Patrick Baldwin: Seth, I got back to my hotel. I'm here in Tampa hanging out with you. We had the biggest sushi platter I've ever seen. I happen to look in the mirror at the hotel and I was like, “That's why they call me Fat Pat.
Seth Garber: Ever since the first time we did this and Paul was in town, it was the first sushi dinner. I have completely always thought you only eat cooked food. It was great to see you eat some great food.
Patrick Baldwin: That was way too much. I’m having a great time. Thanks for having me here in Tampa. I traveled a couple of hours here. Paul is headed over to Cairo and Milan. We're doing this. I thought this was an interesting interview with Daniel Schröer from Futura. When I think of technology and pest control, I think of you because if I ever have a technology question, you're my go-to on that.
Seth Garber: I enjoyed the interview with Daniel. He's a super smart guy. The whole European approach to pest control, in general, is amazing compared to some of the things we're doing here in the US. It's going to be great.
Patrick Baldwin: One more thing before we get into this interview. I wanted to let you know that you cannot microwave perfection. Our friend Joe dropped that on us. I want everyone to enjoy that for a second. What do you say we step into the Boardroom with Daniel Schröer from Futura?
Seth Garber: Let's do this.
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Paul Giannamore: Daniel, welcome to The Boardroom Buzz, finally.
Daniel Schröer: Thank you so much for having me.
Paul Giannamore: I wanted to do you live in Germany but this is the next best thing until we can get back over there.
Daniel Schröer: Until we can get back together in person. We did a couple of podcasts on my format of Talking Pest Management episodes.
Paul Giannamore: That's right. Maybe we should start the show here and talk a little bit about that. You're extremely well-known around the world. Our reader base, of course, has grown over the years. We're probably predominantly US readers. Let's talk a little bit about what you've got going on there in Germany.
Daniel Schröer: I will give you a quick overview of what we've done and where we come from. Our parents, I speak about us, are Oliver Klute and I. We’re business partners and friends. We do most of the bits that we invent together and bring them to life. All of our parents, all four, have worked in the pest control industry. My mother started with Rentokil and had a senior role in Rentokil Germany as an assistant amongst other things to one of the heads of Germany. My father builds Rentokil’s Southern sales and stuff like that.
Oliver’s father founded his company, Biotec Klute, which is Germany's fifth largest service company focusing on the Big Food and Pharma players, the big brands you all know. I'm not going to mention them but it's one of the big brands there. That's his big focus. Oliver is 10 years older than I am. He's founded another company called Future and it’s been a startup. In 2006, he had the idea of creating the first digital mousetrap and he did it and went into television with it. I was still in school then, doing an internship with his company. In 2012, I joined.
We said we're going to make it big together. It only had one employee. We made a big together. We're approximately 40 people and growing strongly. What we've done is we've traveled the world with the German engineering tech that we brought to life from our thoughts and some money that we've saved and all the money that we've made and reinvested. It's bootstrapped. It's not venture or Angel-backed. Obviously, it’s not private equity and stuff like that. We invented new products and brought them to life all in the hemisphere of green tech.
Anything we've made, we wanted to make different. We never had any biocide or pesticide. We always made alternatives to them for monitoring and trapping, especially digital solutions from cameras to sensors to trapping solutions. You can place 1 mouse trap up to 1 million or even more mouse traps or rat traps, and some cockroaches, bedbugs, mouse traps, and termite traps in your premises or your customer base. Hence, improve your pest management program with it towards more ESG. Less CO2 emittance, more efficient control, no biocides used, or to quote Jarl, the former CEO of Anticimex, “The next best thing to sliced bread.” This is what we're doing.
We’re the market leader in this space, it's a small space. Rentokil and Anticimex are bringing a lot of horsepower to the ground with their own IoT solutions. Next to them, they’re also service providers. We are the only ones that are the producer and distributor at the same time. We’re vertically integrated for that niche with all the different products that we have and the patents that we hold and the tech that we've built. We are the market leader in that space and disrupting the industry a little bit.
Paul Giannamore: Daniel, you and I have a mutual friend, Ronen, down in Israel. He's known you and your partner for a long time.
Daniel Schröer: Ten-plus years.
Paul Giannamore: You've got a relatively similar business as far as I understand it. What are some of the similarities and differences? As you recall, I was over in Israel and got an opportunity to see it live. Why it was easier for me to get to Israel than Germany, I don't recall. That's usually not the case. I happen to be in the Middle East that's right. We did have a chat with Ethan and Ronen about what they're doing over at PestOptix. What might be similar or different from what they do versus what you folks do?
Daniel Schröer: First of all, what we do is techie and nerdy. We can go down into the metrics of what the product delivers and it might be a digital trap from the outward experience. The tech that we use, Ronen and his team, as far as I'm informed, use a lot of Wi-Fi. As I'm also informed, it’s using new technologies such as Kadem or such.
We are focusing mainly on Kadem and Narrowband IoT but with a different technology setup and with a different solution altogether. It might be a camera but the way that camera is constructed, the way it detects motion or not whether it uses an AI to analyze it after or before on the server or the device, and how the data is being compressed, unsent, and stored, and how the products are being made available, the price, and what are produced and stored and all of that makes the business and the tech solution different.
This is nerdy stuff and I can nerd out on that. From the hardware, software, device, and server, it will be a different product. That's only for the CTOs, the top decision-makers. The top firms of the world would know when they're not going to choose Bluetooth or Wi-Fi but using this or that product or this or that company because of security issues or whatnot. The biggest difference is that they've built a straight tech company with a couple of products. It's been ages since having them enhanced so I don't know how they're working differently from ours for instance.
What I do know is we have built a huge ecosystem of other solutions around them for ten-plus. People in the States probably best know us for our products NARA, NARA Lure, NARA Stic, NARA Block, and the NARA Spray, which are non-elegent rodent attractants. They’re ARB-approved and IFS-approved. It’s the highest food and pharma standards in the world of GMP. They're being used for millions.
It's like Gorilla duct tape for rodent monitoring. Everybody knows the brand and everybody uses it for food premises and monitoring. This one's a big seller of ours. We have Gorilla Trap, which in our understanding, it’s the best-selling trap in Europe. It's a government-approved humane trap that we've developed with the German environmental government agencies and governmental agencies around the world for humaneness. It’s professionally used. There are a bunch of sensors built and stuff like that.
To mention these two products, you can imagine we have a few dozen other inventions for the sewage system for golf courses or any sanctuaries or any reservoirs or anything like that where we have products and patents that we use but mainly for the professional pest controller. This makes us different than most of the folks out there that have an IoT product because most of them have 1, 2, or, 3 products.
We're in a phase where I've had a discussion with one of the senior managers of one of the biggest providers in the world and one of the big leaders that you all know. We've talked about six of these that companies vanished, fire sale, bankruptcy, etc. because they're single-product companies. We are different. We have a holistic approach with all the analog and digital solutions that a pest control company could use to fully get rid of pesticides or rodenticides. This is our vision and we've built many solutions around that. It's a lot of hardware.
Another part of our business is also B2C. We have the oldest B2C webshop for pest control goods. B2C again, the end consumers here in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the GIS region. We're not expanding into other European countries. We've also expanded that through Amazon and all the other countries in Europe and with brands like Green Home, Green Hero, and Futura with end customer products that we're scaling throughout Europe successfully. That makes up half of our business. The consumer market grew crazy in the past several years whereas B2B sales have been going up tremendously as well but rather conservatively. That makes up our business.
You would probably quickly understand why the business, Futura, is different. We have the B2C and B2B, digital and analog. We fully understand the vertical chain from producing and delivering hardware and software products either a B2B like a classic email order from our B2B webshop. We can even, in the future, maybe have the sensors, solutions, and cameras with AI be listed on Amazon and sell them vertically to people that maybe want a termite station in their garden. We mastered that domain of B2C commerce as well. This is the holistic approach that we've built, which is different.
Patrick Baldwin: You've touched on green and technology. If I went out and said, “I want to be a 100% green technology pest control company,” is that possible? What would that look like to you?
Daniel Schröer: It's a funny question. It's different in the States. It's not a question anymore in Europe. There are a bunch of companies that are fully green. There are a couple of companies that have now seen the advantages of it starting a big family-owned business. Even Anticimex has said that they're aiming at advertising because it's open figures just to name one company from Germany that is also active in the States and actively reducing their pesticides year by year and scaling up their IoT.
You have a startup that says, “I'm only buying and delivering digital services and eco-friendly services to a family business that disrupts itself and reinvents itself and goes digital and green to have a better offering for the clients.” Also, finding ways how you can make more money with that like selling data selling services, selling a solution instead of selling a service per month, and periodic routine visits.
On a scale, if you look at Ronin, Terminix, Rentokil, and Anticimex, you have even bigger challenges. This topic for you, Paul, ESG is a big one, and the taxonomy regulation where the big investors are picked out and all the banks and all the funds that have billions and probably trillions of Euros going into companies that are listed on the stock exchanges. They need to check whether they are allocating all their funds to companies that are reinventing themselves towards ESG.
To answer your question quickly, there are a bunch of companies that are using solely our products or mostly our products and maybe also other products and are operating 100% pesticide-free with digital products and they're advertising it like hell. The clients love it. The best thing is pest control is sometimes even the gatekeeper because of the customers. You can read that online. I've had an interview with Tony O'Donovan from Tesco, one of the biggest supermarket retailers here in Europe.
Also, others with many stores on the ground like him that have done the same and had tremendous success with it. Tremendously, not like 10% or 20% less rodents and less pesticides but almost zero pesticides or 90% less. 80% less visits, 90% less boxes, and over 50% less rodent, which is the biggest problem still in Europe, and probably in North America, rodent occurrence. That was a big success and it's the way to go. One of the biggest drivers or the big decision-makers behind the biggest companies of this world is understanding slowly that this is the way to go.
Patrick Baldwin: I see Europe being the leading edge of technology in pest control, between you, Ronin, and Anticimex and their smart technology. When it comes to needing to handle something outside of digital mousetrap and all the technology and all the hardware, are you saying you don't use any pesticides and you're able to get control?
Daniel Schröer: Yes, 100%. In Europe, we even have a memorandum of understanding of all the pest controllers in Europe that are members of SEPA. The European Associations signed a memorandum of understanding to do pest control under the IPM principle, which is this IPM pyramid under which you claim that only the top of the pyramid is chemicals. The ground of the pyramid is ecological and structural changes like proofing and mechanical control like trapping or proofing technologies for the sewage systems and monitoring most of the past activities because the status from the last visit isn't different.
One of the biggest things that helped us was creating a camera, which is a patented ultra-low power camera that's as mini as a cigarette box. It takes periodic pictures and the AI detects the differences behind them. It detects whether there's a cockroach on the glue board. It detects whether the bait has been nibbled on or the bait is consumed. Whether it's a non-toxic or toxic bait or whether there's a mouse or rat in the trap, our model X and Y doesn't care.
It's a camera that you put into stuff that's made for pest control. That gives you an analysis of the mouse, cockroach, bedbug, rat, mouse, etc. It gives you what your tech would give you when you open up the box. It's a smarter way. It's an enhancement and not just a replacement. If you want you can use it to any extent that you wish. This is green tech because it's tech but it's helping us to operate more efficiently and ecologically friendly if you want to.
Patrick Baldwin: IPM has been around for a while and a lot of people say they subscribe to it, at least over here. It’s considered the anti-base board jockey model sometimes to simplify things. Tell me this, when you get to the top of the IPM pyramid, what's your philosophy? How do you handle that? Do you go back down the pyramid? You’re like, “We're not using pesticides.”
Daniel Schröer: I'll give you a concrete example. Holland is known for bringing innovation into policy quickly. The country has started creating huge fines for people that misused or went to the top of the pyramid without executing and delivering on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd level. It's even continued now with new laws that existed for several years.
For instance, if you have a farm, not like a food site that's orderly and stuff like that and rather clean but a farm, they are forcing the farmer to perform structural changes e.g. building maintenance or rebuilding his farmhouse where he stores all the grain and whatsoever. There's a fire burning and I'm putting it out 50% all the time but I know I'm never putting it out 100%.
If that's the case, it's like a circle that puts you always back to square one and square one is telling you, “The root is a different thing. You need to close that hole.” If that means restructuring or rebuilding that farm or parts of that farm where the rodents occur problems, you need to do that. You're forced to do that by law. This is a trend that we see common in more countries.
I've just been to Brussels. I meet many people there so I'm not going to tell you who I met there. I'm not allowed to. At least I know that the top decision-makers know that there have been so many studies around these pesticides, the PBTs, and rodenticides. They are persistent bioaccumulative toxins that are causing huge issues here in Europe and also in other countries like secondary and primary poisoning to foxes and singing birds and predators and even in fishes in German rivers, which is crazy.
They are doubling down on making it harder for pest use to use the top of the pyramid. Things are slow. I'm always pretty optimistic. Even if it's ten years down the road, things are going to get a little bit more critical. In the next five years, they are going to be dramatically changing here in Europe at least. Even if it's ten years, it's about time that we start getting ready for that.
Patrick Baldwin: I heard you talking about the amount of rodenticide in Germany. In 2018, it's 78 times the height of the Eiffel Tower or some astronomical measurement. Have you seen a reduction?
Daniel Schröer: When you put all the pellets on top of each other, yes. First of all, I want to say that this number was the most conservative number. It's probably tenfold. We spoke to German salesmen of chemical companies and they said, “You can put a zero behind that because what we sell to farmers and private people is way higher even. You can grasp the numbers.”
It went up because there's been a few laws put into place that have luckily shown potential to be misinterpreted, let me put it that way. People acted like everything was an acute infestation. It went from monitoring to finding pests and then brought up more data science, which had an effect though. There have been some rumors in Germany that there's going to be a new law for the GIS region, which all other European countries and traditions follow most of the time for new laws around rodenticide. It seems things are about to change.
Paul Giannamoire: Early on, you asked about Green Pest Solutions. In my non-technical mind, I was looking for a definition. Are we defining that as zero use of any toxic pesticides? Is that how would we define green?
Daniel Schröer: In my personal opinion, I wouldn't say banning rodenticides or any other pesticides would make sense if you ask me personally. Most of my staff will probably agree and all the people from the green tech army. The thing is it has to do with a lot of laziness. It's too easily earned money that comes with doing the same thing that we did in the several years since my parents have been in business. We can be greener, a little bit more sustainable, and eco-friendly, and everybody would be happy. Probably some companies would even make more money. That's at least what I would be aiming for.
To be honest, people are going to do what people are going to do. I'm not trying to influence a lobby for anything there. The only thing that we're going to do is we love tech and we make the best tech and nerdy product that we love and we would buy and, to be honest, all of our top ten customers are buying because we have NDAs with them and they are friendly customers and co-developers. We make this for the crazy folks out there that love to digitize every single box out there.
I could have an opinion on that. My opinion is mostly that I believe a lot of people are still using probably too much, for example, rodenticides but probably also other pesticides. It's hard for the rest of the work. Restructuring a farm or tearing down a wall and building up a new wall cost a lot more money than putting down the pesticide again. It's a fact and you make more money with it. You don’t make money building up a wall again. It's a different thing.
Everybody knows that if it's your house, you would do that. You would clean up. You would throw out all the garbage. You would probably build up the wall again and try to make it work for the next generation or whatnot instead of spraying pesticides where you live and breathe. In the service industry, that's easily earned cash. Now, people are redirected to a more ESG-driven or green-driven economy because it's also necessary partially.
Also, they see the large economic effects of evolving the business towards an IoT, Internet of Things, Software as a Service, or whatever you call it but a more digitally oriented data business that's organized according to data and not according to what's written in a 20-year-old contract. There are huge effects down there that we are grasping. A couple of companies that are our clients are doing great data management. They invested a lot of money into our solutions for many years. They're making so much more money with it and they're saving so much money. It's hard to do that. It's not fast money.
Paul Giannamore: This whole green movement, I've always struggled with how people define it. Clearly, different people define it in different ways. It might mean one thing in Europe and something else in North America. With the whole ESG movement, in general, things always pop into my mind. Back in the early 2000s, put a .com behind the name of a company. In the meme stock era, you had the CEO of Dutch Bros. go to the stock exchange in a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt. The Reddit bros loved it.
To what extent is it real? To what extent is it virtual signaling? A “green pest control” business can't eliminate pesticides because you're not going to go into a facility and kill cockroaches with your boot. We can't get rid of it completely. In Europe, a lot of this has been driven primarily by the commercial end user. These CEOs and the management of these large companies get more pressure on ESG types of stuff. They get consumer pressure. The consumer doesn't understand. They watch the news. Climate is big deal. Everyone gets on this bandwagon irrespective of economic consequences. I
In Europe, more so than the United States, there's this whole pressure on being green. I still struggle to define it. If I'm understanding you, it's probably a work in progress as we move away from littering places with toxic chemicals and focus more on the use of technology in monitoring and lowering effectively the toxic footprint. We're not going to facilities and littering them with chemicals. We're using technology to monitor and understand and then apply minimal pesticides necessary to take care of the problem.
On the rodent side, we've seen it with Anticimex. We see Rentokil’s development and what you and your partner are doing as far as using less rodenticide and using more tech-enabled mechanical traps. quite frankly, if you look at what Anticimes does with the plungers, they've got this equipment that looks almost like a piston in a vehicle that would squash the head of the rat. Of course, our friends in Paris were pissed off about that because according to them, rats are mammals. How dare you crush the head of the rat when it is a mammal like a dolphin?
Daniel Schröer: That is true. There are a couple of great insights, questions, and a thesis in what you said. First of all, you talk to rodent experts but also the CTOs of companies like Anticimex. Håkan Kjellberg, I had a discussion with him briefly and also Tony of Tesco. If you discuss with them how they did it, to name a few examples, 90% of controlling cockroaches have sanitary changes in hygienic IPM-driven principles or methods around that. It's the same with rodents. It's the same with anything else, to be honest.
Also, in outdoor areas, rats or the sewage system. We have a solution for the sewage system where you can keep the rats controlled by excluding them, which cost $20 bucks and lasts forever. It excludes a lot of cities. Biologically, it reduces the population and stuff like that. These are clever novel ideas that helped to change the pest population.
Tony O’Donovan of Tesco named a few examples that I was allowed to share because he said them in the podcast with me. In a couple of sites, he reduced the amount of trials from 200-plus to 20. 90% were removed. That’s rodent. Especially mousetraps, he reduced it to 90%. He had 10% left. When he had seen or recorded a mouse in one of his traps, he hit him hard with anything he had. It's not like he's being cautious with pesticides. He's used anything that was allowed and hard. After that, he tried to make sure he was proofing and checking how that rodent went out of the box and reported it digitally in the same second.
This is different mythology. It's reacting instantly when something happens and being able to grasp where it came from and then hitting it hard with anything you got. It’s officially taken away the safety blanket, that is true. You remove a lot of visits, you remove a lot of traps, and you remove a lot of things that you thought you would need. Thirty years of our industries and my parents included told the customers, “You would need one box more. One box more, you're safe.”
Many of these brave people were brave to try different mythology for pest control and had success with it. That's greener in my understanding because it's doing a couple. It doesn't mean because we are by our ethics, we are voting this or that party and this means anything sustainable we love. We drink our latte with oat milk and stuff like that. It's more of this pest problem that we get rid of forever if we do that. If we get a pest problem occurring again, we hit it hard again with pesticides or anything we have. The bigger the toolbox, the better.
We then go back to monitoring again. We believe that monitoring is 80% to 90% of pest control. The biggest influencers that we speak with internationally also tell us that. They say that 80% to 90% is monitoring. Why do that manually? Why drive there? I know that Rollins and Orkin, even back in the day because of insurance issues, asked their techs not to turn left anymore because they had to cross the lane so they go right to the destination.
If you think about things like that and then being able to reduce the workload of a workforce of 5,000, 10,000, or 20,000 people that are costing a lot of money and creating a lot of CO2 emitted through the vehicles and all the time that they used to inspect all the boxes. Also, changing maybe 5%, 10%, and 20% of that towards a small device that lasts quite long and then applying different mythology to it. This is what we believe. At least in my understanding, we can iterate the pest control work that we do today slightly and then be a bit better and more efficient and probably also more sustainable. That's only a benefit. We’re not doing all of that because we want to be more sustainable.
Paul Giannamore: Does this work in the residential marketplace or commercial?
Daniel Schröer: It works anywhere, to be honest. Residential folks are not renovating their apartment if they don't have the money for it so they keep on buying pesticides and that's it. The owner of the property has to do something there. We also sell more traps, monitoring solutions, repellents, or, the funniest thing if you ask me, a bleeper. It's a smoke detector for rodent traps that bleeps when you catch a rodent behind the fridge or down in the basement. We sell a lot more of that because people want to be informed instantly instead of having a rotten animal in their ceiling or whatnot.
It's not a market that you can change 180 degrees within a couple of years as you did back in the days with anybody using an iPhone or anybody using Facebook or Instagram. It's a generational thing in the B2C if you ask me. It takes ten-plus years for a generation to think differently and to be educated differently in the market. They have so many things to care about in the world. Pest control is minor.
In the B2B world, it gets a lot of traction speed in these times that we speak right now because the big companies get it and they bring a lot of power behind it and they see the innovators doing it. A lot of people are getting under pressure and then comes regulation. It's like a popcorn effect and a lot of things happening. That's my thesis.
Patrick Baldwin: Paul, what you said about green is not defined well. It might be defined differently between Europe and North America. I would say it's not defined well between the guy on this side of town and the guy on the other side of town. Green is very ambiguous. I did catch not drinking my latte with oat milk. I'm not going to try that because apparently, you'll judge me for it.
Daniel Schröer: It's delicious. I would do it, too. I like black.
Patrick Baldwin: Same. Let me think about this because it is a mindset shift for me. I've always thought of green as being on top of the pyramid. When you get to the top of the pyramid, there are no pyrethroids and neonics. There’s no Termidor. There’s nothing synthetic on your truck. You're going to go to something like a natural botanical with not much residual if any. That's all I've thought about green in the past.
I want to ask you this. You have the Tesco and he has ten traps and then he throws everything at it or your technician comes in and takes care of the problem. This might help me figure out what's going on. At the top of the pyramid, I got to go solve the problem today. Are the chemicals on his hand? Are they on his truck? Are they in the chemical shed or at the office? Are they behind the lock and key behind the manager's door? Are they way back in the distributor? What's the technicians’ access to chemicals when it comes time to make an application?
Daniel Schröer: First of all, I do believe that what you initially said is green as well. All these products that do something differently and seem to be a little less harmful are probably also green. On the other side, to your mid-question, the IPM pyramid stands on its top. It's a relocation. That's honestly what I believe. Not to be judging but I do not care about it and I want to make the best product available. What everybody is choosing to be their rightful path, that would be it and I respect it and I truly mean it because it's different in this town and the other town and especially in different countries or continents.
At the end of the day, the biggest thing that we misinterpret is we are not slimming down the top of the pyramid. We are bringing the pyramid back because it has never been there. Back in the day, my grandparents had a farm and the farms were built on these stones with a triangle so mice couldn't jump over it. They were allocated a meter high off the ground so mice couldn’t jump in and eat the grains and stuff. That was IPM. Funnily enough, that's a couple of 100 years.
Due to the massive innovation that happened after the Second World War, the chemicals that arrived and are available to us helped us to thrive, to be honest. They work perfectly good against pets. That's true for most of the cases where they are not occurring any resistances, etc. In the ‘80s ‘90s, 2000s, and so on, they've probably been overused a bit too much because they've made a huge business model out of it. It still wasn't that clear that there have been some negative side effects to it.
In the last several years, alternatives have been developed because that's humankind. We see something and we think, “We could do that better.” That's how we operate. We did that and a couple of other dozen folks did the same. New thoughts arrived. With the new thoughts, people started digging and saying, “There's also some ecological evidence that there's resistance and sometimes other things are more effective. It’s not always that we need to use the big hitter. We might as well clean up and stuff or do a little bit of proofing work.”
My biggest thesis is the pyramid is standing on its top. I don't believe people are going to have to ask the manager for pesticides. The whole structure of when I do what is going to be iteratively changed or disrupted in the next decade probably. I'm here to find out. I'm here to stay. We will see how everybody thinks when it's not the case. I'm happy for either. That's my interpretation.
Patrick Baldwin: I love it. No one else can see this. When you did the inverted pyramid, I'm like, “You're right.” We don't spend much time or effort down here at the bottom. It’s like, “Let’s go to chemical.”
Daniel Schröer: They work great.
Paul Giannamore: Now I want to get into some fun stuff. Enough with the tech talk. Daniel, you and I have had some public chats before on your program. You do a phenomenal job getting all sorts of interesting people from around the world. The two discussions that you and I had historically were largely related to evaluation M&A, greater macro themes, and so on and so forth. Europe is a train wreck in slow motion that's beginning to speed up as we see. Of course, the Americans are willing to fight the Russians down to the last European with these sanctions on fuel across the continent.
I'm going to do a weekly update. I'm going to put a chart. We were talking about this earlier on but when you look at twenty years of history, the cost of electricity, for example, in France. If you look back from twenty years, the French were paying roughly €37 per kilowatt hour. Now, it’s €647 per kilowatt hour, which is a seventeen times increase over the average from 2001 through the middle of 2021.
Daniel Schröer: Is this in the future or in the actual process?
Paul Giannamore: It’s on the France Day-Ahead power. It's current. It's what's being transcribed in the spot market. It's spectacular. Of course, we're seeing the Euro now being at the twenty-year low against the USD and that's pretty prolific around the world. We've officially breached parity for more than 24 hours.
We've got the Germans. No one around that could remember the Weimar Republic and hyperinflation. There might be a few that were alive back then and still around with us but they were 2 or 3 years old. Of course, they don't remember anything. The German people don't seem to be as in control of the ECB as we thought would happen back in the late ‘90s when EMU was being negotiated. I’m interested in the people's opinion in Germany as to what's going on and what are we looking at here as winter approaches.
Daniel Schröer: Winter is approaching as in Game of Thrones. People are scared of the winter. People are frightful of all that seems to be coming, a lot of them at least. It's interesting you talking about the Weimar Republic. If history doesn't repeat itself, it sure does rhyme. That’s a saying I like. Also, in the past year with COVID, I've looked for parallels and metrics that match and give us a hint of what is yet to come in the next twelve months-plus but have not been correct so far. I'm hesitant to have a thesis of what's going to happen in winter even if it's the next six months ahead.
There’s going to be a lot of businesses. It's not just a personal household, house, or apartment that has a threefold or fourfold more gas bill, electricity bill, or whatever. Germany is in the middle of all the increases. It's going to be a tough winter so people are going to save. Consumers are probably going to get down. I'm going to expect that. Whereas with pest control though, as a necessary service, we've never had a crisis yet that affected us as an industry.
That's my opinion on the user. They're going to be saving a lot and there's a lot of personal negative experience that is going to be revealed in the next 6 to 12 months because people also have a lot of credit. People have all their apartments and houses on finance and loans. I don't know if that's going to affect them. Something might be correct. We're talking about a 5% to 15% ratio, not like a credit bubble burst or something like that. That's unlikely.
A lot of Germany is people that produce things, automotive industry and stuff like that, VW, Audi, Mercedes, Daimler, Porsche, and stuff like that. Many people that have companies with machines in them need a lot of electricity and a lot of power. It's not going to be all wind and sun. Although Germany has been lucky to create 49% of its energy through solar but still, it's by far not enough.
People are probably going to call it inflation as well but it's going to have different routes. The price increases for the areas that produce things and make the things that people buy. People probably could not afford it at the same time. It could be that it's through some help from the State or the EU that things are going to be a little bit lighter than we all expect, which I do expect as well a bit. then again, you never know. A lot of things happening there on the macro and I didn't even touch most of it yet. It's going to be an interesting winter. What do you expect?
Paul Giannamore: Help from the EU is probably one cause for the greatest concern. In any of these Western countries, whether you look over here in the Americas or across the European continent, we have this whole ESG movement that we discussed here. It has impacted energy exploration, refinement, and everything that goes into fossil fuels has been demonized for many years. There has not been a lot of investment.
For the same point you made earlier, funds with ESG and investing, don't invest in tobacco, don't invest in oil, and so on and so forth. Now, we are in a world where we don't have ready supplies of oil and natural gas as we did. In the United States, our bonehead administration is draining our strategic petroleum reserves to put downward pressure at the pump, which is asinine. The entire purpose of the strategic petroleum reserve is to make sure that we have ready fuel as opposed to pushing the price down.
To your point about the European government stepping in, my main concern with this and why I mentioned the Weimar Republic is that, at the end of the day, papering over this, printing Euro to send to the people to help them get through with this. This is one of the problems of many European governments that experienced high levels of inflation throughout history. This is acute in countries like Italy, for example.
When we face problems, we turn on the old printing press. Since the establishment of EMU, Europe has largely gone through a disinflationary period. With certain spikes of inflation, for the most part of, the last twenty years have been relatively disinflationary. If I listened to ECB policymakers, they would argue that it’s been deflationary and that was the evil that they have been fighting now for decades. Of course, you're seeing now the highest levels of inflation in the Eurozone that I would imagine you've seen in your natural life.
The problem with these fuel shortages is the policymakers are in between a rock and a hard place. You print and then you exacerbate the inflation problem. If you don't, people freeze to death. My gut tells me that this is probably going to be solved by Christmas 2022. European policymakers are probably going to wake up and say, “US, you guys are on your own. We can't let our people freeze and we can't print any more money.” Bye sanctions. Russia, do what you need to do.
Daniel Schröer: Between a rock and a hard place, you said it. It's realistic to think that's going to come.
Paul Giannamore: What does the German public think about these sanctions and the impact it's having? You look at GDP growth in Germany and throughout the core of the Eurozone, it is starting to turn pretty nasty. Sure, you guys aren't besties with Russia. On the flip side, people like to turn the heat on in the winter. What are people saying?
Daniel Schröer: I'm not the German public so it's not representative of what I say but I speak to a lot of people so I can try to replicate what they say and what they expect at least, the more clever of the people that I speak. The media dictates what we believe. That doesn't reflect my opinion but a lot of people are not too positive about Russia. They have been taught that it's only their fault. It’s probably too complex. I spent too much time on pest control.
To be honest, this is a lot of the thinking process that's going down here. In the end, if you're freezing and if it's going to be a harsh winter, maybe it's not because global warming is happening for once. It’s very unlikely. I do think they're going to turn to Russia. The thing that I have with Donbas and everything are it's gone for a while now. These wars, even if they're relatively small in comparison to what we've experienced in the past, it's not a good sign if a war goes on for too long. Things happen. Somebody taps into the other forbidden zone by accident or whatnot. Something escalates because it's statistics. That's pretty annoying.
This is my personal thinking. Who would have thought that we're going to go down into a pandemic? Who would have thought that tech stocks are going to go up and crap coins? Who would have thought that we were going to head into a war with Russia and all the sanctions? Who would have thought that inflation would peak? Who would have thought that with Germany, the UK, and France, peaking gas and electricity builds, and all the tech bubble correcting itself?
My biggest thinking is something's going to pop up that we don't even know yet, which is always the case. If history doesn't repeat itself, it sure does rhyme. There are a lot of verses that we can find rhymes too, which makes it complex this time. The next thing is there's probably going to be something else popping up and I hope it's not something related to the war, which has gone on for such a long time. It needs to be resolved. That's my thinking.
The population is frightful. First off, there's been COVID and now you have inflation and then you have a war. Now you have a cold winter ahead of you. A lot of people are building ovens. A lot of people are storing wood and stuff like that. It's interesting times but we've got to survive it. In the end, the only things that pressured you as a civilization made you better.
Look at the war in Germany and what came out of it. Look at other countries that had a hard time and went out and got stronger and more resilient after it. I hope for mutual consensus and shaking hands and we're going to agree to things. If you ask me, printing more money is too late. It's so much debt. You can have 15% inflation for five years and then you probably have it split in half but that's not nearly enough because it's so much. Print more money and forget all the depth, write it off. Maybe that helps. What do you think?
Paul Giannamore: That is likely where the West is going. There's just too much debt. There's no way to control this without liquidating the debt and the only way to do that is to print money and inflate it away, which will have negative impacts on society. While we're doing it, it will harm savers. It will be very painful. I don't see any other way out of this. I would imagine the rate-hiking in Europe, if it continues, will be extremely short-lived.
Here in the United States, there's a political resolve to do something. Of course, we're banging our heads against the wall because there's only so far they can go with us before it breaks the system. The real question and why we've seen equity rallies over in the United States is that everyone's waiting for the Fed to once again pivot. We've got that battle of wills. Politicians and policymakers can try to pull this off as long as they can. At some point, there's a point where they will have to ultimately pivot because the system can't take it, it’s too indebted.
Daniel Schröer: It’s math. In 2009 or something, Satoshi invented the Bitcoin cryptographic invention and put it on a forum. Unless somebody invents a new methodology to resolve the problem that we have with all its complexity and gives it to the ECB and the Fed, I doubt it highly. It's math. It's probably reprinting again and seeing other types of inflation. I kept it as a hobby to buy a bit of gold here and there and put it away. It didn't pay off yet so much but we're going to see what the winter says.
Paul Giannamore: In Euro terms, gold has done much better than in dollar terms.
Daniel Schröer: That is true.
Paul Giannamore: Taking this back to pest control. When I think about the European continent and the transactions that I've been involved in over the years, they are largely commercial businesses. When you have countries like Germany, for example, you've got domestic residential pest control as well as commercial. On the whole, the majority of Europe lives in a different social-spatial arrangement than big countries like Australia, Canada, and the United States. They have all this space and a bunch of people out in the suburbs and the rural area.
Daniel Schröer: It’s totally different. We don't have so much residential spraying. With termites, we have none of them.
Paul Giannamore: In the pest control industry, for the most part, especially under a lot of European regulation, commercial pest control is either mandated, it's mandatory, or you can't operate without it. Of course, that provides some resiliency as long as businesses stay solvent. Of course, due to this whole crisis in Russia and Ukraine, we’ve seen spikes in fuel costs. We're seeing foundries across the continent close. We're seeing manufacturers that can't get the energy to produce. We're seeing that. That'll slow down pest control services there. For the most part, I expect the industry to hold up reasonably well.
Daniel Schröer: Not perfect. They're going to see cutbacks.
Paul Giannamore: Every crisis is different. This is different than the solvency crisis that we had during the great financial crisis. If I think back to that, what was hurt in the US and Australia was the domestic or residential pest business. We had the housing crisis in the US and Australia had its share of that as well. we saw people losing their homes otherwise having to move out and losing their jobs.
This recession promises to be of a different variety. We won't know exactly what that looks like until we start to feel the effects of that. When I compare the European market to the US market as a whole during the great financial crisis, the European past tended to do a little bit better in commercial and the United States tended to do better in residential. That would continue. Are you noticing any demand softness in countries in which you deal and you export to and otherwise service?
Daniel Schröer: First of all, one of the things that already happened here in Europe but also minorly corrected already were gas prices. You have a business that drives 1 million, $5 million, or 10 million kilometers per year. Germany is not as big as the states but still, it's quite a large country in Europe. An increase to your cost, that's dramatic. German or European pest control businesses had the luck of operating at quite high margins. EBITDA of 10 or 20 easily.
I would say the smaller the business, the higher the EBIT sometimes. Exceptions are there but most of them would see and recognize that there's a change in the EBITDA or in the margins but it would up the pricing a bit because of inflation. Although they wouldn't be hit by inflation. This is what we've seen, a preparation and going down the route of increasing prices a bit toward adjusting to the smaller margins or shrinking margins.
Consumer-spend has been going down. On our advisory board, we have two people sitting. One of them is from their so-called eCommerce mafia of Germany. He's one of the top founders here from the unicorns. We learned from him for one side of our business as well that's operating in eight countries and on our B2C side that the consumer-spend is going down towards the highs of COVID 2021. It's stagnating this 2022 a bit.
We are still at growth towards 2021 on the B2C side as well, a healthy growth. We thought we've grown 100% this 2022 and it's half of that. It's quite dramatically different from what we've been expecting. We think that's going to continue towards the next six months. This is residential. This is consumer-spend. That is to be expected that it correlates on this end.
On the other end, on our advisory board, we have the Chief Digital Officer of Bosch. Bosch is a billion-euro company known around the world for tech in cars and stuff like that. She's helping us with the B2B side and the product development but also with our knowledge and international contacts on the B2B end. Through her, we've seen massive confirmation that our resilient pest control world is going to be staying resilient, most part of it.
Looking at the business in the past years, we had different crises. That's true with the housing crisis, the Greece crisis, and the .com burst. In pest control, if you look at the stocks also, mainly, if you look at the sentiment of the pest control associations that we've experienced during these bursts or crises, you see that there's always been a stable and reasonably well dealing with that crisis. In the B2B world, I expect the same.
We've also thought about the sales of our green tech. Alternatives and digital products are going to slow down. As the products got better and the gas prices went up a bit and you had more ESG hurdles, especially in the US, you had less people willing to work in jobs that had frequent contact with other people due to the COVID pandemic and other things. Everybody wanted to work remotely and doesn't want to do service jobs anymore so it's harder to get new employees. For our side of the business in the B2B world, it's not going to be a big change.
For all of Europe though and for the service side of businesses, I do not believe it because a lot of the business that we have here in Europe is a subscription model. Pest control is backed by laws right here. We don't have spraying on residential areas or large areas like you have in North America, South America, or Australia. That's going to be stable. Nothing's going to change there. In Sweden, Anticimex, they do have this insurance model. For them, they're getting the same insurance amount and doing a different job. They probably could even work to be a better year for them. We don't even know. It could be an answer or interpretation of how I believe it could be.
Paul Giannamore: I have one last question for you on this topic. You talked about working from home. At least the way that I look at it in the United States is we've “come out” of the pandemic. Everyone looks around and is waiting for this 2019 economy. There have been some fundamental changes in the behavior living, goals, and objectives of people. The purchase of travel rather than the purchase of goods.
One of the reasons we're seeing the stress on the supply chains and one of the reasons why we're seeing all this inventory build is because firms are buying the wrong inventory. We have different interests now, post-pandemic. We probably aren't going back. In Germany and in greater Europe, almost even anecdotally, Daniel, what changes do you see in the actual working individual from a work-from-home perspective? Are people going back to the office? Are there still low occupancy rates in German offices?
Daniel Schröer: In Tesla, people are going to come back at least for 4 or 5 days. I want to tell a story from a consulting somewhere base located in Germany. I’m good friends with one of the senior employees and he asked his team to come back. A lot of people quit or threatened to quit. We've seen the same in our team. We have been switching to remote work because we didn't have any space anymore. We thought it would be fancy digitally and fit our company model in 2017. We've been working remotely even then. For us, it was perfect. We still do that. I'm sitting here in my home apartment.
The majority is to get back in the office at least 4 or 5 days a week if you want to have a career, for sure. A lot of individuals that have a good asset, meaning a good reputation, a good degree, or whatnot, are reallocating and are trying to get to employers that seem more modern. I'm invited to hold a speech at Europe's biggest business event for owners of the biggest family businesses here in Europe. It's an exclusive event. I can only participate because I grew up with such a family and they let me in. Now they're interested in the weird stuff that I do. They look at me like a weird unicorn. I’m not a unicorn in the billion-dollar evaluation form though.
I'm holding this speech on purpose. Our purpose is closely knit to remote work and stuff like that. In COVID and with remote work, people come to find all these things that come along with having a good life. Chilling in your pajamas, having a midday shower, and having a great coffee. Instead of having three hours of chitchat with a coffee in the office, having a big old sleep on your couch or whatnot. It was
transparent to us.
Also, in the beginning, I had seen people in my office sitting and having coffee all the time. I was like, “Go back to work.” I accept that for ten minutes. It was always a pain to see people chatting for too long. I'm not always self-employed. I worked at Deutsche Bank and I know that people chatted for a long time as long as they could to not work. That's normal.
I try to encourage people to work less per day but more effectively. We tried that with an employee that got to work with us in 2014 or 2015 and worked in a different city, which was unimaginable back then for us. We trusted him. We said, “We don't even mind if you work 30 hours per week just do your job. We can measure you by numbers because our systems allow it.” We tried it and it worked.
From there on, we took it to another level. We sent all the people home. We even told them, “We don't even care if you get paid for 40 hours. If you do your job in 20 hours and it's perfect, go and take a walk and be official about it. Brag about it in the Slack channel and inspire others about it. We want to be giving you as much space and be managers of your time and responsibilities and still have a great life if you want to.” We dragged all these individuals in. As an employer, it helped us because we didn't get all the clever people in our city so we got them from anywhere around Germany. We've got a lot of applications because we're known to be a modern employer that does it differently.
The purpose thing, which I'm giving a talk about, is a big thing. A purpose is how you work. You have a bit of time to be doing what you want to do like painting, reading a book, or whatever that fulfills your soul. The rest of it is that you are being fulfilled by what your company does. Either it's super demanding and you learn a lot about the economy and you enjoy with yourself or it'd be like you do something techy that's on the edge that could explode.
You could be on the journey of a fast-growing company and be a manager of something because you started early. You do something that has to do with sustainability like with our brand, Green Hero, having pet care products that you invent and bring to market. This gives you a purpose instead of being in an office and working at a logistics company or whatnot. It’s not to discredit probably some great companies in there. Helping us to go remotely modern and adding this purpose touch to everything as a business helped us. That's anecdotally but you asked for anecdotally.
Paul Giannamore: I did.
Daniel Schröer: It’s a long answer so I hope I didn't bore you.
Paul Giannamore: It's always great catching up with you. I look forward to seeing you soon.
Daniel Schröer: With you guys, too. Thank you for having me. It's a pretty huge pleasure always.
Patrick Baldwin: It's wonderful. This is great.
---
Patrick Baldwin: Pop quiz, hotshot. Define green.
Seth Garber: Do you mean the color?
Patrick Baldwin: Pest Control.
Seth Garber: I love stainable pest control and green pest control. To me, what green means is using the least environmentally impactful product at all times that will take care of the infestation or create preventative measures for the structure or home that we're working on. That's what it means to me, straightforward.
Patrick Baldwin: Is that too broad in terms of defining it within the industry and peer-to-peer or is that too broad and defined to industry-professional to the consumer?
Seth Garber: From a business to a consumer or a professional to a consumer, it's probably good. However, if I'm going to go peer-to-peer, I'm going to have a whole different discussion. If I'm going to go peer to peer, what we're going to talk about is utilizing what Daniel referred to as the IPM pyramid. That makes the most sense. Are we identifying the threat? Are we taking proper sanitation?
How are we going through the inspection? Are we monitoring things? Are we going through the maintenance to be sure that we're doing things correctly? Finally, if we do all those things right and we haven't controlled the infestation, we're going to use the least toxic product. Walking peer-to-peer through the IPM pyramid would probably make the most sense.
Patrick Baldwin: Hopefully, I don't go down a rabbit trail here. As we were driving back after dinner, you pointed out a building and you're like, “That was the first LEED-certified building in Tampa and I sold it.”
If I'm talking about green, do you think about LEED and green being on the same wavelength?
Seth Garber: LEED is under the United States Green Building Council. It's a specific designation related to the efficiency of a building. If a building is LEED-certified, as it relates to IPM, absolutely. You absolutely have to have a structured approach in defining what products you should be using, if any, and a path to be there based on infestation levels. I would say that green and green in the commercial real estate space and LEED are synonymous together from my perspective.
Patrick Baldwin: You do consulting so I’m going to use one of your words. Is there a green playbook?
Seth Garber: That's an interesting one. Growing up in the industry, back in the mid-2000s, there wasn't a green playbook. Today, there are a lot of good paths that people can take or operators can take. For our organization, it didn't exist at the time. We relied on something called the Sanford Cisco IPM tier three model, which was something that was built out in California. In today's world, I would argue that the right playbook is the one. MPMA has under GreenPro. I would argue that's probably the only one that we would be considered a playbook. Every company has to determine that for themselves and that's why they leave it liberal.
Patrick Baldwin: Be careful. We're in Florida, don't say liberal. No, you said MPMA. Is that quality pro? What is it?
Seth Garber: The one that I'm referring to falls underneath quality products called GreenPro. There are a lot of companies that are certified. Our organization, years ago, we were the first one to go through GreenPro in the state of Florida back in 2008 or early 2009. There's Green Shield. There's a whole bunch of different ones now. I would argue that quality pro-green is arguably the gold standard right now, at least at a broad scale for companies.
Patrick Baldwin: Let's jump over to technology. Europe is ahead of the curve when it comes to what they're doing over there versus what we're doing over here. Anticimex and Rentokil aside, regionals or even smaller, do you see companies pulling off technology at scale?
Seth Garber: It's one of those things that I internally being pest control former operator. As a technologist, it’s one of those things that you dream about. I dream and think about it all the time. I look at all the tech. I haven't seen anyone at scale doing it well. We see a lot of pockets where a building here, a building there, and a handful of buildings may have it. A company might be servicing it but it’s scale.
I couldn't call any region in the US where a company is nailing it. Some people might argue with me and say, “We have a good technology program. We have tons of sensors. We've got tons of traps out there.” They do but it's an add-on product for most companies today versus a standard operating procedure, at least from what we see in the 78 markets that we participate in. It’s pretty neat. I would argue that no one's doing it at scale. People are going to go in that direction but not yet.
Patrick Baldwin: Is there an opportunity there? If someone jumps on this and they go and buy all of Daniel’s products off the shelves, can they do this?
Seth Garber: One of the things that I loved about the episode is Daniel’s talk about the move in Europe to where they're requiring this as part of the procedures for a lot of these countries. If a company today could get Futura’s products, they could probably work with Daniel's team and get it sorted out to build a scalable program.
You and I were talking about this a little bit. The component that's most difficult is being able to articulate the value to the people on the ground floor. Not necessarily the people in the C-Suite or the people that are making these decisions but how do the salespeople connect the dots for that commercial client or lots of commercial clients or, for that matter potentially in the future, the consumer clients? It can be done with a lot of focus. People could monetize it in big ways.
Patrick Baldwin: We're going to come back to that as far as their sales process. I don’t if that's going to end up on Pest Daily or The Boardroom Buzz. When we were chatting earlier about selling this, there are a lot to uncover there.
Seth Garber: I would like to get your thoughts, Patrick, on how Europe is handling its environmental initiatives based on what Daniel said.
Patrick Baldwin: What's interesting is as an industry in the US, if we can get ahead of this and we can get on the same page, that's why I want to put in a box, maybe that's the OCD me. If we can define and agree on what green is and then appropriately use that word whether it's in marketing, sales, and service across the board, “This is what green means. This is what green isn’t.” It raises the standard of the industry.
Here's the thing. I want us to proactively beat the curve on regulation. I don't necessarily want the state or the country coming and saying like Cassie, “We're going to take neonics out of your hands. We're going to take this and that out of your hands.” The consumers, the Pestie that are out there, they've got to play along as well. I would like to see us as an industry get ahead of green, get ahead of technology so that we are proactively handling this before it has to come through legislation that starts taking away our tools. That's the scary thing.
Seth Garber: That's incredible. You brought up that point about this direct-to-consumer. We follow what Pestie is doing out there. We follow it closely. They've got great marketing. I think about it and I'm like, “Is this the right thing to do? Is this where we're going?” I dislike it a tremendous amount. From my perspective and I would say that for a lot of people, we should take the commercial-grade stuff off the market as a whole and let the professionals be professionals. In order to get to where you're describing, Patrick, the regulation should be on probably the direct-to-consumer sales and these products, honestly, and let the professional be professional so we can take what green is and make it better, honestly.
Patrick Baldwin: Let's do it. Who's going to own it?
Seth Garber: I can't exactly own it living here in Tampa, Florida.
Patrick Baldwin: Let's call her friend, Cassie, because she knows people who could get that done. By the way, there's been a lot of messages going over to Paul about Pest World in Boston. The readers have voted. Guess who's going to Pest World?
Seth Garber: Is Paul coming to Pest World?
Patrick Baldwin: He’s coming to Pest World. He might be bringing someone with him.
Seth Garber: He's going to be bringing somebody with him?
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah.
Seth Garber: Who’s coming with him?
Patrick Baldwin: I think you know.
Seth Garber: I know?
Patrick Baldwin: No, you don't. Take a guess.
Seth Garber: Are you coming with him?
Patrick Baldwin: No.
Seth Garber: Am I coming with them?
Patrick Baldwin: No. We're going to be there.
Seth Garber: Who's coming with him?
Patrick Baldwin: The Mexican.
Seth Garber: The Mex is coming to Pest World?
Patrick Baldwin: This is a cultured episode between Germany, the Mexican, and going to Boston. This is quite eclectic. Paul's going to Pest World. Thanks for putting the pressure on him. He didn't see that coming. He broke that news to me as he was traveling. as Paul and I were talking to Daniel, it was interesting. Daniel, a while back, said, “Go look at Hodinkee.” I’m like, “What's Hodinkee?” He’s like, “There's an app. Go look at Hodinkee.” Paul loves watches. You all can talk watches.
As I've spent time with Paul, he loves watches. The two of them, I just got to sit there and watch. These two nerded out in a cool way about their watch collection. We have that. We're going to find a place to drop that. If you're a watch collector, you don't want to miss it. We even talked about Apple Watch for a second.
Seth Garber: As technical as I hear watches are, all I can think about is mixture ratios and how the products are going to work so we can become more environmentally sensitive.
Patrick Baldwin: That was good. That’s clever. I appreciate it. Paul, safe travels out there. Missed you on this one but it was great. Daniel, thanks for stepping into the boardroom with us. Seth, thanks for filling in. We're going to have some more fun in Tampa. We're going to go get a Fatter Patter with some Italian.
Seth Garber: Pat's getting fat.
Patrick Baldwin: We'll see you all.
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