TJ Guest Special - Social Aspects of FinOps

Today Frank and Steve are joined by TJ (Anthony Johnson), Cloud Business Manager at Box.  TJ talks to us about the new working group he's launched as part of the FinOps Foundation, Social Aspects of FinOps, as well as walking us through his journey and experiences to date.  We also briefly touch on Unit Economics which TJ has promised to come and do another episode on. 

As part of the relaunch of the Podcast under "The FinOps Guys", we'll now do two types of episodes, ones covering the news that listeners are used to, and by popular demand, special guest episodes.  Stay tuned for more of both types of episodes coming up!

Transcript

F - Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of What's New In Cloud FinOps with Frank Contrepois and my friend. 

S -Stephen old. And today it's all a bit different. 

F- Yes, we first of all we are the FinOps guys and we have a guest an illustrious guest. So please introduce yourself guest. 

TJ - Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. My name is Tony Johnson. I go by TJ. And I am a FinOps practitioner, a member of the FinOps Foundation. I have X number of certs across multiple cloud vendors. I'm a master gardener. I'm a veteran in the US and really happy to be here. 

F - That it already just sets the scene that this is going to be cool, OK? And we 
have to admit we had no clue what TJ wanted to talk about. He said he had lots of topics and he picked one before we went on air. We just say stop talking, let's start the recording. So this is what you're going to get now. So what was the census? What do you want to talk about, TJ? 

TJ - Well, and thank you for the opportunity to just kind of talk about whatever's top of top of mind here. You know, recently I, I've been a Member, I'm fairly active with the FinOp Foundation and I submitted a request for a new working group called the social aspects of FIN OPS. And it's really about, you know, kind of the behind the scenes part of Fin OPS where you know, most people are thinking about, well, how do I work with optimizations or how do I, you know, optimize my Kubernetes. It, but the social aspects of synapse is really about communication and and that's really kind of the the unsung hero of success for for fin OPS practitioners meaning that we don't talk a lot about how we communicate within our teams within the organization with our stakeholders. And I think it's an important part of Fin OPS because you need to build trust and how do you build trust. So that's typically through communication and so. I thought this was an important topic to bring up because I think there's a lot of successes that we can share amongst other practitioners to really talk about how did we build trust within our organization people to say, OK, the thin OPS team is giving us good information, it's giving us what we need to help manage the business. It's it's communicating on awareness of spend on, you know, how do we optimize this, how do we save money there? What is our. Model for building a community usage practice within the organization and whether that's reserve instances or savings plans or cuds or reserve slots for big query, whatever that is and whatever platform you have, I think it's really important to talk about. How we communicate and what manner and what plans do we have in place and and what communication channels have we used? And so I just wanted to bring that up to the Finance Foundation and a couple of people said, well, you should start working group and I'm like, OK, let's do that. So I presented to the tack and they said, OK, let's put this together. Of course you're going to read it. And I said, yes, I will. And and yeah that's how it all started and now we've got you know a couple people, I've got a 32nd slot on the next summit. So yeah it's been really fun trying to start this this whole working group and and really finding out that a lot of other people have this is an interest in and want to talk about it. So as they as they joined the working group Slack channel, it's been really interesting all the different people from all the different companies and. Just trying to, you know, figure out what's best for for them and and maybe grow some new skills and and yeah it's been, it's been great. 

S- I think it's a fantastic one because if we look at the biggest challenges out of the state of Fin OPS, it's getting engineers to take action, right? I think a lot of people kind of go right. Well, it must be processed. We need to fix the process and make them do it. But actually it's. About relationship, it's about trust. It's around people understanding and believing in in the recommendations that might be being shared. 

Yeah, 100%. 

F - I totally connect also. Well, the finOps foundation reminds us, not absolutely on every page of the website, that FinOps is a culture change and culture is really about people and communication is the way we do everything. So I'm totally thinking what you're building is absolutely positive and it's going to really impact the community and. That trust that you talk about, and it's really, in the end, we only take action. It's not due to carrot and stick most of the time. It's because 

Yeah. 

yeah, someone is asking us nicely, as as basic as it might seem so. 

TJ - Yeah. And it really fits kind of every part of what we do. We at Box just finished our little bit of our FY24 planning and forecasting of services that we're going to consume and you know units and dollars and all, but but what facilitated that moving forward as quickly as it did was. How we communicate, where we communicate and, you know, building that trust to say, you know, I'm your guy to help you build your forecast. And let's figure out together certain aspects of it, such as we did an exercise early in the year to continuously find a common unit cost across kind of the different services within the different cloud providers we use. And we use four different cloud providers. So we've got GCP, we've got a, we've got. Azure, we've got IBM cloud and that they're all, they all have different unit costs obviously. But to apply a forecast across all four cloud vendors and then apply the right unit cost to determine what we call a unit budget and then a dollar budget moving forward for forecasting, we had to build trust to ensure that we had good information to help them understand what they spent in the past and then work with them and have conversation around what do they intend to do in the future. And those conversations were what? One with, you know, VPS and directors that owned the applications and was really insightful for everybody to learn kind of how that happens. And so the whole communication process and the plan that we developed together to go through this process was really quite amazing and very, very positive across everybody. So it helps in every aspect of what you do. 

SO - Did you find, because of the organization itself and the culture that exists within box, that it was easy to get people feeling like it all aiming for the same goal, right. That's a big part of it and I know you've got great skills in bringing people together anyway, but was it maybe easier there than it would be in other places? Do you think there's there's things that. You can do in general in an organization to help make the whole process of working towards one goal together easier. 

TJ -Yeah you know it box we have an amazing culture and and it is definitely one of the one of collaboration for sure and and everybody comes to the table you know looking to collaborate looking to learn and and that's what's really amazing about our culture and it it it really promotes that type of of. Of behavior and and it's just an amazing place to work. I'm so grateful that I am I am working there but it but it really everybody did come to the table saying OK how do we do this as quickly as we can and how can we work together on this and that makes my job a little bit easier as well. I've worked at other places where it wasn't quite so seamless where you know you have people that own fiefdoms that are very hesitant to collaborate. Because they want to keep their information within their own world and don't want to sometimes even share that, right? I was working at a large financial institution a couple of years ago and they they really did not want to share any forecasts because they didn't think it was of interest to anybody else but them. And so getting something done was much more complex and needed to use all of my skills, dare I say to. To build that trust to get them to share some information and eventually we did and and they did. And you know I think what was different back then is that it was in person. So you could actually go and talk to somebody face to face. I think it's a little bit more complex doing stuff over zoom and building those relationships that way. But again it has to take two people to be open to the conversation and I think that's it. That's a big part of of building that trust that that people are. Open to that and and they want to work with you. 

F -So for people listening now it's a new they were asking really good questions. You said it's how to communicate, what channel, what communication channel to use. But I will start is what would be the first steps you would recommend someone who is just got their FinOps responsibilities either officially or not officially and they need to build that networking and starting building that. Relationship and trust. How would they? So how would you recommend them to start? 

TJ- Well, what I do when I first start out is identify all the stakeholders and then I build a communication plan. So what does that mean? So I I know we have certain objectives over the next, you know, quarter or year and I start building a plan to to really look at how I can contribute to their success and what does that mean. So I'm going to build awareness, I'm going for different datasets that they need to make decisions. I'm going to help them save money on their budget basically through experience and tools. And then we figure out how are we going to communicate, is it really just going to be a series of zooms? Is it going to be through slack channels, is it going to be? Face to face is it going to be. And so you gotta figure out what that Channel is, right? And and different channels have different types of information that you're communicating. You know, Slack is kind of the more direct message, instant kind of communication. You know, if you have different decisions that you have to make and you have time, then maybe it's done through, you know, e-mail or you post something up on a confluence page for them to respond to or give them instructions on what the process is. And so it depends on what you're communicating will kind of dictate what the channel is. 

SO - I think it's it's important to remember that. A FinOps is about helping people. And I think sometimes people miss that or forget that and they think FinOps are bugging them or pointing out they're doing wrong. But if you go in, you know, going to Frank's question, you go in and you kind of go, right. How do I successfully implement myself as a practitioner in this organization? It's just remember that FinOps is there to help, and it's there to help the organization understand and manage their costs and get the best value out of cloud, but with the shift to cloud. The responsibility for spend moves right and so you've got these people who are accountable for spend or certainly responsible spender they're accountable is dependent on the business who are really in a position of risk. You know it's it's not unheard of and myself and frank have been in organizations we've seen this where a. Environment has been maliciously attacked and the load of spot GPU's been used, and people have gone Bitcoin mining, right? And suddenly this individual person's lab account, for instance, has got 100 grand worth of spend on it, right? FinOps is there to help people and see this early, understand it early, but also just to feel comfortable with the responsibility they have for the capability of spending within a second. And so if you go in with that mindset that you're trying to help people, trying to help them understand, try and help them control what is now within their responsibility and what they are actually directly impacting to the customer and actually also helping them understand the value of what they're doing to the company, then I think it's a lot easier if you go in straight away and and. Feel very corporate. Feel very I'm trying to hit this target for the company. Then you're gonna hit that resistance that we talk about and and you're gonna miss that piece I think because you're missing the social aspect of actually you're in a position to really help people. You're in a position where you hopefully have the understanding and the visibility and the time to give people better information that will help them do their jobs better. And hopefully if you do that in the right way, people will actually appreciate what you're doing and that's a really great way of starting. And you have seen that of my own kind of practitioner time as much as my management time, where actually if you just go in that mindset makes a big difference. 

TJ - Yeah, I agree. I mean one of the one of the first things that we do from an awareness perspective is we institute anomaly detection and then how do we alert those those anomalies to the individual, your respective owners, right. And again another communication channel and other opportunity to communicate and and I think that's important you know, you know you should be leveraging. Every opportunity that you have from a communication perspective to build that trust to say yes, I can help you you know with with this issue, let me, let me see what the data has that that that we can support you with and help you make a decision around that. And so yeah, I think that's right on target there and and sometimes we start off with oh by the way you're 200% over over budget or something, right and let me help you bring that down through. Optimization of right sizing of resources or purchasing committed usage or other other tactics that we can use right now. For example at Box we we've identified over forty different tactics that we can use, right. So it's everything from policy changes, it's it's you know, right sizing, it's you know having contract negotiations, you know for specific products you know I talked about. When I spoke at the FinOps X on unit economics, one of the things that we talked about was, you know. You know, unit cost is not necessarily unit economics, it's a component of unit economics and and one of the things that you want to leverage when you're doing procurement. Is is your unit cost right? And so you know you do the contract on how you consume the cloud and just don't take what you're given at face value because it may not relate directly to how you consume the cloud. And so we use those kinds of communications with procurement with different teams to really see how we can apply savings. And so those are all components of kind of what we do at box and really help our internal customers focus on. Our internal partners focus on on helping them be better at managing their business. 

Really cool. 

F - Down one thing I've seen which is again sounds potentially obvious, but it is to take the time to listen to people before, because they probably don't know what you do FinOps when you are in it, you just feel that everyone knows about it and everyone, everyone has a clue what you're talking about. And then just. I've seen that just getting their understanding what people are doing, starting by listening and then moving to talking and defining in their terms how you can help really bring that trust. Up a notch. It's that listening thing which is very hard to do, especially for me. I always want to talk. He gets really extraordinary results. 

TJ - Yeah, and you know what's funny is that we were having a conversation, A-Team conversation. Around um. An announcement that we had made about, so this is about sustainability and our our SG team had just published their latest version of their annual report. So So ESG is environment, social and governance. So it's the CO2 emissions kind of stuff that organizations talk about. And we were just talking about it and it's like, well, we should. And this is. Probably February or March of this year we should do something to help them and what can we do? And then, so it turned into just a comment in a team meeting to now a full blown project where we're now creating reports for the ESG team to understand our CO2 missions across all of our cloud providers. And you know, coming up with this standability number because you know we are the content cloud, right, so we are there's a lot of storage. That we have. And So what is our CO2 emissions on cloud storage, for example, right? So we are now able to calculate that um and and and continue to to manage that and and optimize that right. And so if we optimize our storage and our policies around storage and how we do things, we are able to reduce our CO2 emissions which is a great thing to say. And and within our organization you know from a cloud perspective nobody understood that we could we could do that today right. So those are. All conversations that start off, you know as a comment in the turn into now a project where you know we're producing quarterly reports now in our CO2 emissions for our for our cloud consumption. And eventually the goal with that is to then go back to our customers and be what's called the scope 3 for the greenhouse gases. There's the greenhouse gas protocol that's a global initiative that a lot of organizations use and there's three scopes. The first two are more internal based on your own. Data center stuff and then three is kind of your supply chain and we are part of that supply chain for our customers. So we want to be able to give them the CO2 emissions for the services they consume from us as box, right. And so you know this again turn from a conversation into now this project where our goal by the end of this year is to offer to our customers the CO2 emissions they consume by consuming our services. So just really great open communications. And you know our willingness to start new projects that really haven't been done before and just amazing collaboration within the organization. 

S - That's really interesting and it's just worth noting actually we're going to be having a mark on doing a sustainability talk soon because it is so high in people's minds. It's something of big interest to myself and Frank. So it's great to search on that because I think you can't really be doing anything in French without talking about sustainability at the moment. I just like to take a side sidestep. I think it would be really interesting to listeners.  I'm going to start this by saying actually some of the most socially wonderful people I've met in my career so far. And this includes me having a background in hospitality, in in cheffing, in sales, and doing all sorts of different things. But some of the most socially ones people I've met are in finOPS. And I think a lot of people assume that finOPS people are, you know. Excel Wizards and just spend our time with spreadsheets and that we don't like speaking to people right. But that hasn't been proven at all in my experience and and generally it seems to draw and I think it's because it's a niche and it's innovative and it's new. It seems to draw really really interesting people and I include you in that J in the times we've met Rita couple of years ago and you know stayed in touch and good friends with Frank who therefore makes you a good friend of mine. And I think people would be really interested in in your journey and how you got into finos and how. The social skills that you have and that you talk about and you know the social aspects have made you as successful as you are. You know what? What have they enabled you to do because you've kept that in mind because you're so naturally do? 

TJ - Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. You know it's an evolution right. It's not something that I started off you know trying to get to my, my first I want to say my first career is in finance, right. And so you know typically finance state of yourself, you do your numbers, you like you said you do your spreadsheets and and you know you're in your little bubble you know you have a very repetitive cyclical work product that you produce and. And it just, it seems to never stop and and that's kind of wanna move away from from the finance aspect because I was doing you know, closing the books every month. I was a staff accountant at Warner Brothers. I was a chief accountant for another company that did a lot of. Secret stuff for the DoD and so there was a lot of reporting and a lot of stuff that had to happen with that and you know the detail oriented part of my brain was very satisfied with that. But the the social aspect was was not so much. And then I moved into financial accounting software, which I really got kind of heavy into. I mean I was, I'm a little older than probably most of your listeners perhaps, but you know I was doing Lotus on an I. Um, you know, PC, right. And so I've been doing this stuff for a very long time from a cost based analysis kind of financial perspective. And then I got into the accounting software which led me into candidly the hardware side of business over time. And then I worked for IBM for a number of years and was blessed to travel the world on their dime and help people understand this new thing called ecommerce in the 90s. And and so it just got to a point where I moved into a position where we were starting to use cloud. I've been a consultant on and off and that's where the sales part of me comes into play as well. And believe it or not, kind of as a finance person, you are a little salesy in kind of what you have to do sometimes. But yeah, so I just moved into from accounting software to consulting and I've been consulting on and off. Within Fin OPS, I've been doing this for a decade already. And so, probably more than a decade now. And so, you know, one of my first. Contracts I've saw was a a Facebook contract for cloud consumption and this was in the early 10s, two thousand 10s and so looking at a lot of different things. My career has been, uh, what I think is a very smooth evolution from finance to financial software to the hardware side of that. And you know, I've helped design data centers, I've helped build out data centers. Pretty much anything you can do on it. I'll probably done you know early career I was pulling wires through walls as well right. So and I settled and found fin OPS and not settled but I settled down to find Fin OPS and I just loved it because it fed my financial analysis part, but also the fluidity of cloud and you know kind of the newness and it's always kind of evolving and it's just really attracted me to this and. Just love it and I can sit here and talk of the next three days on it if you want, but just been a great, great evolution in getting to this point. 

S - I think, and you know, I can't how the saying goes, but basically your career always makes sense when you look back on it. But if you're at the beginning, you'd have no idea how you got to the end. And I think we've all had that. And I think that's what makes finOps so interesting every person you speak to. And hopefully as we do more of these interviews, everyone has such a vastly different story. I you know I've got I'm a chef. You know Frank used to live on the desert Island. You know you would finance you know Web Brown who was on previously you know he's he's been you know deep dark software engineer side and it's it's totally random the kind of people and it's actually that community and the fact that if you just go and ask a question in FinOps foundation or in other forums you actually will get such a breadth of different thoughts and answers. Because it's got such a diverse community in terms of its backgrounds, which I think it's fantastic. 

TJ- And I agree. And I for me I find most of the most successful ones. Always had the same trait of being very detail oriented. And and yes they can be very social but they can also be very detail oriented and a lot of the like my mentor which is a Brent Eubanks and Frankie and Brandon know Steve if you know Brent you know I'm lucky enough to now work with him every day. So for me that's that's just a fun opportunity to to continue to learn and grow. But yeah I mean the the social component of this is really something that is not I don't want to say not normal but. It's not intuitive to an IT person to have a very social component to what they do, although. If you move into the fin OPS part of it, um. A lot of people are very social right and it's this the the approach they have. I mean take Joe daily for example. You know he is just this this ball of energy that you wanna talk to for a long time and and he's so knowledgeable in the space as well. But I mean he's just a very I would call him somewhat extrovert 
but but he's very gregarious and and not at all what you would think of of a financial IT person minded. The right kind of thing and it's just you find so many individuals like that that have just a unique perspective on things that this is really why I enjoy the space. 

F - And I'm going to take this slightly going down to say to us two very, very important questions or one very Lotus 123 on DOS. On windows. 

TJ- Uh. So I want to say early version of Windows, but there was a version of DOS in in the company, yes. 

F -I think that was the first soft to someone installed on my computer at the time, so it tells you what's on. And the other thing which was quite a I can imagine now everyone, some people will just be super excited to go on a meeting with TJ because something is going to happen. But how do they feel if every meeting with CJ generates 3 new projects, very interesting ones, is that what happens in box? 

TJ - Um, you know we are we're fairly early in our cloud journey and I think that's why both Brent and I are here and we're really help here to to help guide the organization and and I'd like to think we do a pretty good job with that and you know it's just there's so much to do still right that we're we have all these ideas and we just can't do them all and so you know we as a team look at you know. What do we, what do we feel is the most important that we can contribute to the organization as a whole and and where are we going to make a difference to the organization? And you know with that kind of approach we find very successful projects that emerge and we have a great team of people that are fantastic at what they do. And so, you know, we actually have a team of almost 10 people on and off 10. It's usually 9 to 10. And so that's a fairly decent sized finops team, right? And and you know we're, we're able to do a lot, but there's a lot to do, right. And so that's the challenge that we have as prioritizing and making sure that we're again contributing to the organization as best we can. 

F -It's really cool. 

SO - Just conscious of time and the fact that we could chat forever and I don't know if the listeners can listen forever. Going back to where we started this and the exciting news that you started the new working group, what are the things you're hoping will come out of the working group? And maybe also to bolt onto that question, what kind of people would you like to come and help? 

TJ- So I I am very open to all, all people coming in and with all very backgrounds because we're all going to have different experiences around communication. Some are going to be better than others, some are going to be different. And you know I am open to everybody first of all. Secondly, the outcome that we're trying to get to is I'm looking to. Do a couple of things. One, I would like to see a fin OPS communication plan that is a a broad, I don't say a necessarily generic plan, but an overarching plan that would give somebody a starting point of how to build their own plan. #2 think um, trying to trust building models. You know what, maybe scenario based to help people you know navigate through situations that they come across and maybe options to take. Know if certain situations come up. You know I have, I have done, um, diversity training, personality styles training, emotional intelligence training. I've gone through a lot of this as a consultant to be better at what I'm doing so I can relate to, you know, my clients better, but also be a better salesperson and understand, you know, kind of what are the the things that this person is looking to achieve, whether it's professional or personal and. Try to help them get there, you know, through whatever my network, through whatever I can help them with. And that has always been helpful and successful from a sales perspective and then really kind of getting that down to how do I do that internally for my internal partners, right. And so those are all things that I 
have kind of used as a skill set to build over time. That got me to the point where we can do a lot in a very short period of time and we can build trust quickly. 

SO -That's really interesting. I remember I was, I think I was chatting to a guy I used to be the head of training at Google, really, really top guy, did a training course with them, some beers and he he stressed this app, I think it's called approach where. When you're dealing with someone that you maybe struggle with you can answer some questions on their behalf and it tells you, it kind of guesses their personality type and and maybe what you're getting wrong and what will work with them, it won't. And and for people that maybe haven't got that experience in how to deal with very different personality types in a, you know, if you can't go and get that training, which is so valuable. And you know me and Frank have been saying business. I mean frank like reading up on this stuff, it's kind of an area of interest to us. But actually that was a real quick cheat guide. And that I used to kind of give to to sellers, just hey have a look at this go and answer this question with this IT manager is nothing like you as your big gregarious sales self and see what kind of things they need, what reassurance this person needs to feel better connected to you. 

TJ - Yeah. And there's so many tools out there. I mean for personality styles, there's one called disk, there's colors, there's another one called taking flight. I mean there's so many that identify the four or five major personality styles that gives you insight on on what motivates them. You know, how would they make a decision and and they're pretty spot on actually. And that's that's kind of scary that I don't say everybody's predictable, but the majority of the time they're. Consistencies across everybody that that can be predictable in some level understanding what motivates somebody, identifying their style really builds that relationship quicker, right? And so for me that was a really interesting kind of aha moment, let's say maybe 8-10 ago. I started really learning this more and more and and it really helped accelerate the trust building and helped accelerate, I wanna say the the sales cycles and and stuff like that. But it helped build the relationship, which was great because they understood me, I understood them and now we can work together better. 

SO - You can learn a lot about yourself. If you do want these things on yourself, you can actually learn a lot about why something's annoy you and stuff. That's what I found, that my when I'm under pressure, like I've got quite a standard mask where I'm quite easy going and collaborative. But actually if I'm really under pressure, I can really, really direct and it can be a real shock for people. I mean, when me and Frank worked together, Frank absolutely found that it would normally we're so collaborative and then suddenly I've got a time pressure and I'm a bit of an A hole and. You know, suddenly it's a very different Steve. And then we have a chat after work and I'm back to normal, Steve. It's like, what's going on? And like, I was just trying to get it done. That was, you know, and I had to learn that about myself. That actually just getting it done doesn't mean I should change how I deal with people because I've worked really hard on how I deal with people the rest of the time, and it can be a really interesting one. Any final questions from you, Frank? 

F - No, not really. Now I don't have a final question. That was extremely I have notes all over the place. I want to go in the channel, so I invite everyone who is a practitioner, practitioner to go to the channel discover, talk with TJ. By the way, bombard him. He is an absolutely amazing person to talk with. So yes, Wealth of knowledge and experience. to spot yeah, spot him at add events. Let's go. The chat is going to be amazing, so that's that's the tip for. 

TJ - Very kind. Thank you. 

SO - hopefully, TJ, we can get you back in the future to talk about unit economics with some of the work you've been doing there as well. I think lessons would 

TJ - Yeah, love that. happy to do that. You know, we've come a long way. 
We're a second Sprint of that working group. I Co lead that one and that one's really kind of, you know, kind of tugs on the heartstrings there because it has a lot of financial components to it and really gets you to a point where you can really make the big decisions for the organization with the unit economics measurement. And you know that's just an amazing part of of contributing to the organization and how to make it better. 

SO - I think it's one of the most exciting parts of FinOps units economics. It unlocks so many things and if someone gets their mind around it properly and learns about some of the tactics of implementing it, the value as a practitioner you can bring. Just quadruples overnight, I think. I think it's massive. 

TJ- the value of the organization does the same thing. 

F - it is the kind of thing that I when I think it conceptually, I say, oh, it's reasonably easy and I am sure it is so full of details I'm just happily ignoring. So I went into some of the details and then discover, yes, how complicated that is. But yeah, the initial thing is, yeah, well, you just take the cost divided by the amount of stuff done. 

SO - Gotta start somewhere, right? It's 

TJ - Yeah, I mean that's kind of the the the basic evolution that you start with, right. I have a maturity process that I built that is around that whole thing, right. And so 
when we talk about unique economics, it's either going to be engineering based, it's 
going to be finance based, it's going to be operations based and you know so you have you have a ton of different kind of measurements and people mostly start with the engineering unit economics, right and or cost to serve right. It cost X amount of cloud infrastructure to serve a customer, right. For example, there's a cost to produce 
which is the non production cost which some people call the R&D cost too. But I mean so you go through all of these different measurements and they all can impact the organization in different ways as well. This is a lot of fun and again I'm happy to talk about that on another one whenever you're ready. This has 



Well, thank you so much for your time, TJ. 

It's been great speaking to you and fun catching up 

SO -and and we really did tell you that we don't do any preparation and now you see that that's absolutely true. 

TJ - it's absolutely true. 

SO - Absolutely true. We don't even know if the sound effects are going to work. 

TJ - No, it's it's all good. You guys are awesome. So thank you. 

SO -Perfect. Thank you so much. And we hope to be speaking to you all soon. Everyone will be doing a news episode that will be coming out shortly soon 
as well. And then we've got loads more of these interviews coming. So thank you so much for listening. So bye for now for me, Stephen old. 

F - And me, Frank 

TJ- Thank you guys, much appreciated.