220: Leverage Co-Branded Collaborations with Chad Jenkins

Chad Jenkins, President and CEO of SeedSpark, is motivated by natural curiosity and a passion for creating exponential value through unconventional thinking and collaboration. We learn about Chad’s journey from serial entrepreneur to the head of SeedSpark, where he helps businesses grow exponentially. Chad explains his Before/After Collaboration Framework, which involves identifying services that create a need for your product and shares his “Just Add a Zero” philosophy, emphasizing the importance of rethinking and maximizing existing resources to achieve exponential growth.

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Leverage Co-branded Collaborations with Chad Jenkins

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast and my guest today is Chad Jenkins, the President and CEO of SeedSpark, a consulting firm that helps businesses grow exponentially by applying unconventional thinking. He is also the author of Just Add a Zero. Chad, welcome to the show.

CHAD JENKINS: Steve, thank you very much for having me. I’m very excited.

STEVE PREDA: So Chad, you are a serial entrepreneur and now you’re partnering with businesses to help them become successful as well. So tell me about your transition. How do you go from building your own businesses to helping others and what led to this transition and how has this been going?

CHAD JENKINS: Yeah, so I appreciate that great question. Natural curiosity has driven me since a very, very early age. And you mentioned the serial entrepreneur. It is true because that’s the conventional interpretation. I would argue I’m a serial value creator. And one of the last few years, I’d say the last four years, I began to take one step back and look at the commonality in all the businesses that I’d started because I was never really emotional about the industry I was in. I was always very emotional about the value I was creating. And a couple of my strategies that I leveraged to create that value have led me to a place where I was able to really see my unique ability being applied that made it very logical for the very next step is continue doing that but at a much higher velocity. As most of the listeners probably know, when you come up with an idea that creates a lot of value and you do the proper research and understand the depth of market, it still takes a little bit of time. Even if you’ve done 50 startups, it still takes a little bit of time to set up the logo, the organization, the accounting, the website, the messaging, the branding.

I said, well, if my unique ability is to identify ways to create big value in existing industries and to grow exponentially, I can leapfrog by just collaborating with somebody who's already in the business or already in the industry. Share on X

So that was really the evolution is the awareness to understand exactly what my, and I classify it as unique value capability and contribution is, which is the unconventional thinking that creates a much bigger outcome, and then the awareness to say, okay, instead of just doing it myself, how about I leverage the art of collaboration and do it with others? So, that’s the evolution.

STEVE PREDA: Okay, so there’s a lot to unpack there. So, you talk about your unique ability, and obviously Dan Sullivan talks a lot about unique ability and something that where you add the most value in and how you can focus on that.

CHAD JENKINS: Yes, sir.

STEVE PREDA: So, tell me a little bit about your unique ability and what it is, and is it the creating the collaboration or is it something else and then the next step is the collaboration? And then we’ll talk about your collaboration framework as well.

CHAD JENKINS: Yeah, I appreciate that. You’re exactly right. Unique ability, which I invested time, effort, energy, and am so appreciative to Strategic Coach and Dan Sullivan, specifically, because the core concept of unique ability has been very empowering to me. The practical applicability of my unique ability is my unique value contribution. And you’re asking specifically of that. So it’s awesome that my unique ability is to be able to look at someone’s existing resources in their industry, their relationships, how they create value, and see ways to combine it, take the same exact resources, but combine them differently to create additional value. And for me, that is the core definition of collaboration. It’s when unique value is created when two or more people, places, and things are combined. So my unique ability is to be able to do that, not specifically from a standpoint or perspective to go break into a new market, launch a big marketing campaign, expand manufacturing, buy a new building, buy another business. I’m like, okay, maybe, but first and foremost, let’s look at everything that you have at your fingertips, understand how we might be able to recombine it to create more value and serve, this is another one of Dan’s language and concepts, your hero target. So ultimately, hero target stands for the ones that don’t know, who do you want your business to be a hero to? So when I’m working with my businesses, industries, or other business owners around the world, I’m always looking at it from a perspective of what do they have immediately at their fingertips, how could we recombine it, repackage it, remessage it, add enterprise value to their organization, all from a standpoint of creating more value for their hero target. That is my unique ability.

STEVE PREDA: Yeah, love it. Love it. So, Chad, can you give an example when you identified people, places, and things and recombined them and created more value? So give me an example of the recombination.

CHAD JENKINS: Sure, sure, sure. I’ll use one of my older businesses. This is started in the beginning of maybe late 90s, 99, or 2000, 2001, somewhere along in there because it was the great dot-com bubble, but nobody told me and I was uneducated so I didn’t know that that wasn’t the best time to start a business. Actually, what I found out is it’s always the best time to start a business. I had recognized there was a commonality at that time. Many organizations were moving into wireless communications. I as well had began to expand wireless communications for another business I owned. But I’m drawn to friction in any industry because, again, driven by natural curiosity, my attraction is friction. In that particular industry, what I had at my fingertips was the wireless carriers would change packages every month, literally every 30 days. They also metered, like today we have unlimited. At that time you did not. If you sent too many text messages, you were going to pay a big bill. Even at that time, if you talked too much, you would pay a big bill. Another fact is all of my folks had to know those rate plans. We did have to understand how to read a wireless bill, and the commonality of friction in that industry was everyone’s bill was messed up. So I just looked at the facts, recombined it, and said, okay, if we have to know the rate plans, we have to understand how to read a bill, and we have to know them so that we sell new phones, how about we just add value to those that buy phones from us and offer a service to make their bill as low and as cost-effective as possible, matching the new rate plans that come out every 30 days. So I’ve got expanding opportunity driven by a third party. I don’t have to invest in that. They come up with new rate plans all the time. And I’m not having to increase or put effort into the variability. My clients are growing. They’re using more minutes, less text messages, more data, less minutes. So there’s always this matchmaker that you’re able to do, and by doing so, you’re adding exponential value to an existing relationship. And who would you like to buy your phone from? The guy that’s on the end of the street paying a lot for retail, or the guy who’s going to make sure your bill is right? So just by taking that particular approach to an industry I had never been in before, I was able to take over a large swath of the Southeast and be one of the largest, at that time, Nextel distributors. Even though it wasn’t about distributing Nextels at all, it was around creating value for those who use Nextels and as a byproduct of that, who do you want to buy your phone from?

STEVE PREDA: Oh that’s fascinating. So you basically help them choose the package and then was that package re-chosen every 30 days when new packages came out?

CHAD JENKINS: As it needed to be. So in one particular, there’s a production home builder who took care of their accounts across the entire Southeast. They were always adding people, taking away people.

At the same time, the carriers are changing the rate plans to encourage net new subscribers. Share on X

And I was in the middle of playing matchmaker, well, my staff was, looking at the trending patterns of usage and then understanding what opportunities the carrier provides you. This happens today with your local internet provider. So let’s say Spectrum, an example, they come out with a new plan, but you’re on last year’s plan. They don’t pick up the phone and call you and tell you, they’d be delighted for you to take advantage of this new plan. So I was providing that level of service. And of course, in-house customer service. So none of my clients called the carrier, they called someone who they knew their first name. And they executed it out. And we stood behind those changes to make sure that the monetary impact on their bill was actually what they realized. If they didn’t, it was on us. We had, of course, a guarantee. Saved millions upon millions of dollars for those clients and became a $20 million recurring business, which I am known for recurring businesses. I really like them.

STEVE PREDA: Yeah. Awesome. So that’s a really good service. So people are always paying the lowest possible bills and without having to monitor it themselves, and making the administrative hassle of moving themselves to a different package. That sounds pretty cool. Let’s talk a little bit about the framework that we discussed before this pre-call, which I like because it’s a very simple framework, and it was also applicable apparently to all kinds of businesses. So you call it the before-after collaboration framework? Can you talk about how that works and how to discover those collaboration opportunities that exist in businesses in a systematic way?

CHAD JENKINS: Indeed. So we spoke previously about my simplified definition of collaboration. One, I’d love it if anyone would ever be able to tell me how anything in the future doesn’t involve collaboration. Literally all future involves collaboration. So with that fundamental understanding and a very simplified definition, we want to make it operational. Now, I’ll go over that definition once again. So it’s the unique value that’s created from the combination of people, places, or things, at least two or more. So if you apply that to your business, no matter really what type of business you’re in, at least I’ve explored hundreds of different models and have been able to direct this so far, when it is what you do to deliver value to your hero target, something comes before and something comes after. So very similar to me recognizing the patterns in that wireless industry, you’re able to do it for your industry. Whatever it is that you do do, when you deliver value to your hero target, consider what they were doing just before they picked up the phone and called you. You currently have clients. Do a little bit of introspection and say, where did they come from? What was the commonality? Were they working with financial advisors before? Was it trust attorneys? Were they working with architects? Because I’ve done this, as I mentioned, for hundreds of different businesses. And just the same, whenever you do the best job that you can do, and you really deliver a lot of value to your hero target, they inevitably, very consistently, take the next step. And they engage with another business, a different product, different service. Whenever you have that awareness of what comes before you and what comes after you, that begins to really uncover a limitless opportunity to replicate and even sometimes triple your sales force and your reach. So hypothetically, you may consider engaging with this person, place, or thing. And we’ll just take Wealth Advisor as an example as one that comes before you. There’s some prereqs to making this sustainable and making it real. The very first thing that you would have to do and I’ve coined this strategy of “Name the baby.” Steve, if you had a baby and I had a baby and we didn’t name it, which is something we would not do, but if we didn’t name it, I’m not sure whose would be whose. Yours may have a little bit more hair. So we don’t do it personally, but in our business we do it all the time. We create intellectual property, especially small to medium-sized businesses on a daily basis but they don’t name it. Well, I would tell you it’s very paramount to go beyond just a really good conversation, what I would classify as a gentleman’s agreement, with your prospective collaboration partner that comes before your hero target’s journey. Whenever you engage with that, hypothetically, we said, wealth manager, you would want to give your value creation a name. The reason that you would want to consider doing that is you begin to leave the competition behind. So one fundamental rule, and we’ve already kind of validated the fundamental rule, is you have to have the same hero target. That group that comes before you, those wealth managers, they have to want to serve and provide value to the same hero target. Well, that they are if they’re coming before you. You’ve already checked that box. But validating that they do, and then naming the combination of your product and service combined with their product and service creates the new unique value that I talked about at the very beginning of the definition of collaboration. So now you have a unique value that’s been created and you named it. And you’ve empowered not only yourself to talk to your sales team about this new value, you’ve empowered him and his sales team, you’ve empowered his digital presence, his website, his LinkedIn, his marketing, his messaging. You’ve done the same. But then as well you have empowered your hero target. Because if you’ve done this correctly, and in the countless examples you can look backwards, even in your daily life today, where you engage and purchase one thing from one party, but if you look backwards you used to purchase that two or three times from two or three different parties. So you’re also empowering the hero target. You’re making it, there’s another fundamental rule of business, easy for people to do business with you. But you’ve done that by combining two products and services. Now if this goes on for years and years, and hypothetically you’ve got it on your website, he as well, people are starting to call in and ask for that product or service that combines both what you do and what he does. Keep it in mind, I did not say you had to do anything different. I’ve said that specifically two or three times now. He did not have to change what he does, nor did you.

You created something that carries a new name, a new brand, which is also intellectual property in the marketplace. Share on X

Your competitors cannot offer it. And over time, you may end up changing an industry. The reference that I talked about where you buy one thing from one party, but then you look back in your history and used to buy it from two or three parties. Now you’re just being the one who’s bringing that level of innovation to your industry and potentially even the other industries, all from a standpoint of creating value for the hero target.

STEVE PREDA: So essentially, you integrate with your supply chain, so to say, and you make it an organic way for your supply chain to sell your product because it becomes an extension of their product.

CHAD JENKINS: I like the way that you put that. You’ve integrated your hero targets value chain. It might be even a more expanded way to say it because it’s his supply chain, correct? On our side, I’m grabbing what comes before and after and I’m combining them to deliver it to the hero target.

STEVE PREDA: Yeah, I mean, of course it’s their supply chain. It’s also our supply chain, I guess, because it generates business for us. That we have partners who will refer business to us or sell the product that we co-branded, whatever it’s called.

CHAD JENKINS: Yeah, the co-branding is very important to name it because if not, this is a referral relationship. It’s not a true collaboration. Remember, in collaboration, we have to create new, unique value by the combination of people, places, and things. So in this example, we took two operating companies with uniformity in the same hero target, we combined them and created new value and named it as well. Great point.

STEVE PREDA: So what is the benefit of your referral partner that you collaborate with and create this co-branded product? Why would they give you an exclusivity, basically? Because when they co-brand, then essentially they are making a commitment to refer all their business to you rather than some to you, some to others. So how do you create that? How do you motivate them to do that? What’s in it for them? Do they get a higher piece of the pie, bigger piece of the pie because it’s a branded product, more premium price? What’s the logic behind there?

CHAD JENKINS: There’s not really a referral. I want to make that clear distinction though. When they’re engaged, remember we gave it a name, so this product or service that exists on their website, they can’t do it by themselves. I can’t do it by myself. I have to engage them, we have to deliver the value together or the product or service that the hero target wants to buy isn’t real. So, ultimately we’re not referring back and forth because that would literally just be a referral agreement. Here, you’ve actually created something that is net new. It’s intellectual property. It’s a new product or service that your hero target is buying. I appreciate you making that distinction as well. Now, why would they do that? My goodness, because they’re doing what they do. Guess who’s doing what they do very similar to the way they do it? Everyone else in their industry. That’s who’s doing it. Same messaging, same language, same positioning, same potentially even value proposition in some instances. Well, here they’ve recognized the value proposition that can be delivered to their hero target in combination with the logical pattern of the hero target’s behavior when they do a great job. So, first and foremost, they have to do a great job. If not, whenever we’re delivering this product or service, it’s not going to work very well because they’re not good at what they’re doing. The reason that they would do is because you began to leave competition behind. This product or service has been named. No one else can deliver it. Now, they as well, they could subscribe to the methodology. They themselves could go and find another collaboration partner, and kudos to them if they have that level of thinking, and they themselves could begin to evolve an industry over time. That is not what I see in the marketplace. It’s more of arrows in, me, me, me, look at all the great things I do with my product or service. When the hero target typically doesn’t care about that, they only care about the outcome. So you’re elevating yourselves from a level of thinking to really focus on the hero target. And from a standpoint of how do you make it easy for people to do business with you, well, you create more value.

You become an attractor, not a pull, they get pushed towards you because of the value they're going to get from engaging with you. Share on X

You’re just bringing some partners along to do and deliver that value, which everybody wins, right? Originally, we talked about what comes before and what comes after. And I want to make this distinction as well. I have many of them that come before, and I have many that come before and after. Those are all unique products and services that combine the secret sauce of what each one of these organizations do to combine together to create new value. But no, you’re not beholden to just one. In essence, in your references, why would they want to engage with you only? And I’m saying, not only. Hopefully, they’ll subscribe to the methodology. They’re also focused on the hero target and in other elements and categories in their business, they began to look beyond just their product or service to deliver value to their hero target and they began to create collaborations with others.

STEVE PREDA: Love it. So, Chad, give me an example where you did this so that we have some actual products and people can visualize what that looks like, how did you name it, and you know, maybe if you can give an example where you had an incoming collaboration and outgoing collaboration as well, that would be the best.

CHAD JENKINS: Absolutely. So I’ll take it in an example of my construction company. General Construction Company, we do interior office upfits very similar to actually this office that I’m sitting in, all over maybe a couple hundred a year. What we realized is many of those interior office upfit hero targets, they didn’t do a lot of planning beforehand. It could be more like back of the napkin sketches. It was a horrible idea. Where we want to plan and give pricing on an actual set of plans. And we much prefer to do that. I’m very fortunate to have quite a few experienced guys that can give just a ballpark number, but that ballpark number always moves around. So we wanted to solve that friction. And by doing that, we began to engage with other architectural design design firms, interior office design firms specifically, and we combined a product or service and gave it a name, and it’s used in that industry. So that was the first one. This has been quite a few years ago. That worked. It was wildly successful. My guys were able to get better numbers. Of course, the interior design firm was, they were able to get not free clients, because they’re in collaboration with us, but whenever that product or service was requested by the hero target, we both came to the party. Well, everybody benefited. They had really good communication with a GC who they’ve been working with for a long time. We, of course, got way better drawings from the get-go. Therefore, we were able to give a much better number and set proper expectations with that hero target. So that’s one. You ask for one that goes beyond. So now, hypothetically, a hero target was introduced, maybe to us, maybe to the architectural firm, it doesn’t matter because for the product or service that we created, we both get to show up. But we look beyond that. That’s afterwards, there’s maintenance interior that needs to be done to your office, not heavy but it’s janitorial and things that may or may not be included with the building. So we began to create other products or services that combine not only the architectural, but then an HVAC maintenance program afterwards or an interior janitorial program specifically for that type of office that they needed and combine them as well. There was one that we did, I just remembered it. This one had interior office furniture. So, they’re getting a new office, they need to understand what the pricing is going to be, then they need to upfit it, then they need it included with furniture. You can just buy that as one whole package now. So, there’s a couple that we’ve used and they’ve been wildly successful. Because everybody was doing the same thing. We’re just adding value by combining it. It’s kind of simple.

STEVE PREDA: So the way I understand it, so you had the general contracting firm who did interior design. You collaborated with the architects. The architects sold this product that was a co-branded product of turning their blueprint into a great office, and then you back-ended that with an HVAC and janitorial ongoing maintenance service. So you were in the middle and you collaborated the front end with the architects and the back end with the service providers. That’s fascinating. That’s awesome.

CHAD JENKINS: Yeah, because if you look at it just as a physical, the hero target is just walking down the street, right? And he’s going to get to your driveway. This is where you deliver your product and service. Keep in mind, there are driveways to the left and to the right of me. Why don’t we just package it together? And instead of putting a sign out the end of the road that says Lemonade 25 cent, let’s figure out exactly what they need beyond Lemonade and make it a complete experience. Let them buy the whole thing.

STEVE PREDA: Yeah, I love it. And then you allow the person that you collaborate with on the front end to deliver more value because it’s no longer just a blueprint, but they help them get the office, the best quality, the best arrangement and so on, the service. It’s a one-stop shop and everyone can potentially benefit here.

CHAD JENKINS: So one example that was the anti of this, Steve, early in my career, I’m recognizing and drawn to this friction. Before I really began to understand the art of collaboration, I would just build new companies or I would just expand services. And some of those services were not the best at doing. We just weren’t. One of my organizations I recently rebranded because they’re pretty decent sized P&Ls, a digital marketing firm, a cybersecurity firm, a managed services company or firm, and a software organization. So I recognize frictions with small to medium sized businesses in each one of those categories. So I created an organization or built one over time that included all of those. The world doesn’t understand those so well. They understand them individually. It’s also harder to get someone with enough business acumen to see how you could combine all those to create a lot of value to the end user. I ended up rebranding all of them individually and put a layer on top that is in collaboration with each one of those individually. And now if you want to get the value of the combination of all four of those delivered, you engage with this new product or service.

STEVE PREDA: Love it. Yes, that’s bonding. So, Chad, before our time is up, I really want us to touch upon your book. I really like the title Adding a Zero. So what does that mean? Why did you write the book first of all and why did you give that title? What does adding a zero mean?

CHAD JENKINS: Sure, sure. The reason I wrote the book is to empower other entrepreneurs with the level of thinking. You likely already have everything you need to double your organization, to grow exponentially. And we talked about that a little bit, just looking at those existing resources, figuring out how to create more value. I was forced to do that at a very, very early age. So around eight to nine years old, I figured out what my father made, rough order of magnitude, annually. And I’d like to do math pretty quick, so I did the reverse math down to the minute and the hour and the day. I was like, oh, that’s not too big of a number. I added a zero to it. When you take that math back out to the annual amount, it’s a very large number. And it struck me all at the same time. I understand why people move. It’s love and fear. Some people say greed and fear. Both of those struck me at the same time. I really want for more and I feel like I don’t have anything. So fear and greed are love. By adding that zero, what it forced me to do is exactly what I do now because I’ve been trained to do. So I was on a farm and I didn’t feel like I had anything at my fingertips and that was not true at all. I had the ability to train horses. I had the ability to create revenue on a weekly basis by helping to create value for people who want to sell horses. And I did that as one of my first businesses. Then next, I created a landscape company because I did live on a farm. I had a tractor, I had a trailer, I had a truck, and I had driver’s license at 15. Thank you for the state of South Carolina. That became my first landscaping company. So even in our earlier conversation today, you’re seeing it much more mature than when I was 8 years old. But I’m doing the exact same thing. How do we create value out of what is at our immediate fingertips? One reason that I named the title of the book, that is because I did it in practice and doing it in practice made me elevate to this level of thinking. It forced me to look at things a little bit differently and I would like to empower other entrepreneurs to be able to do the same thing so that they also can grow exponentially with what they already have at their fingertips.

STEVE PREDA: So you told me there are two ways of adding a zero. You can add this at the back or in the front. So what does that mean?

CHAD JENKINS: Yeah, I appreciate that. So, when I talk about really changing the way that you look at things, most people gravitate, of course, to adding the zero at the back. It was $10 million a year. I want to go to $100 million. I made a million. Now I want to make 10. It’s a very logical way to approach it. But I’ll give an example. This is one not too long ago that I was helping an organization with. And they had 10 sales professionals in their organization. You can look at the numbers, and six were really toting the mail, they’re really producing, four were not so much. So in this leadership meeting, they were saying, oh, what can we do with these four? We need to just get rid of them, what are we gonna do, what are we gonna do? And I said, hey, why don’t I just add a zero to the front? You have 10 today, how do we create the real questions? We got all this brainpower around the room. Let’s ask some questions to create some bigger outcomes. Add the zero to the front. So instead of having 10, how do we reach our goals or surpass our goals by having one sales professional? What would have to happen? Adding it to the front, sometimes I found this even more beneficial than adding to the back. As I mentioned earlier, adding to the back is very conventional. You add it to the front and just let it sit there for a second and see what happens in the room with your leadership team. Now, sometimes this will happen. The first guy will just blab out how many different reasons there is that we would never be able to do that. And that’s okay. I study a lot on trying to research how to figure out how to leverage the way your brain works. So in this example, what if we just got onto one sales professional? Oh, everybody freaks out. Grab the whiteboard, start writing it down. Here’s the reasons that can’t ever be true. And I would say, write them on the left side of the whiteboard and write them as bullet points. And then right after that, also in the spirit of leveraging the way your brain works, write the power of unless. And then restate it and then say unless and let the folks around the room fill it out again. What happens on the right side is a roadmap to creating the outcome that you seek, which was foundationally, again, adding the zero to the front. How can we get onto one sales professional, reach this 135% growth over last year, and do it with just one? Man, what came out of that particular meeting, this is an actual meeting as well, what came out of that meeting completely changed that organization and the way they approach delivering value to their hero target.

STEVE PREDA: Yeah. So, I love this idea that come up with the objection of why it cannot be possible, which is defining all the obstacles that makes it impossible, right? And then you have the platform upon which you can build a solution to resolve an obstacle because you identified the obstacle, now you can remove it. That’s brilliant.

CHAD JENKINS: And leveraging everybody in the room and by doing it in the way that I suggested, left side, unless, right side, guess who has ownership in the outcome? Yeah. So finding ways to ask the right question, in my experience, will always yield the right answer. So I focus there, even though a lot of times in our brain we come up with the solutions, in our position as being entrepreneurs, we’re the first ones who had to come up with the solution. That’s why we became an entrepreneur. But the quicker that we mature to the place where it’s not about us, it’s about them, ask the right question, you will get the right answer. And empowering them with things like just add a zero, the power of unless, collaboration as an opportunity or operational strategy, all of those things begin to help you remove the competition, grow exponentially, and reach the pinnacle of whatever you ever sought out to do, maybe even more.

STEVE PREDA: Yeah, love the power of Unless. Awesome. So thank you, Chad. Great ideas. We talked about collaboration before, after. We talked about power of Unless, and there are other stuff that we didn’t have time to talk about, but that’s okay. If people would like to learn more about what you do, how you add a zero, how you help businesses and want to connect with you personally or with your team, where should they go?

CHAD JENKINS: SeedSpark.com is the organization, Seed the Opportunity, Spark Growth. So that’s where we partner with entrepreneurs around the world to reach the exponential growth. And chadtjenkins.com is, of course, me personally, and then for the book, justaddazero.com as well.

STEVE PREDA: Awesome, so Chad Jenkins, President and CEO of SeedSpark and the author of Add A Zero. Thanks for coming on the show, and those of you listening, think about how you can add a zero, either in the front or in the back, and how do you leverage the power of Unless and collaboration, so lots to chew on here. Thank you, Chad, for coming, and thanks for listening.

CHAD JENKINS: Thanks, Steve. I really enjoyed it.

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