Building Unbreakable Brands

Meghan Lynch (00:00):
Family businesses can often feel like what they're experiencing is totally unique. But our guest today is a family business expert who has seen it all and has the stories to prove it. He's learned that instead of having the right answers, families just need to ask the right questions and he shares some creative tips and tools to help you do just that. Plus Henry will be asking his questions as the voice of the next generation. All this and more coming up on this episode of Building Unbreakable Brands.

(00:36):
Welcome to Building Unbreakable Brands, the podcast where we talk to business leaders with a generational mindset. I'm Meghan Lynch. I'm an advisor to family businesses and founder of Six Point, a brand strategy agency that helps generational brands honor their past while evolving for the future. Today my guest is Ira Bryck, who ran the family business center at the University of Massachusetts, and its CEO Roundtables, which I belong to for some years. He now coaches business leaders and does executive search, both using an assessment tool that helps raise a person's self-awareness and ability to manage their personality. But most importantly to me, Ira is also my good friend. So welcome to the show, Ira.

Ira Bryck (01:20):
So nice to be here and that's most important to me too.

Meghan Lynch (01:24):
Awesome. I am so glad to have you on the show. And when we met, you were at the University of Massachusetts at the Family Business Center and I participated in round tables. But before you were educating and advising family businesses at UMass, you had firsthand experience actually running your family's fourth generation clothing business.

Ira Bryck (01:52):
Yes. Well before that business, when I was born, my father was working for my mother's father in the Lower East side in a wholesale bedding and bath. And I used to go in with him on Sundays, they were closed on Saturdays, they were all Jewish wholesalers, closed on the Sabbath. And I used to occupy myself with tying myself up with rope and going down the conveyor belt and all. But I did grow up in this children's clothing store since my earliest memories were working there. And my father pulled me aside at one point in my childhood and said, of my three children, you're the one that I want to join in the business. No offense to my sisters.

Meghan Lynch (02:29):
What was kind of your response in that moment? Was it something that you were looking forward to?

Ira Bryck (02:34):
I admired the way he was in the business. I still have a mental image of him behind the cash register, debonair with his sleeves rolled up and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and just being such a good conversationalist with every kind of customer. And he grew up in business. Him and his four sisters and his parents grew up above their general store near Kennedy Airport. So this is a guy that from the time he was born 93 years earlier, he was doing everything to run a business.

Meghan Lynch (03:05):
So he was 93 when he died. Oh, when he died, when he handed you the business

Ira Bryck (03:11):
That was, but even in his 10 years of dementia at the end I thought he could still go into the store and open up and make sales all day. He had so much muscle memory for business. Wow,

Meghan Lynch (03:20):
That's amazing. And I'm sure that spending time in the business had a lot of lessons and education that went along with it. But I'm curious if there's one lesson that kind of sticks with you as you think about your time there?

Ira Bryck (03:35):
I mean, I have to say, we built a reputation and we were, well first of all, we were the oldest children's clothing store in the country, so to close in our 90th year was a big thing. And we had seen other people go out of business, and this is one of a million things, but I remember that the guy down the street had gone out of business in a woman's shop and whenever anybody would come in and say, I'm so sorry you're going out of business. And he would say, if you would shop here, we wouldn't be going out of business. So I lectured my father in how to behave, how we were each going to behave as we closed and people came in, one woman came in with a communion dress that was hers like 90 years before, and we still had the same style hand smocked in the Philippines.

(04:18):
And I remember just once, somebody just before we closed after 90 years came up to me and said, you know why I shopped here? I wanted to give you my money. And I had a relationship with a lot of people's kids, even some of them little kids that I waited on grew up and got back in touch with me. One woman, one man rather, one man who had six older sisters became Aunt Barbara, the largest Tupperware salesperson in the US just doing this female impersonator role of a Tupperware saleswoman. So anyway, there's a lot of nice stuff I learned there.

Meghan Lynch (04:54):
And I'm curious when you think about, for somebody to come up and say, out of everywhere I could shop, I specifically want to give you my money. Why was that particularly meaningful to you?

Ira Bryck (05:08):
I think it's something that I've learned now intellectually, but then it was just an experience of we wanted to be in the relationship business, not in the transaction business. We had long-term relationships with kids that grew up and had kids and still shopped in our store who went to the same parochial schools that we did the outfits for, or Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, brownies that became leaders and bought their pins from us. It was just like there was a lot of relationships

Meghan Lynch (05:40):
When you were transitioning to then start working with family businesses, it feels like one of the things that you were really good at was kind of helping other people realize what they were good atC and what they were in business to do. And I'm curious if there's any particular question that you would ask them or if you were trying to help somebody figure out yours was relationship, what was their thing that they were in business for? Is there a question that you would ask them?

Ira Bryck (06:16):
Well, I would answer that by saying something that's happened recently, which is after 25 years of running the Family Business Center, I thought it was time for a change. And I had a successor who, and we worked together and we're still very good friends. And when I decided after 25 years that I wanted to do something else, I created a stop doing list, which is something that Jim Collins talks about in Good to Great, but just in terms of stop doing the stuff that's beneath you or not your high value activities. But I made a stop doing list for me of my next chapter is going to have no boards of directors, no university, no getting asses in seats, no soft money. And then I said, what's left? And it was like my favorite stuff is left and so what can I do with that favorite stuff?

(07:05):
And it was just lucky in my case that Giombetti Associates, who was always one of my corporate partners, strategic partners, I just slid right in there and started doing the kind of consulting. And I had always been a fan and did their assessment several times. But since then I've helped two other friends of mine who retired figure out what their next chapter is, what are you an expert at? What recharges you? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they went through this process and they both found exactly what they wanted to do and then instead they're both substitute teaching and loving it,

Meghan Lynch (07:43):
The perfect default retirement. So really figuring out not just what is your expertise and then also what do you not want to do. So both of those sides

Ira Bryck (07:56):
Life is too short and the idea of I hate this job and that's why they pay me the big bucks, that's disgusting. I could have been so much more successful than I was, but I chose to

Meghan Lynch (08:10):
The time that I spent in your CEO round tables, one of the things that I really felt like I learned from you is that a lot of times having the right question is more important than having the right answer. And I'm curious if you have a particular approach to asking questions, how do you come up with the right questions to help people get to those aha moments?

Ira Bryck (08:35):
There is something called a strategic question that is an art and science. And I had years ago when I first started the CEO round tables, I happened onto this person who's a friend of mine lives in Western Mass, Paul Lipkey, and he was an expert in this thing and he came in and trained me and trained the first round table and did a presentation on 9/11. Actually on the 9 11. We didn't cancel the dinner forum and everybody showed up. It was amazing. And then we just started practicing in our round table. What is a question if somebody spends five minutes talking about some challenge or pain, what is the question that's not going to be advice, that's not going to be just kind of prejudiced or biased in the way that you are prejudiced and biased. It's really going to be like 10,000 foot view, but also acknowledging that the person also lives in the weeds.

(09:29):
And so in our group that you were in for years and I had three round tables going at the same time, but yours was my favorite, of course, I'm not kidding that. What is the question that if you were just asking a question that the person would say, that's a great question and write it down. And I would say, this is the kind of thing that's going to wake you up in three days of three in the morning and you're going to all of a sudden have an aha because it's just been germinating in your head and we got really, really good at it. And then wisdom, some people are, I remember Curio, who's still my dear friend of Kitchens by Curio, he could not ask a strategic question. There was always some bit of Italian wisdom that he got from his grandmother in this little town that if you saw a picture of this town population 60, it looks like Michael Corleone is still hiding there.

(10:19):
And then he would tell this long story and I would be like, here's the strategic question, and he would be perfect and he'd move on. But really you want something that the person, it's just going to live in their head and germinate and not be judgmental and not be so specific. Anyway, it's an interesting thing and we all got good at it. And I also found when I was getting good at it, I had a teenage daughter and it was particularly effective in making my point in being heard rather than telling her, well, here's what father knows best has to say.

Meghan Lynch (10:51):
Yeah. And I think that it was definitely one of the things that made the round tables for me, and I think for everybody else who participated in them, so valuable because everybody has advice for you, but at the end of the day, only you can make the decision that you need to make. And so it gives you a nice combination of perspective and also ownership where you don't feel like you're just kind of taking orders from people and kind of lets you come to your own answer, but at the same time it does help kind of take you outside.

Ira Bryck (11:27):
Well, in the beginning, before we were good at it, somebody would come up with the most popular thing that people would complain about in these round tables is my sales manager's terrible. And in five minutes without strategic questions, the group would be like chanting, fire her, fire her. And it was not helpful. And then the person didn't want to fire her. It's my mother, whatever it is. So anyway, this was just a lot more helpful to help people think things through.

Meghan Lynch (11:56):
You are listening to Building Unbreakable Brands, the podcast all about brand stewardship and crafting an enduring legacy. I'm here with my friend Ira Bryck who pivoted from running his family's fourth generation clothing store to become a trailblazing family, business educator and advisor. Ira. I want to talk a little bit about that pivot from spending time in your family business leading that and to the point where you decided, no, I'm actually going to change courses, become an educator and advisor to other family businesses. You as part of that, you wrote three plays and those are not just plays, but also learning tools for family businesses. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the plays and also why plays as learning tools?

Ira Bryck (12:44):
So I mean there was a few reasons why I wanted to write a play. I mean, first of all, I had an assembly in my elementary school in fourth grade where I wrote this seething satire of Gilligan's Island. I could say much more about it, but I will only say the scenery was all on overhead projections. So there's a lot of shadows cast on the little island. But when I started at the Family Business Center, I went to a conference, a family firm institute, and there was a play where a real life family of actors portrayed a family that owned a florist chain and wanted to sell it. And I remember I was sitting next to the accountant that raised his hand and said to the actor that had just repeated some numbers like you can't retire and leave this to your children you want because you counted the assets three times.

(13:30):
So I turned to the guy next to me who's still a friend of mine, a business broker from around here, and I said, let's go write a play that does not have anything to do with data or right or wrong answers. It's all about emotions. And then we kind of crashed the first meeting of Pioneer Valley Playback Theater, which was like this kind of psychodrama improv and sold them on the idea of creating this play with us. And that became our acting troupe that we did two of the three plays. The third play was just me and two people portraying me and my father were the two actors. I was not an actor, somebody portrayed me. And anyways, just super effective. And also tied with that is there's case studies that I brought together a hundred people at a dinner forum and expected everybody to read this 40 page Harvard business case and had a UMass professor like go through it, a family business.

(14:23):
And most people didn't read the 40 page case. So I said, okay, we're just going to perform this right in front of you and then we're going to discuss it. And it was really interesting. And the plays were funny. Two of them had a lot of Yiddish checked by the Yiddish National Yiddish Book Center and my father, and we did them about a hundred times, including translated into four different Spanish dialects. My son, who was an actor and a dialect coach translated the expressions into Spanish into Catalan actually. And they were great and I love them. And the third one was about me and my father, which I wrote as he had declined into dementia. And it really made my sisters cry. He had stopped talking and I just put 10,000 words in his head, in his mouth. And anyways, it was really a nice experience for family. We performed them in family business centers around the US and abroad, and it really brought a lot of people into a nice conversation. I have a hundred more stories about it.

Meghan Lynch (15:24):
Is there anything specifically about the format of a play that you find particularly helpful?

Ira Bryck (15:31):
I think you see that as a family business expert. Richard Narva once said, there's no two snowflakes alike, but you can still talk about snowflakes. So there's no two family businesses alike. I've consulted to hundreds of family businesses. I've never seen the same situation exactly, but there's always been, it's also true. There's nothing new under the sun. So I just loaded the plays except the one about me and my father was really about our stuff, but loaded the plays with situations that the audience would be like. That's my life. And I just remember this one time we had been doing this one play in Southern Illinois University, and we were breaking down the set after and the play involved two identical twins, Sal and Sal and Jake, Jacob and Esau. And they had a fist fight on stage, wrestling match and all that. And somebody came up after, and I was breaking down the set with Saul, the Esau character, and he was like, now I see why everybody hates me. I'm like you. And so Tim, who played Saul, who also played me in the next play, says, so you're going to change your behavior. Whatcha are you going to do different? He goes, not a goddamn thing, but at least now I understand why they hate me. So not everybody learned as I was hoping, but

Meghan Lynch (16:47):
They had at least that moment of

Ira Bryck (16:49):
Feeling some perspective or just

Meghan Lynch (16:53):
I'd be interested to hear what other unconventional tools, because pretty creative in terms of helping family businesses think about things differently or bringing different kinds of tools to leaders. But what other kinds of

Ira Bryck (17:09):
Well, I created a series of cartoons. I can't draw. So I hired my sister who's a fine artist, and then when she got sick of doing it, I hired a guy that I found online that does business cartoons from Boulder. And those were just people, again, looking at this situation where I am not going to get into describing the cartoons, but they take some thought to get, and then when you get them, it's like a little, wow. I have a lot in common with family businesses and I have the same problem. They're funny, they're not. And then I invented a few training exercises. We would get together once a year with all the directors from North America, like 40 people. And I came up with this thing that we would do every year in over three days of sit somebody in the hot seat in the middle of a circle and they would say for five minutes something that they were facing.

(17:56):
And we all had a lot of similar challenges with sponsors in the university and difficult in sales and all that. And everybody would just ask strategic questions. I taught all the directors, had to ask strategic questions. And then we started adding to it of I just asked a bunch of people that I know that are involved in improv and psychodrama and together we kind of created this system. Well, I created it, but with their input where we would sit somebody in a chair and then they would pick somebody from that circle of their peers and put them there, and then they would role play out a situation. So when I did it with directors, I did it with psychologists that deal with family businesses. I did it several times. I just remember one highlight with this really, really clever, well-spoken psych psychologist who dealt with family businesses was standing on his chair and screaming at the client, cursing at the client in this role, play with people all around asking strategic questions of him to just sort of guide it a little bit or pause, play back, repeat, do it different. And then he sat down and he was like, I feel like I'm going to be a better therapist just from being able to scream like that. So anyway, it's an interesting training exercise.

Meghan Lynch (19:11):
Yeah, that's really interesting. And as I am kind of picturing the people who you would need to get involved in stuff like this who also knowing the folks at the family business center or family businesses that I've been involved with, it seems like there would be people who potentially would not buy into the idea of role play or seeing themselves in a play or what am I going to learn from a cartoon? Did you find that people had those roadblocks around it?

Ira Bryck (19:47):
Well, I mean, I do think that there's something about being flexible and open-minded as a person that allows you to handle conflict better. If I ever would say to a family in a mediation of like, can you just switch roles and you are blah, blah? If they could not do that, I would be like, why don't you just sell the business? It wasn't a direct line, but it was the kind of person that could not see from the other person's point of view, et cetera. And I find the family business center, I mean, we gathered together people from all across the political spectrum. The stories about that too, that I won't tell, but just the way that a lot of people felt safe in that room felt like they could use each other. I remember I did one thing where this couple that had a business in Holyoke still do, they just said, how do we redesign our facility? There's so much waste in here and when we should move. And I got six people together that had dealt with space planning in their business, and we just sat together and planned out the guy's business and he threw out half the stuff and moved this over there. And you could read the testimonial on my website. He was so pleased. He says, I was about to hire a really expensive expert to do this for me, and all I had to do was buy six people a sandwich.

Meghan Lynch (21:05):
I feel like you're very good at tapping into that collective knowledge and then bringing it together in a way that is organized in a very light way, not so organized that it feels prescribed, but yeah, just kind of bring people together to bring the collective wisdom, but still have it lead to actionable next steps.

Ira Bryck (21:31):
The things that a person will do to get out of pain are pretty extreme. And so I gathered together people, I helped them clarify, here's the pain that you all are in. It might be different flavors of that pain. One of you wants to kill your brother, one of you wants to kill your sister, but still, and what would help you, and I would ask you, I mean actually when I used to go buying from my children's clothing store, I would look at a line, I would say, if you were my customer, would Meghan Lynch buy this? And in hiring speakers or planning events, I would say, will Meghan Lynch be benefited by this? I mean, you were really one of these very few people that I just always had in my mind. So I brought in Peter Post, whose great-great grandmother was Emily Post to just talk about etiquette.

(22:18):
And I had people, there was one woman that didn't want to submit. I had them submit questions to me in advance so they wouldn't be seen as having this or that problem and was like this one woman was like, I work with a bunch of men who are constantly being obscene in their humor and insulting and sexist and I don't know how to tell them. And one of them is my husband. And she told me the next day in the parking lot after the event, he got down on one knee and cried and apologized. I knew that was your question, I'm going to change. And he did. So this is Peter Post who's also telling you how to set up your silverware and drink tea with your pinky up.

Meghan Lynch (22:59):
That's really fun. And I think it just goes to show how much people, humans are just carrying around with them and are just looking for those opportunities to step into somebody else's shoes. We all get so caught up in our own own thoughts.

(23:18):
You are listening to Building Unbreakable Brands, the podcast all about brand stewardship and crafting an enduring legacy. I'm here with my guest Ira Bryck, a family business educator and advisor who now coaches business leaders and also does executive search. So I'd love to hear more about the work that you're doing with executive search. I remember in round tables and people, problems were always top of mind for folks, various iterations, but I know finding the right people became a recurring pain point. And at several times you would ask the question, what is somebody who would be good at this job? What other jobs do they have out in the world?

Ira Bryck (24:04):
What are they doing right now? Exactly. Where are you going to find them?

Meghan Lynch (24:06):
Yeah, I'm curious whether that's a question that you still ask

Ira Bryck (24:10):
Well, I still do. I mean, the reason why I came up with that question was I had heard somewhere that they were looking for people with a certain perspective and skillset, and they decided in this wacky brainstorming that that person would be the best folder and colorizer at the gap. And so they just started staking out the gap and watching how people handle the merchandise employees and then occasionally going up to somebody. And then I said, let's try that in our round table. And there's a guy who in our roundtable was like, I'm looking for somebody who can deliver furniture without breaking it on the way to the customer's house. It was like that person, if they were unemployed now might be in a gym and you could see how they lift barbells and don't drop it in grunt or whatever. Planet Fitness is like judgmental behavior.

(24:57):
And he did, and he found delivery men just who were unemployed in the middle of the day in the gym. So anyway, but it's just interesting to, you have to, as you're saying, find the, so in my executive search, I equate it to where's Waldo, where I'm trying to find the one person. So if I'm looking for a marketing director, first of all, that's a job that everybody thinks they can be a great marketing director. I'm sure that I'll get a lot of applications. And then just the whole idea is how much you can disqualify people to find Waldo at the end, last man standing is Waldo, whatever. And just to have of those 120 applicants send a polite reminder. But even there, I try to be helpful. I've helped people with their resumes who I'm just disqualifying right off the bat, get it down to 10 people who I'm having Zoom interviews with.

(25:47):
And then I use this certain assessment that kind of just shows what are their strengths and weaknesses, their tendencies in a way that I love this assessment and I have a lot to say about it, but just to get it down to the three people or five people that are going to fit into a culture and just sitting around a conference table at this one place that I've done several searches, Eastern states, the Big E, and looking around the table, it's like I have found several people here and they all fit perfectly into the culture. In each case, I found somebody that had the skills and the personality and the character to be part of this team with diversity, with growth potential, et cetera. It's so satisfying and just to put a lot of my soul into trying to hook up the right person in their right job.

Meghan Lynch (26:37):
And I'd love to hear more about the assessment tool that you're using. There are a lot of assessments out there. So what makes this one a little bit different or what makes you like it?

Ira Bryck (26:46):
Well, so first of all, this is three assessments. It takes about an hour to take the assessment. They are used by psychologists all over the world and HR people like Giombetti didn't invent this, but when it Giombetti Associates is run by Ross, but his father, Rick founded it. Rick was the HR director at Sweet Life Foods in Springfield and used a lot of assessments and just said, these three just fit together so well. And it's really a beautiful jigsaw puzzle, these three pieces of just who you are as a person, what your personality traits are, and just to say that very complex thing in one sentence, Aristotle used to use the same kind of idea, but we stole it from him. He didn't steal it from us. So just like on any trait that has a spectrum, you kind of want to be in the middle.

(27:34):
He called it the golden mean. So just on the spectrum of bravery, you want to be brave. You don't want to have a deficit of bravery and be cowardly. You don't want to have an excess of bravery and be foolhardy. You want to be in the middle. So this is not a Giombetti spectrum of bravery, but there's a lot of traits that you are born with of just your energy level, your pace and speed. Are you competitive? Are you communicative? Do you tend to collaborate well? Are you stable? And all the assessments, we call it stability. Another one would call it low neuroticism, the big five, but you're really getting a snapshot of a person at the same time. It's very complex. I have never seen two assessments that are the same. And yet a good friend of mine has almost the same assessment as me almost.

(28:26):
And we are such different people and she relates to hers and I relate to mine, but we just exhibit them differently. So it's not like you're really making a perfect oil painting of a particular human being, but you're really getting a pretty good snapshot. And when I do feedback sessions with people, most of the time people say, yep, that's me. Yep, that's me. Sometimes they object. But also there's a lot of traits that just kind of depend. If you're a very stable person with low goodwill, you're really not going to be a likable person. I mean, that's more to it than likability. But if you're a very stable person with high goodwill, you're going to be a totally different person. You're never going to take over Nazi Germany, for instance. But all of these things are nuanced flavors.

Meghan Lynch (29:18):
I'm curious, in the time that you've been doing this matchmaking specifically with Giombetti, has there been any most surprising match that you've made or most surprising Waldo that you've discovered during a search?

Ira Bryck (29:37):
Well, there was one that we're still in the middle of now, and I want to talk about in general terms, but we were looking for somebody and then found somebody who could grow into that person. So they lacked the experience and they lacked the skills, but they had a lot of potential. And the client might hire this person in the end, but the person said, boy, you should talk to my mother. She has the experience and she's also in the same thing. So was my grandfather in the same industry? And so the client considered didn't happen like this, but hiring the mother and the son together and then also making a plan where the mother and the son could buy the business in a few years. And it may or may not happen, it probably won't happen, but that was surprising to me of like, wow, not finding Waldo, but finding Waldo and Waldo's mother. Right,

Meghan Lynch (30:29):
Right. Yeah. And that's really funny that they were able to also, again, maybe shows that power of the mirror of the assessment to say like, oh, actually I know somebody with this profile in my own family, but who also has that experience? That's really fun. You're listening to Building Unbreakable Brands, the podcast for leaders with a generational mindset. My guest is Ira Bryck, who's an educator and advisor for family businesses. He's been told by families that work together that he helps them have helpful conversations, especially when they're mad or sad and can't figure out how to solve their problems. In our final segment, I'm going to turn the mic over to the next generation. My son, Henry has a question for Ira about this description of what he does. Take it away, Henry.

Henry Lynch (31:18):
Hi Ira. My question is, I wonder if you're like a therapist.

Ira Bryck (31:24):
Great question. It's so nice to hear your voice, Henry. I haven't seen you in many years and you don't have that many years. I do have a little bit of a therapist aspect to what I do, though. Family businesses don't really want to be in therapy. A lot of my peers that are family business therapists, they are therapists, they are psychologists, they are PhDs, and they don't even put PhD on their card because they're so worried that they're going to be not hired because the family doesn't want to be in therapy. But you do have to realize a lot about how families work together and how siblings get along, and there's parent child stuff, and just be able to see that and ask questions. I definitely never want to come off as psychoanalyzing a client, but I do want to ask them good questions. And even the agenda is strategic questions.

(32:19):
So I typically would ask them six questions, including one of the questions is like, what's something that you would change about yourself? Something you change about someone else, and something you would change about a thing, or the idea of what got you here won't get you there. It's like, what are you lacking that's not going to get you there? And then I have everybody, some people just put bullets, other people write the Great American novel, and then I just make an agenda of strategic questions. So I really try to have them running the thing with me, facilitating me making the playing field level, me not letting the bully bully people, just spelling out what the options are. If they always threaten like, well, I'm going to quit. I'm the person that's like, okay, so let's say you quit. Then what happens? And just have people talk about things in a practical way, in an emotionally intelligent way instead of the way that some families might just argue kind of ridiculously.

Henry Lynch (33:20):
Thanks a lot, Ira. I also have a joke for you. Why did the donut maker retire? Because he was tired of the whole business.

Ira Bryck (33:29):
Oh my God. He should buy a bagel store, solve his problems.

Meghan Lynch (33:36):
Thank you, Henry.

Ira Bryck (33:37):
Thank you Henry,

Meghan Lynch (33:38):
And thank you, Ira. This has been such a great conversation. I really appreciate all your stories and wisdom, and if any listeners want to learn more about your work or the assessments, the coaching, can they learn about all things

Ira Bryck (33:54):
Ira, at my very simple website, ira bryck.com, I-R-A-B-R-Y-C-K, my cartoons, the YouTubes of my plays, my advice column, all kinds of stuff. So thank you so much, Meghan. I so value everything about you.

Meghan Lynch (34:09):
Same. I really appreciate just everything about you and all of the wisdom and thought and creativity that you bring to your work. It's always a pleasure.