. One thing that Hank said, let's circle back to the second, but he said, hopefully those things were passed on from the founders. So when you talk about values, Hank said, hopefully those things were passed on from the founders. to the next gen, to the leaders today. When you think about DNA, one thing that comes to mind is DNA doesn't change. You're born with the same DNA, you die with the same DNA. So think about that. So in the early days when Hank said, hopefully, the business today looks very different than it did 78 years ago. We have different uniforms, we have different buildings, we have different geographic footprint, but at the core, many of the things that we do are the same today because of what was started way back when. So when Hank says, hopefully those things were passed on. So the values, your question, I'll let Hank answer that in a second, but the values that were started way back when, seven, eight years ago that were birthed, think about DNA, that still is very much the same today. And the opportunity that we have as leaders and in a continuing business is to draw out the DNA and the qualities that were expressed from way back when. I like to think about that and focus on the fact that all of the things that Hank mentioned way back when are still very evident today because that's where we started and we have an opportunity to continue to grow the business, but what's at the core, the values, which I'll let him answer, is still very much the same from 78 years ago as we have grown and changed, but we are still at the core, have a lot of those same things.

Hank: 10:38

Yeah. Well, thanks, Mark. I do think it's important. And that consistency, that thread runs through multiple generations. And I think it largely contributes to our success and who we are today. When you ask about values, think about, again, all the way back to the early days, the things that were relevant and things that were important. And Back to that story about going offshore, my dad was so proud of the people that went offshore and solved those problems. And he would say, you know, I don't know how to run a platform. I don't know how to run a crane. He says, but I don't know how to, I'm not a very good mechanic. And I could say, me too. But he said, we had people Some of them were his relatives, his cousins and his nephews and so on. He says, but people are so important to our, we're a people business. And the value of people being important and raising up people was always front and center The value, this is kind of an interesting, kind of elementary value of learning and improvement. But my dad, like I said, wasn't formally educated. But I never saw him without a book. He was always reading a book. And when I was a kid, early on, I had the opportunity to travel with him. He had a boat brokerage business in Harvey, and I'd get to ride with him. And often we'd, so we'd go to Harvey and he'd go into the office and talk to the people who manage the business. And he'd say, you go on the boats and see what's going on. And so I had the freedom to run on a couple of boats and naturally I'd go to the galley and see what kind of snacks they had and food they had. But inevitably I'd visit with the people who were working and we would dialogue some. And then on the ride home, my dad would begin to quiz me. He said, what did you see? What did you learn? And I began to realize that I wasn't... He didn't want to know just what kind of snacks I had on the boat. He wanted to know what I was learning about from those captains and those men who worked on the boats. And after a couple of trips, I realized that I was going to be quizzed on what was going on on the boat. And he had asked me things. Well, did you go into the engine room? What did it look like? Did you go into the... captain's quarters or the pilot house. What did it look like? Was it clean? Was it well maintained? And he was telling me that continuous learning or continuous improvement was an important value. And we didn't say all those things, but the values of people being important, the values of learning, were well set at an early age, the values of integrity. He would talk about customers with great respect, and he would tell me that customers expected certain things from us, no more, no less, and that's what we were required to give them. So I was learning value lessons that were firmly planted in my heart and soul, so to speak, that we continue to, we formalized a list of values some years later. We formalized our purpose statement some years later, but those things were pretty firmly entrenched in the way our founders acted and conducted their business.

Samantha: 14:52

Mark, did you have anything to add? I do have something that I wanted to follow up with.

Mark: 14:55

No, go ahead.

Samantha: 14:57

So you mentioned the place in that your father placed great importance on people. He knew the value of his employees and really respected them and wanted to, I guess, make sure they were they felt that importance and they understood how important they were to the company. Do you have any examples of maybe back of how your father, ways he interacted with the employees that maybe showed that?

Hank: 15:23

Yeah. Well, a couple of examples. Two things that I guess come to mind. One is when I was a youngster, again, we would... often go to festivals or fairs that we love in South Louisiana. And I'd go with my dad, and he always had a, seemed to have a pocket full of $1 bills, and this, when a dollar, you could really buy something with a dollar. And we'd walk around the fair for a bit, and if he saw some children my age, my colleagues, particularly those who were relatives or whose parents work for our company, he'd call them over and give them some money, a dollar or two, and I was kind of wondering when was I gonna get my dollar or two. And eventually, after we did that for a little bit, then he'd give me a couple of bucks and tell me to go have a good time. But I was witnessing his respect for people, even kids, and his generosity for kids. our relatives and the people that work. He always told me, this kid's dad works for our company. They're important. He didn't exactly use those words, but it was pretty clear they were important. One of the best examples that I recall coming to mind was now I'm a teenager and we moved into a different house. And For a number of years, we lived with my grandfather. We didn't have a house of our own. It was our grandfather's house. And then my mom and dad built a house. So we moved into this new house, which was modern and a nice home. And we were having dinner like we typically did, my brother and my mother and my father and myself. And the doorbell rang. And this unique story or uniqueness about this new house is we had three doors and there were three doorbells and each one had a different chime. So I knew exactly what door somebody was ringing the doorbell at dinner. And I looked out the window and I could see the car and I recognized the car and I recognized the family and I knew it was somebody that... represented an employee of Danos, and the children, one of the children in the car, it was a carload of children, one of them was a classmate of mine, so I knew exactly who it was. So I said, I got it, and I'm kind of a mischievous teenager at the time, young teenager, maybe 12, 13 years old, whatever. So I ran to the door and opened the door, and there's this lady there who I expected, when the first time she had come, she was kind of rough, but she was... Polite. She says, is your daddy home? I said, yes, ma'am. So I ran back to the table where my parents were, which was just a few steps away. And I said, it's Miss So-and-so. She wants to talk to daddy. And my mother kind of took a sigh, an exasperated sigh. She says, why do they always come at dinner time? And my dad got up. And, you know, I... I didn't realize at the moment, but I realized after the fact, they came at dinnertime because that's when my daddy would be home. Danos didn't have an office at that time. His office was in his car. It was a rolling office. He went, the office went where he went. The administrative office was in somebody's garage apartment who did part-time bookkeeping. So they came at dinnertime because that's when my dad was home. So my dad went to the door and talked to the lady, came back and Sat down, he said, she needs $25. I'm not sure the number for food for the children. And he sat down, and then there was a little awkward silence. And I realized after the fact, my mom was the bookkeeper. She was the money manager. He wasn't going to go write a check. He could have. He knew how to make out a check. But I don't know if this was orchestrated for my benefit, my brother's benefit, or not. In hindsight, sometimes I think about it. But he sat down. It was silence. He says, Thelma, that's my mama's name. He just said, Thelma. She took a deep breath. She backed up. She wrote a check, came back, gave it to my dad. He signed the check, went to the door, gave it to the lady, came back, sat down. And there's more. Awkward silence, I'm thinking, you know. And then my dad said something like, you know, that guy, he named him. He says, he's been working for us for years. He's a good guy. He works six, seven days a week. He knows how to run a platform. He's a good man. He's got a big family. It's hard for them to make ends meet. We're lucky he's part of our company. Silence for a moment. And my mother said, Hank, Oh, tell me something about school today. It was over. Subject done, point made, employee valued. And my mom and dad had this partnership. I mean, she could be tough, but they worked together. They respected each other. They knew the value of employees. She made her point. He made his point. And I got to witness it, the value of employees. the respect for employees. And I think it was a great lesson for me. I'll tell you the rest of the story. 10 years later, my dad's going, I'm in charge of the company. My brother and I are. We have an office now. This man is still working for our company. His wife shows up at the office now because there's a place to go. She didn't have to come to our house at dinnertime, and she wants to borrow some money. The man who's our bookkeeper was my daddy's generation. He retired from our old company now. He was a full-time employee. So the request, I don't know, it came through me, through him, to loan this lady. Maybe it's $50 or $75 now, an advance on his check. So he comes in my office and he says, how in the world am I supposed to do my business? Everybody wants to borrow money. I got these people. Why don't they balance that budget and take it? Now, he's an accountant, so he knows how to balance his budget and run his business and all of that. So he's railing at me about this woman. And I don't know that I thought 10 years earlier, but it was firmly implanted in my mind. And I said, Johnny? make the check. Now I'm talking to somebody in my father's generation. I'm a little timid. I'm in charge, but he's a very important part of our company. I said, make the check. So he went, he made the check. He gave it to me. I signed it, gave it to her. Point made. Here's this 10 years later, a lesson that I learned and witnessed 10 or 15 years prior to. And Johnny substitutes for my mama, so to speak, and we get to replay this thing again. Value of employees, they were important. They are important.

Samantha: 23:08

There's so many things I love about that story, particularly the one when you're at your childhood home. I love the dynamic you talk about with your parents and how they had that partnership, you know, running the business, but also just how their generosity and And their love for people and care for people really comes through in that story. And so you kind of touched on this, how the generosity has continued throughout the generations of the business. But so I wanted to, can you expand any on that? Or Mark, maybe you have some thoughts or stories that you witnessed of how that generosity has continued to develop and grow with the company.

Mark: 23:48

Yeah, I'm enjoying hearing Hank's stories because some of these I haven't heard before. Some of them I have heard bits and pieces of this, but I would say more is caught than taught. That's what I'm thinking as Hank's speaking is these life lessons. We talked about DNA a second ago, how DNA is inherent in us, and it takes time to pull it out. As an organization, we're finding the best in people and pulling it out, allowing people to express their talents and gifts and abilities better. And when you think from a generosity standpoint, all these little lessons, that was inherent in us from the very beginning. Hank caught that. It was taught, but he caught it because it was lived out. And now how is that expressed today? I'm sure we'll talk about Seeds of Giving in a bit, but I want to hear some more stories. Hank, how else was that expressed in the early days? And we can transition about how that is today.

Hank: 24:40

Yeah, I think about all the way back to the story about the fairs or the festivals that we went to. And I witnessed my dad's generosity. And I witnessed my dad helping some of his relatives who were less fortunate. At that point, by the time I'm a teenager, we have a pretty successful I say we. My parents have a pretty successful business. My uncle's already gone. My dad's in charge of the company, owns the company. My uncle's gone and my cousins and my aunt are there and part of the company. I witnessed my dad and my mom's affection and generosity towards his partner, towards the family of his deceased partner. I witnessed their involvement in the community when things were starting up. At an early age, I knew that I watched my mother, because she was the bookkeeper, work on the books, and she'd write a check donate to the church. She'd write a check to donate to the schools that we were involved in. They were following us and following the community. They had a sense. I heard dinnertime stories that as goes The community, so goes businesses. And as goes businesses, so goes the community. So there was some partnership and some sense of responsibility for a growing business that we had to give back to the community. So I heard that. You know, a few years later in the early 20s, I'm 21, my brother's 23, my dad's gone. We're in charge of the company. We're in the process of buying my mother's interest out. And so how are we going to continue that legacy? How's that DNA going to continue to live in us and growing through us, I should say? growing the business and yet understanding the importance of having a healthy community around us. It sounds a little selfish, but I think, I don't mean to sound selfish, but I think that The community had to be healthy for the business and the business had to be healthy for the community and the industry. So my brother and I learned that we need to continue to be generous and supportive and involved in the community so that we could help raise up a healthy community, which would furnish employees, which would educate our employees' children, including our own children. So my brother and I, began to work on that and our business began to expand into other communities. We had branch offices in Intercoastal City and Galveston and Morgan City and Burris. And so we realized that those communities had to be healthy too. So we thought about how we would continue to, it wasn't so sophisticated, but it was part of our DNA. And then, you know, things evolved, and Mark can really speak to this, but things evolved to the point that we dedicated, we began a foundation, and Mark can tell you more about the elements and the story and the history of the foundation, but a lot of it is built on that generosity, and watching the generosity of our employees, how they got involved in the community. One of the things that is just amazing to me Obviously, we live in South Louisiana. Obviously, there's some storms that destroy communities. And when somebody of our employees, one of our employees had a catastrophe, a storm, a fire, or something, the first people who were there were fellow employees who were helping, lending, bringing their swords, bringing their resources to help. So I think part of the DNA just went through the fabric of the organization, and we fed on each other. We saw our employees being generous. We became more generous. They saw us become generous. They became more generous. And so it goes, the foundation and the things that have grown about that value of being generous.

Samantha: 29:16

Mark, do you want to talk a little bit about how the foundation did start? I know Mr. Hank mentioned that the employees became generous and stepped up. How did that look from a forming of the foundation

Mark: 29:28

standpoint? Yeah, good question. When I think about how to answer that, I've been... involved with the business in some form or fashion for more than 40 years. I've been full-time here for more than 10 years. I've been involved for a long time. We've talked about DNA. We've talked about the quality. We've talked about more is caught than taught. And some of these lessons that I didn't hear, but we can see how that's expressed. And when we think about what we call seeds of giving today, and that's the philanthropic or community-oriented arm of what we do, they really start as a grassroots effort. We have done things in response to the community in ways from way back, even when my grandfather never heard that story, giving out dollar bills to the kids in the community at a fair. And how has that changed to helping people in the community? Lots of requests. And I say grassroots because over time, we've always had lots of people in the community that needed support with a T-ball field to be redone or jerseys or a school or things like this. And we've been very generous to respond. But for years, we were responding to needs and not very intentional. And you think about our DNA, and Hank said it as well. A lot of things that were at the core, we may capture it different. The way we state our values, the way we state our seeds of giving was an effort and really direction from somebody in the organization that said, hey, we can do better than just responding to needs. Let's figure out how to be real intentional. Lots of requests. We can't respond to everything. We have a limited number of resources, so where do we really want to invest? And you think about our purpose. Honor God developed great people to solve big challenges for our customers and communities. How can we solve big challenges for our communities if we're just a broad brush responding to everything? So one of our employees said, let's start what we called the foundation back then. Today we call it the seeds of giving, and we can talk about what seeds and think about the term seeds, the seeds that were planted by Papa Allen and Thelma way back when and how that's expressed today. But in the early days, we said our employees are doing great things in the community. We want to support our employees. And so there's a couple of different arms under Seeds of Giving, what we call Gives, Works, and Cares. And the latest is Roots. So Gives, to be clear, there are lots of organizations in the community that are doing wonderful things. We want to solve challenges in the community. So this is our... This is how we invest in the community to organizations that are doing things that we can't do, but because we support them, we can enable them to have a bigger impact. So we're giving in the communities. Works is when our employees are, and many of you, maybe some of you listening to the podcast or volunteering at organizations in your communities, we want to support those organizations through you. So as a company, we want to invest where our people are investing. So when our employees are giving of their time, we wanna give of our financial resources. So we're sponsoring $10 an hour. So if you're volunteering at an organization and you're not reporting your hours, you're leaving money on the table that you could be giving to your organization. And then CARES, Hank mentioned that as well, Often catastrophes are events that happen, unforeseen events that people don't have control over. Our employees have a need. A mother needs to feed, way back when it was a mother that needed to feed her children. They came and said, can I borrow money? Well, today it may be a fire, it may be a death in the family, it may be a sickness. And through Danos Cares, we're responding to those needs. So when you think about gives and works, those are outward community. Cares is a response to our inward community. We realize that we were missing, we were responding to our inward needs. inside Danos community, we were missing an opportunity to invest in our community. And that's where Roots came in. You think about Roots, think about a tree, having a strong foundation. How can we invest in building a strong foundation within our organization? And that's where Roots came from, where we want to, what better way to invest in our community, our Danos community, than building strong families? So we're sponsoring camps, financial programs, piece of something that we're doing, helping people to learn how to manage their finances better, teaching them that. summer trips, lots of different things, and it's still new. So we're trying to find ways that we can support people. So the generosity that started way back when, now we're trying to be real intentional solving problems. But everything that we've done really started with the idea of an employee that said, we can be better. And now we've formed these committees, and these committees are made up by Danos employees. And this isn't just Danos giving the money. These are employees that are donating money to Seeds of Giving and then in turn we're able to steward it as a company and have a bigger impact because as a community we can take the resources and we can invest them together as a community instead of one person or one organization and we're taking the best ideas that come from inside the community. So it's been really neat to see the transition and the growth that's happened.

Samantha: 34:31

So there's been a lot of growth for both the business side of things, clearly, since the company started, you know, 78 years ago, but also on the philanthropic generosity side of things that has grown significantly as well. Are there, have there been any challenges or, you know, how does a company balance the business profit side of things with also maintaining that spirit of generosity and that spirit of giving to both their employees and to the community?

Hank: 35:00

You want me to go first or you want to go? Well, I was going to say things, the evolution. I was going to make a comment about the evolution and think about balancing that question. And back to 78 years ago when we were a one boat, two man operation and things evolved to a point maybe 50 years later, we got a little more sophisticated, a little bigger, and then from the second generation to the third generation, and Eric and Paul and Mark came in from working and being educated, had been all over the world. Mark had been in four or five different countries working, and his brothers from the West Coast to Houston, and one of the early questions that we had to addresses that they said, okay, we've coming home to South Louisiana, why are we here? They had already made the decision to come, but they wanted to address it formally. Why are we here? What's our purpose? What's our values? And not discounting the DNA that had run, that was running and continues to run through the company, it had to be personal for them. So, They formalized the purpose and said, besides formalizing a purpose statement, which Mark just stated, honor God, develop great people to solve challenges for our customers and our community. They said, we're going to live that out. And they acknowledged, and we acknowledged, that sometimes living out your purpose causes conflict and presents challenges. And we knew that serving the community, serving customers, being profitable, being generous is all embedded in our purpose statement. But if we did it correctly, that we would be able to live out our purpose and prosper. We are a for-profit company. So we never shied away from the fact that we are a for-profit company. But how much we make, What we do with that profit, how we reinvest it in the company and in the community to build more opportunities is real important. And I believe that when you're generous in a broad spectrum and invest properly in the community and people development and people who are maybe needy that can't ever pay back, it pays great dividends and the company profits flourishes because it attracts people who have a similar set of values, who don't mind working hard but are generous. And that translates to great customer satisfaction, which translates to repeat customers, which translates to opportunities for us to grow our company and become profitable and continue to be generous. So it's just... really a part of the whole puzzle, the whole purpose. And I think, yes, sometimes those things seem to have come into conflict, but when we can pull it off properly, everybody benefits. The customers, the community, the employees, the owners. So I think that's an important... project that we have to always stay focused on. How do we live out our purpose? Which includes being generous.

Samantha: 38:59

Thank you, Mark. I know you had something you wanted to add to that. I

Mark: 39:02

think Hank captured it well. But what I would add to is a process, what he said. Having a business, multi-generation family business that's approaching 80 years is not easy to do. And we have been... And there's no guarantee of success that it'll make it to 80 or 81 or 82 years. We have a purpose that drives us, right? We're not going to forsake our purpose in order to maintain a business. But by driving towards our purpose, we talked about DNA, we talked about values. All of those things are expressed through our business. And when we're successful as a business, we're able, we're in a position to have a bigger community impact. So that drives us on. When you're having a bigger community impact, it drives people that want to be a part of what you're doing. So again, Hank talked about how it's complimentary. It absolutely is. Again, there's no guarantee to success, but we will never compromise our purpose in order to maintain a successful company. They're complimentary. We want to make sure that purpose first. We're driving. We're going to do the right things. We're going to honor God. We're going to develop people. We're going to solve challenges in our customers and communities. And in the process of doing that, we have great people that are going to come up with great ideas, like we talked about a minute ago with Seeds of Giving. We will have people that challenge it. We have had customers and we have had employees that said, why are you giving all that money in the community? When you think about when our customers are cutting back and saying, we need rate reductions. So if we're talking about impacting the community, there's the perception, and people have actually said it, that if we're giving money in the community, our customers are gonna think that we're charging them too much. So they're gonna want rate reductions. Absolutely something we should consider. But we're not gonna stop doing the right thing. We're not gonna stop investing in the community. When we do the right thing, the right results will happen. That may mean that we continue to grow. That may mean that we have to pivot. But it's, again, very complimentary. And it's a challenge that we've had to consider and we will continue to consider. And we want the right people with the right ideas that are continuing to challenge us to do great things.

Samantha: 41:12

Employees are such a big part of the business, but the foundation, they've really, you mentioned employees' idea started the foundation, and it's now Seeds of Giving. Can you tell them a little more about that?

Mark: 41:24

Yes, Samantha, I would say Seeds of Giving, we talked about the word foundation, Hank used that, you just used that as well, Seeds of Giving. What is it? We're planting seeds, we're growing, we're having an impact. And this is a community effort. So this is not just a Danos Corporation. When the company is successful, we're able to have an impact. Yes, when the company is successful, we're able to have a bigger impact. But it's been really, really neat and encouraging to see how the employees have responded. So this could be employees that have been on the receiving end. This could be employees that have been involved in community efforts. But we've been fortunate. It's not just about dollars, it's about lives impacted, but when you think about it and when you measure dollars, more than 20% of what we give comes from the employees. So that makes me often just take a step back and think, wow, it compels me from an accountability and from a stewardship standpoint that this is not just a company writing a check. we're investing dollars, more than 20% that is given by our employees. So think about the impact that we're having, lives touched, areas impacted, partnering with great organizations and responding to needs. So it's very much a partnership that goes across all aspects of the organization and all people involved.

Samantha: 42:42

Great, anything else to add?

Hank: 42:45

I heard somebody, a very successful, businessman recently on a podcast say something that I've been thinking about for the last few days. It just happened a few days ago, but he said, dreaming is like a muscle. And he said, the more we dream, the more we develop that muscle. And he was not only a successful businessman, but a very successful businessman who was very generous And he says, we need to practice dreaming to do big things, better things, awesome things. And that includes not only growing your business, but developing people and being generous to the community and the areas where you wanna be generous. So we're gonna continue to dream And we're going to include not just the owners, but as many people as we can in our organization to dream with us how we can be successful. And we measure success not only in profit, but in generosity and in developing people. And we have to do that as a team. So we're dreaming big, and we want to include plenty of people in our dream.

Samantha: 44:11

Thank you. Thank you for letting us be a part of that dream and to continue dreaming with you.

Hank: 44:18

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to tell our story, some parts of the story. It's great.

Samantha: 44:25

I think everyone enjoyed hearing it. It's great. Great listening. Thank

Hank: 44:29

you. Thank you, Samantha.